Announcing the Fedora Commons

The news is finally out there:

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.

There's also some staffing news, in addition to Sandy Payette becoming Executive Director:

Daniel Davis will lead Fedora core software development as chief architect, Thornton Staples will lead outreach efforts as director of community strategy and outreach starting on October 1, 2007, and Carol Minton Morris will serve as director of communications and media. Chris Wilper and Eddie Shin will continue in their roles as lead software developer for Fedora software and developer for Fedora software, respectively.

I'm going to miss having Thorny right down the hallway where I can wander down and think things through with him. He's staying local and will maintain an office at UVA, so we've not completely losing him.

The full press release is at the new web site: http://www.fedora-commons.org/about/news.php#moore-grant.

If you're not familiar with Fedora yet, check out the Portfolio portion of the site to see examples of systems built using Fedora. You might also want to check out the first in a series of promotional videos that includes our UVA Library work.