The FOCUS (Fisheries Open Source Community Software) community has been established with the purpose to create and maintain free software dedicated to the management, conservation and sustainably use of the fishery resource.

FOCUS Vision is to be the global reference innovative open source solutions for sustainable fisheries management. The community can accept donations of open source initiatives that supports this vision. The accepted donations future development will be managed by FOCUS and published under a free open source licence. As FOCUS believes that information sharing is a pillar of the platform needed to perform efficient fisheries management a strategic partnership with UN/CEFACT has been established to support the FLUX Standard for sustainable fisheries management. In reality the FOCUS suite aims at implementing the FLUX standards.

All deliverables from the FOCUS projects will be made available under an open-source licence and are free to download, change and use. We hope that any beneficiaries of FOCUS also will be giving something back to the community but this is voluntary. FOCUS has by its support from Atlassian a state of the art platform for collaborative on-line capacity building. All supporting documents and tutorials on how to engage with or use deliverables from FOCUS will be made available on this platform. Furthermore, webinars, video-tutorials and yearly meet-ups for developers are envisioned.

The FOCUS community is led by a Community Manager and a Community Board that together are responsible for the strategic direction of each of the donated projects. It is the Community Manager’s role to ensure that projects are able to progress in a coordinated way. All governing processes should be documented and transparent and support the management of the Community. Quarterly meetings of the board is forsen but on-line meeting will be arranged as needed.

European Commission/DG-Mare, UNECE, Swedish Agency For Marine and Water Management, Government of Flanders Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, The Danish Agrifish Agency, Marine Scotland, European Fisheries Control Agency,Netherlands Enterprise Agency, Ministero delle Infrastrutture e dei Trasporti, Atlassian