Many of you will have probably seen this in other ways but as far as I
can tell this hasn't been forwarded here.

Apologies if I missed it and/or if I'm just adding to your inbox
overload.

Andy
--
Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
http://efoundations.typepad.com/
[log in to unmask]
+44 (0)1225 474319


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette

(607) 255-9222, [log in to unmask]

http://www.fedora-commons.org

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson

(415) 561-7427, [log in to unmask]

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR
BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) - 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. 

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development
of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding
will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora
Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software
development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora
Commons.  This network of partners will be instrumental for making
Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will
support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new
mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and
preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, "the
new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it
possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and
archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make
it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways."

"Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides
the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have
enduring impact.  The unanticipated cross-disciplinary uses of this open
platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure," said
Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation.

Payette also noted, "The open-source software that is developed and
distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is
often referred to as "e-Research" and "e-Science," including storage of
experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review,
publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the
next generation of scholarly works.  We will also continue our work with
libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized
collections, making previously locked away material available to wide
audiences.  Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in
the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue
to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in
applications of our work."


About Fedora Commons

Fedora Commons <http://www.fedora-commons.org>  is a non-profit
organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source
technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage,
publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our
intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage.  Since 2001, with
support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the
University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has
developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository
software that combines content management, web services, and semantic
technologies.  The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support
an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly
communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science
Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.  The Executive
Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora
architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project.
The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from
multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital
libraries, sciences, and humanities.  For more information, visit
http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to
advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research
around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco
Bay Area.  The Foundation's Science Program seeks to make a significant
impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific
research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more
information, visit http://www.moore.org.