Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap

Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap V0.9

Vision

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.

We will do our best to:

enable the building of information systems to provide access to durable, enduring and re-usable digital content
straddle both the Web and enterprise system needs while minimizing complexity to enable widest possible use
enable content owners to establish and enforce policies for trust and access to their content, and we will never require that they yield any rights to their content or pay any fee to anyone in order to use the software and practices we provide
enable the use of best practices for the handling and curation of the content contained within information systems incorporating our software
provide key technologies in free open source for all our goals
ensure that the software we support is modular and can be easily integrated in many configurations to support information systems that satisfy the unique requirements of our community
ensure the sustainability of the software and practices we enable, and that we will incorporate an evolutionary approach to them as a key design goal
create an ecosystem of cooperating and collaborating projects to help enable making the world's information enduring and to sustain the required infrastructure

We believe that a holistic approach to understanding the needs of our community and providing a sustainable open community, combined with open standards and open source software, is likely to provide the best platform for long term viability of the world's information and immediate utility for its use. This does not necessarily mean open access to all information since the rights of organizations, institutions and individuals must be respected. However, there must be no proprietary technological barrier that prevents accomplishing our mission and the missions of our community. Additionally, content owners must not be expected to yield their rights simply to use software or practices we provide. While we are a non-profit corporation, however, we believe that constructive engagement with profit making organizations is necessary to reach our goals.

Many of the organizations that Fedora Commons serves have substantial overlap in their requirements for content-related solutions. This provides us with an opportunity to develop technology that satisfies common needs reducing the cost and time it takes to develop content-related information systems. We have also found that many of these organizations have unique elements to their needs or already have investments in applications or infrastructures that they must continue to use. Recent trends in software development architectures and technologies make it practical to create semi-customized solutions from re-useable components and services. Fedora Commons has selected two of the most effective trends to guide development of its technologies: Service Oriented architectures (SOA) and the Web architecture. In addition, Fedora Commons will incorporate semantic technologies and model-driven architectures as these trends become practical. Organizations or solution developers can integrate Fedora Commons-supplied components in different ways, combined with their own locally-developed components and legacy systems, into solutions that meet their unique and individual requirements.

While the approaches described above are more often associated with larger systems, we must also ensure that the barrier to entry is low so that organizations with limited resources are served. One approach we expect to use is pre-integrated solution bundles that provide reasonable utility without substantial development. Solution bundles may be used as-is or be customized within the capabilities of the organization.

It is interesting when a natural synergy forms between the needs of a community and emerging technology.

To ensure content is enduring, we must make the software sustainable.
The emergence of open source software enables communities to sustain their own software. However, the approach a community takes for sustaining software is not clear and has spawned multiple sustainment models which are still being tested. Fedora Commons is still developing its sustainment model but one requirement is clear: the need for a strong community.
New software architectures and technologies lend themselves to an evolutionary approach to software development, which is very appealing for sustaining software used in content-related information systems.
Sub-dividing the work into evolvable components makes it easier for the community to sustain the software.
Using continuous evolution as its guiding principle to create a sustainable software base helps achieve the mission of Fedora Commons and the organizations it serves - enabling organizations to make content enduring.

The Roadmap Process

The Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap combines a description of the requirements we plan to support and the release plans for our software development projects. This first generation roadmap was prepared as a result of the first Fedora Architecture Summit held in April 2007, the formation of the Fedora Commons organization through the Moore Foundation grant, and a series of meetings held with our community including the Mellon Foundation and a number of the projects it funds. We are developing a transparent community process for authoring future versions of the roadmap, so this roadmap should be considered a living document whose next version will be prepared by the new process.

For this roadmap, we have adopted a process and terminology similar to that used by eclipse, and adapted to suit Fedora Commons (2007 eclipse roadmap). There are three main sections to the roadmap:

Vision – Information on the Fedora Commons organization and its strategic goals.
Themes and Priorities – Describes the application areas, strategic use cases, and requirements characterizing the purposes and needs which Fedora Commons is working to satisfy. This section also helps describe the scope and priority for our work.
Release Plans – Lists Fedora Commons' development projects and their work products including a timeline for their availability.

Over time the activities of Fedora Commons will grow but these activities must be prioritized by considerations of the scope in which Fedora Commons can be successful and the sustainability of the code base. The scale of our efforts is profoundly dependent on having a supportive community ecosystem contributing to the work.

This roadmap will be documented in several forms. The master and most complete form will be located on the Fedora Commons Web site. Using a Web site permits us to create a set of linked documents that the reader may explore based on interest and depth. The roadmap will also be published in a document form that is more condensed. Finally, the roadmap will be provided as an executive summary.