solutionCouncils

Solution Councils

• Data Curation
• Lightweight Interfaces
• Open Access Publishing
• Preservation and Archiving

Fedora Commons (FC) solution councils are intended to be formed by interested members of the community around a particular solution area, for which one or more applications could be built 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 into an integrated application that addresses a particular use case of the solution area.

A champion for the council must be identified to begin its development. That person must be the driving force to get the community off the ground, and will work closely with Fedora Commons to identify potential members of the council and sources of support for its efforts. Council membership should be limited to a small group of members committed to making the solution happen, both by mobilizing resources (by such means as applying for grants or securing institutional commitments) and organizing the appropriate community segment. Wider participation should be encouraged by forming working groups to tackle specific problems.

Responsibilities of the Solution Council include:

1. Develop and maintain the defining vision for the solution area. This is seen as a high-level functional definition of the solution that is shared among the council. It is essentially the architectural framework for solution bundles in the area.
2. Coordinate the development of one or more solution bundles that realize the vision in a specific way. Ideally, development of the solution application software would follow the "tangram puzzle" philosophy of the Fedora Commons Framework, creating modules that could be configured, or for which different versions could be chosen, for different implementations of the solution bundle, consonant with the defining vision.
3. Provide input to the architecture council about ongoing development of the FC Framework architecture that improves it from the point of view of the solution area.
4. Contribute new services to the FC framework.