Repository Redux: The Future of Fedora

Fedora has been an unqualified success in the repository arena. More than twelve years since its inception, the project has seen three major releases, has hundreds of adopters worldwide and a sizeable base of committed institutional sponsors. But despite the project’s demonstrated value and track record, numerous challenges lie ahead of the Fedora community. Fedora’s code base is aging and the developer pool is shrinking, just as new demands around performance, scalability, research data management and linked data are pushing the project more than ever. Over the past eighteen months, members of the Fedora community began to consider the future of the project. In discussions that coalesced at Open Repositories 2012 , the essential question emerged: how best to preserve the Fedora’s community and architecture, while refreshing the code base to meet the emerging challenges of today’s repository landscape?

At OR12 a grassroots coalition of Fedora activists and DuraSpace committed to kickstart a three-year effort to write Fedora’s next version, with three principal objectives:

1. to preserve the strengths of the current Fedora architecture and community
2. to address the needs for robust and full-featured repository services (that are now mature and well-understood, compared to six or twelve years ago)
3. to provide a successful platform for our common use for the next 5-10 years

This session will give an overview of the project’s drivers, progress to date and plans for the next two years. Speakers for the session will include members of the Fedora Futures Steering Committee and the Fedora community who have contributed as Sponsors of the Project.