About FOCUS
Organization
The FOCUS (Fisheries Open Source Community Software) community has been established with the purpose to create and maintain free software dedicated to the management and preservation of the fishery resource.
As an open source community, FOCUS is based on voluntary work from members and contributors. Sharing software, through the use of the “Free or Open Source software” (F/OSS) model, is widely recognised as one of the most efficient ways of increasing the use of the software, whilst at the same time ensuring the quality of the end product by allowing other developers to check, improve or increase functionalities. It also aims to save costs by not ‘re-inventing the wheel’. This principle of sharing software has become a widely supported initiative in many Member States and throughout the institutions of the European Union.
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 projects. It is the Community Manager’s role to ensure that projects are able to progress in a coordinated way.