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Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap V0.9

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Overview

Fedora Commons was incorporated in May 2007 and startup funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was granted in July 2007. Since that time, all business functions have been created and the new organization has been staffed. Fedora Commons has been granted federal and New York status 501(c)3 status. The Fedora software was developed as a joint project of Cornell University and the University of Virginia funded by the Mellon Foundation starting in 2001. The architecture resulted from the pioneering work of Sandy Payette and Carl Lagoze later joined by Thornton Staples and Rosser Wayland. With over ten releases of the software and having developed world-wide adoption, the need to create an organization to foster and develop the Fedora and its related technologies resulted in the formation of Fedora Commons.

This document provides a roadmap for the development of Fedora Commons' technologies. It is the first such document published and the beginning of a community process for governing technology development in Fedora Commons. The roadmap summarizes the strategic vision of Fedora Commons that guides development, documents the themes and priorities of our community summarizing the needs we will address and provides a plan for the software releases we hope will enable those who adopt our technology.

Our Goals

It is now clear that much of the basis of our intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage is increasingly in digital form and can only be fully utilized in digital form. Our mission is to facilitate organizations and institutions whose own missions depend on technologies and techniques to create, manage, publish, share and preserve the world's information. Unless these organizations and institutions can sustain the world's information, provide durable access and the means to interconnect related information, regardless of the immediate economic value of the information, much of our heritage is at risk and our ability to perform important scientific and humanities research maybe greatly reduced.

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  1. To ensure content is enduring, we must make the software sustainable.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Sub-dividing the work into evolvable components makes it easier for the community to sustain the software.
  5. 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.

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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This roadmap will be documented in several forms. The master and most complete form will be located on the Fedora Commons Web site. Using a Web site permits us to create a set of linked documents that the reader may explore based on interest and depth. The roadmap will also be published in a document form that is more condensed. Finally, the roadmap will be provided as an executive summary.

Themes and Priorities

Introduction

In this section we capture the needs of our community that Fedora Commons will address. These needs are expressed as a set of high level requirements found in the systems which members or organizations in our community are building or intend to build. These system requirements are captured from descriptions of our community's applications, scenarios of use (also called use cases) and experience with their existing systems, combined with imagination of innovations which we can enable. We have collected these requirements into "Themes" as an aid in understanding related sets of requirements. Themes provide a way to classify our community's needs, and may include both specific functionality and general characteristics like performance, scaling and robustness.
For the initial version of this roadmap we will use the Eclipse classification of Themes to help indicate priority. Themes are described in one of four categories (from the Eclipse 2007 Roadmap):

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