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. 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. |