Fedora Futures
Fedora is a robust, modular, open source repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It is especially suited for digital libraries and archives, both for access and preservation. It is also used to provide specialized access to very large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural materials as well as scientific data. Fedora has a worldwide installed user base that includes academic and cultural heritage organizations, universities, research institutions, university libraries, national libraries, and government agencies. The Fedora community is supported by the stewardship of the DuraSpace organization.
Vision
Fedora stakeholders, working in concert with DuraSpace, are organizing a software development project designed to make major improvements to Fedora over the course of approximately two and a half years. The project, Fedora Futures, will use a combination of financial contributions from the community and developer resources contributed in-kind by stakeholder organizations. We expect that current Fedora committers will form the core of this developer group, and that their work will be supplemented by other developers. The project will be executed in close alignment with the existing Fedora committer/developer team.
Goals
The Fedora Futures project will address the top priority requirements expressed by the international community over the past few years. These will include:
- improved performance, enhanced vertical and horizontal scalability
- more flexible storage options
- features to accommodate research data management
- better capabilities for participating in the world of linked open data
- an improved platform for developers—one that is easier to work with and which will attract a larger core of developers.
These goals, once realized, will position Fedora as an effective platform for the next decade.
Fedora Futures @ OR2013
Building Fedora Futures
Thursday, July 11, 2013 2:30PM - 3:00PM
McDonald Ballroom
Repository Redux: The Future of Fedora
Thursday, July 11, 2013 9:30AM - 10:00AM
McDonald Ballroom
Fedora has been an unqualified success in the repository arena. More than twelve years since its inception, the project has seen three major releases, has hundreds of adopters worldwide and a sizeable base of committed institutional sponsors. But despite the project’s demonstrated value and track record, numerous challenges lie ahead of the Fedora community. Fedora’s code base is aging and the developer pool is shrinking, just as new demands around performance, scalability, research data management and linked data are pushing the project more than ever. Over the past eighteen months, members of the Fedora community began to consider the future of the project. In discussions that coalesced at Open Repositories 2012 , the essential question emerged: how best to preserve the Fedora’s community and architecture, while refreshing the code base to meet the emerging challenges of today’s repository landscape? At OR12 a grassroots coalition of Fedora activists and DuraSpace committed to kickstart a three-year effort to write Fedora’s next version, with three principal objectives: 1. to preserve the strengths of the current Fedora architecture and community 2. to address the needs for robust and full-featured repository services (that are now mature and well-understood, compared to six or twelve years ago) 3. to provide a successful platform for our common use for the next 5-10 years This session will give an overview of the project’s drivers, progress to date and plans for the next two years. Speakers for the session will include members of the Fedora Futures Steering Committee and the Fedora community who have contributed as Sponsors of the Project.
Fedora Futures @ NEFUG 2013
At the New England Fedora Users Group, Ben Armintor presented the Fedora Futures project. The presentation is available on Google Drive.
Fedora Futures Project Welcomes New Technical Lead
The DuraSpace organization and the Fedora Futures Project are pleased to announce that Andrew Woods will take over as the new Technical Lead for Fedora effective May 15, 2013. In this role he will provide technical leadership for the Fedora Futures Project. Woods joined the DuraSpace organization in early 2009 as a Fedora committer. Since then he has helped establish the D.C. Area Fedora Users Group, been a project co-lead on DuraCloud, and worked in various technical and advisory capacities within DPN, APTrust, Chronopolis, and NDSA. more ->
Fedora Futures @ CNI 2012
At the CNI Fall 2012 Membership Meeting, members of the Fedora Futures initiative announced and led a discussion on the future of the Fedora Commons repository. This included a review of the current state of Fedora, the proponents and objectives of the Futures initiative, and a review on the use cases, stakeholders, high level requirements and processes which are guiding the project. The presentation is available on SlideShare and embedded, below.
Fedora Repository Futures: Towards an Evolutionary Development Roadmap
In recent months, many members of the Fedora community–both developers and stakeholders–have expressed a desire to refresh the product's vision, and to produce an evolutionary short- and mid-term development roadmap for the repository. The idea here is that while Fedora's conceptual architecture is proven and still sound, the underlying technology needs to become more responsive to a wide range of current and emerging requirements, more performant and scalable, and capable of advancing in a more agile development framework. The feeling is that this work would require considerably more effort and a different approach than is possible using our current model of volunteer developer contributions led and coordinated by the DuraSpace organization.
At the 2012 Open Repositories Conference a group of Fedora stakeholders self-organized to plan some post-conference, informal discussions about "Fedora Futures". That group, encompassing representation from some large institutions, major projects like Hydra, Islandora, APTrust, and eSciDoc, plus DuraSpace, met last week for an initial conversation to explore these topics. The outcome was very positive. The group found a lot of common ground and interest on possible approaches to improving Fedora. Most importantly, a commitment was expressed to mobilize resources in the short term to organize a sustained effort to scale up the development of Fedora.
As this work takes shape, the group will reach out to the wider Fedora community of developers and other institutional stakeholders for feedback, recommendations, and support. This is the place to come for project updates and news
Edwin Shin to be Technical Lead for New and Improved Fedora Repository Platform Initiative
The DuraSpace organization is pleased to announce an agreement with Registered Service Provider MediaShelf (http://yourmediashelf.com/) to hire Edwin Shin (http://yourmediashelf.com/who-we-are/edwin-shin/) on an interim basis as Fedora Project Technical Lead. Eddie will work with DuraSpace and a committee of stakeholders who recently got together to define a software project for making substantial improvements to Fedora through mid-year. At that time a permanent Fedora project lead will be engaged to continue development of "Fedora Futures".
Working with developers and the extended community, Eddie will be primarily responsible for helping the community develop the product vision, describing product functionality, and preparing an implementation plan. A number of Fedora committers will work with Eddie to achieve these goals. Additionally, he will manage and participate in Fedora committer meetings to ensure that everyone who is working on Fedora Repository platform improvements is informed and able to offer input.
If you would like the Fedora developers at your institution to participate in the project, please contact Eddie directly by email: edwin.shin@yourmediashelf.com. If you would like to find out how to otherwise support the project, please email Jonathan Markow: jjmarkow@duraspace.org.
Project Team
See the Project Team page for the growing list of project participants
