Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Mission Statement for OpenACS

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Hi Guys,

I am definitely interested in having people disucss this on the forum. (Note I posted 2 days prior to disucssing it on IRC!).

Here is my current draft.  I was hoping to get the grammer cleaned up before I posted it in the forums but I have been too busy today and you guys are very correct to be pressing me to post.

Mission Statement

OpenACS is a vibrant and supportive global community that cooperatively develops and implements free and open source software for creating dynamic web sites.  We believe:

•    The web can be used to enhance collaboration, communication, community and knowledge transfer
•    Powerful, customized dynamic websites and the code to create them should be universally and internationally accessible.
•    Web sites should be created with advanced, elegant engineering, scalability and reusable components.
•    These reusable components should be assembled and customized into powerful vertical applications.

Alfred's Text:

Subject: What is OpenACS ?

OpenAcs is an international community of developers who develop and
maintain a toolkit for building websites. Tracing back to its origins at
MIT, the toolkit incorporates advanced web engineering concepts, suitable
for high traffic websites. Because the toolkit is always installed with a
fully relational database, there is a high degree of integration with
databases, with a clean, easy-to-understand API for generating websites
from the database. In addition, an object system resides on top of the
database, permitting site developers to create complex applications using
the object API - examples include an object level permissions system,
audit trails, ability to relate one object to another.

The system contains features seldom found in web servers - automated
testing, component package system for easy installation, upgrade paths for
code and database schemas, and full internationalization. The system also
has a fully functional content repository and content management system.
These features have been used in a variety of production websites, and
have led to the community adding to and growing the OpenACS core by
contributing software back to the project.

This vibrant community stays active by collaborating on new features for
the core, maintaining contributed software, and at times acknowledges its
academic roots and incorporates cutting edge or theoretical techniques.

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