ANNOUNCEMENT: FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
<http://www.fedora-commons.org>http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

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

(Ithaca, New York, August, 2007) - Fedora Commons 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
<http://www.fedora-commons.org>Fedora Commons 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.

-- 
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu