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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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We will do our best to: |
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panel- 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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While the approaches described above are more often associated with larger systems, we must also ensure that the barrier to entry is low so that organizations with limited resources are served. One approach we expect to use is pre-integrated solution bundles that provide reasonable utility without substantial development. Solution bundles may be used as-is or be customized within the capabilities of the organization.
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It is interesting when a natural synergy forms between the needs of a community and emerging technology.: - 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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