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.
Fedora Commons Proposal to the Moore Foundation 
pdf (344 KB)
Fedora Commons Bylaws pdf (216 KB)
Fedora Commons Certificate of Incorporation pdf (1.07 MB)
Computer networks, both within organizations, and globally with the Internet, combined with the World Wide Web, have become a primary conduit for accessing our collective intellectual works. With the emergence of Web 2.0, these networks are rapidly becoming a primary means for authoring and collaborating on new works. What happens, however, if information is locked up in systems that are not built to facilitate sharing across boundaries, and are not attentive to the long-term sustainabilty of social and intellectual knowledge accumulated within them?
This is where Fedora Commons plays a critical role. New interoperable systems designed to facilitate collaboration for the communities they serve should be easy to use to repurpose information from any source the user is authorized to access. Systems should also facilitate preservation. Information within - papers, data, annotations and commentary - is part of a scholarly and cultural record that should be well-managed to persist over time. Fedora Commons embraces the dual focus of enabling the creation of innovative, collaborative information spaces, while attending to the longevity and integrity of information that results from collaboration, ensuring that change is both evolutionary and sustainable.
Fedora has been adopted by hundreds of institutions for an array of innovative applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, e-science, digital libraries, archives, education, and more. Among its notable installations are National Science Digital Library (NSDL), the Public Library of Science's open access journal system, the Max Planck Society's e-scholarship system, the Chicago Historical Society's multimedia encyclopedia, the University of Virginia's digital collections, the Australian national institutional repository initiative (ARROW), Oxford University's digital archive, the Perseus digital humanities project, and numerous applications in national libraries, companies, universities, and cultural institutions.
The Fedora platform is logically divided into four major functional areas that reflect its first principles:
These are critical services that should be offered by any platform whose purpose is to enable collaborative applications while attending to the challenges of information management and preservation. Using a standards-based, service-oriented architecture, the Fedora platform provides an extensible framework of service components to support features such as OIA-PMH, search engine integration, messaging, workflow, format conversion, bulk ingest, and others. In addition, features such as authentication, fine-grained access control, content versioning, replication, integrity checking, dynamic views of digital objects, and more are incorporated into the Fedora repository service. Fedora provided services can be seamlessly integrated into an organization's existing infrastructure, protecting and enhancing prior investments.
Many of Fedora's features exploit its flexible and extensible digital objects, which are containers for metadata, one or more representations of the content and relationships to other information resources. Fedora's digital objects provide "Lego-like" building blocks to support uniform management and access to heterogeneous content including books, images, articles, datasets, multi-media, and more. Access to the digital object is provided by disseminators, which can simply deliver a desired portion of the digital object or can deliver a customized view. Fedora's digital objects are self-describing and self-delivering-key features that enable preservation.
Semantic technologies are viewed by many to be the next major wave of information technology and they will play a central role in systems that support knowledge work, especially for future Web applications. Among other capabilities, semantic technologies enable easy and flexible fusion of information from multiple sources. Fedora integrates semantic technologies into its services for describing and inter-relating digital objects, providing a simple, practical way to begin using these exciting new capabilities.
The Fedora platform is highly scalable and configurable. It is designed to evolve, based on the assumption that technology will constantly change, systems must adapt, and access to content should be perpetual. Overall, Fedora is an agile system that can be used in many ways, and can adapt to new requirements as they emerge. Fedora makes it possible for digital libraries and archives, actually any system with digital content, to become more than just a place that offers access to resources. Systems built with Fedora are environments that enable contribution and customization, and enhance the ability to connect information resources, people, and organizations.