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- enable the building of information systems to provide access to durable, enduring and re-usable digital content
- straddle both the Web and enterprise system needs while minimizing complexity to enable widest possible use
- enable content owners to establish and enforce policies for trust and access to their content, and we will never require that they yield any rights to their content or pay any fee to anyone in order to use the software and practices we provide
- enable the use of best practices for the handling and curation of the content contained within information systems incorporating our software
- provide key technologies in free open source for all our goals
- ensure that the software we support is modular and can be easily integrated in many configurations to support information systems that satisfy the unique requirements of our community
- ensure the sustainability of the software and practices we enable, and that we will incorporate an evolutionary approach to them as a key design goal
- create an ecosystem of cooperating and collaborating projects to help enable making the world's information enduring and to sustain the required infrastructure
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We believe that a holistic approach to understanding the needs of our community and providing a sustainable open community, combined with open standards and open source software, is likely to provide the best platform for long term viability of the world's information and immediate utility for its use. This does not necessarily mean open access to all information since the rights of organizations, institutions and individuals must be respected. However, there must be no proprietary technological barrier that prevents accomplishing our mission and the missions of our community. Additionally, content owners must not be expected to yield their rights simply to use software or practices we provide. While we are a non-profit corporation, however, we believe that constructive engagement with profit making organizations is necessary to reach our goals.
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It is interesting when a natural synergy forms between the needs of a community and emerging technology.
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- To ensure content is enduring, we must make the software sustainable.
- The emergence of open source software enables communities to sustain their own software. However, the approach a community takes for sustaining software is not clear and has spawned multiple sustainment models which are still being tested. Fedora Commons is still developing its sustainment model but one requirement is clear: the need for a strong community.
- New software architectures and technologies lend themselves to an evolutionary approach to software development, which is very appealing for sustaining software used in content-related information systems.
- Sub-dividing the work into evolvable components makes it easier for the community to sustain the software.
- Using continuous evolution as its guiding principle to create a sustainable software base helps achieve the mission of Fedora Commons and the organizations it serves - enabling organizations to make content enduring.
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Roadmap Process
The Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap combines a description of the requirements we plan to support and the release plans for our software development projects. This first generation roadmap was prepared as a result of the first Fedora Architecture Summit held in April 2007, the formation of the Fedora Commons organization through the Moore Foundation grant, and a series of meetings held with our community including the Mellon Foundation and a number of the projects it funds. We are developing a transparent community process for authoring future versions of the roadmap, so this roadmap should be considered a living document whose next version will be prepared by the new process.
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