The Fedora Commons Website has gone live.
Here's an excerpt from the About Fedora Commons page:
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization providing sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage by bringing two communities together.
Communities of practice that include scholars, artists, educators, Web innovators, publishers, scientists, librarians, archivists, publishers, records managers, museum curators or anyone who presents, accesses, or preserves digital content.
Software developers who work on the cutting edge of open source Web and enterprise content technologies to ensure that collaboratively created knowledge is available now and in the future.
Fedora Commons is the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content.
Here's an excerpt from the press release about the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant that helps fund the Fedora Commons:
Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.
With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.
