Solution Communities
Fedora Commons (FC) DuraSpace solution communities are intended to be formed by interested members of the larger Fedora Commons community around a particular solution area, for which one or more repository-based applications could be built. We at DuraSpace see these communities as being relevant to our mission in the most general sense, about activities that relate to ensuring the durability of digital information in all use cases, and we encourage participation whether you are using DuraSpace software products or not.
The popular mythology that has developed around the open-source movement, fed both by wishful thinking and media hype, would have it that the software is developed by bands of fervently engaged software developers, working like Santa's elves, magically making it all happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. Interesting prototypes, experimental systems and new directions often do emerge as a result of ad hoc and creative collaborations. Mature, well-tested, production-ready, open source software and best practices, however, are methodically developed and tracked by professionals who are also stakeholders in its ongoing success.
DuraSpace's Solution Communities program is aimed at directly engaging technically-aware managers and technical practitioners in the open source process so that they have a direct role in defining the mission for the software development. The goal is to bring communities of interested people together around specific use cases that are important to their organizations, to share information and get to know each other. In this way, Solution Communities develop the level of trust that makes collaboration possible.
on top of Fedora. These are known as "solution bundles" implying that there is a complete end-user package that bundles software created externally with a specific set of Fedora Commons Framework services, on top of a specific storage strategy, into an integrated application that addresses a particular use case of the solution area. Active communities are:
- Data CurationLightweight Interfaces
- Open Access Publishing
- Preservation and Archiving
- Scholars Workbench
- Small Archives
Fedora-create community - This was the Solutions Integration community, but we have re-purposed it as part of our new developers' community strategy. We now have a Committers Team that takes care of the Fedora Repository Service. If you are a developer working on any kind of software that can integrate with Fedora, please check it out.
DuraSpace Fedora Commons is using a bottom-up approach to organizing these communities, based on the theory that higher levels of order will emerge out of complex systems under the right conditions. The main idea is to start sharing information and trying to have both face-to-face and virtual meetings so that a level of comfort and familiarity can be attained among a community of people with like interests.
A link to the current statement of FC's our methodology can be found below. This methodology is very much under development and a link to a list of issues under discussion can also be found below.