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<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";
color:black'>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE</span></b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";
color:black'>CONTACT:</span></b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>Fedora
Commons: Sandy Payette</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>(607)
255-9222, <a href="mailto:payette@cs.cornell.edu">payette@cs.cornell.edu</a></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.fedora-commons.org"><span
style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>http://www.fedora-commons.org</span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>Gordon
and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>(415)
561-7427, <a href="mailto:greg.nelson@moore.org">greg.nelson@moore.org</a></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";
color:black'>FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES</span></b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>(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. </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'><br>
With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an<i> open community</i> to
support the development and deployment of<i> open source</i> software, which
facilitates<i> open collaboration</i> and<i> open access</i> 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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
"Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the
basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring
impact.</span><span style='font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";
color:black'> </span><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";
color:black'> 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.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>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."</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'><br>
<b>About Fedora Commons</b></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.fedora-commons.org"><span
style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>Fedora Commons</span></a><span
style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'> 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.<br>
<br>
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 <a href="http://www.fedora-commons.org">http://www.fedora-commons.org</a>.<br>
<br>
<b>About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation</b></span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";color:black'>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 <a href="http://www.moore.org">http://www.moore.org</a>.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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