Welcome to FOCUS, an open-source community with the goal to offer a free suite of tools to support fisheries management organisations. By offering our users a free platform for fisheries management, we hope to contribute to the sustainability of the fisheries resource.
FOCUS believe that sharing information is a pillar of the platform needed to perform efficient fisheries management. To enable information and ultimately knowledge sharing parties’ needs to understand each other’s information, we therefore 100% support the UN/CEFACT FLUX standards.
FOCUS is organised as a collaborative community built on respect, openness and voluntary contributions.
Since FOCUS establishment in September 2016 a lot have been achieved. First of all our board was elected and started its work by defining the Governing articles for FOCUS setting our vision to:
“To be the global reference for standards and innovative open source solutions for sustainable fisheries management“.
Attracting members and sponsors has been an ongoing effort and today we are proud to count The EU Commission, EU Agencies and states globally as friends of FOCUS. FOCUS has also signed a SDG partnership with UN.
As of today a major donation has been made by the co-op project called Union VMS by the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management and DG-Mare. During 2017 Sales Note, Fishing Activity backend and FLUX transport Node donations are foreseen. Furthermore, infrastructure donations has been done by Belgium and Sweden.
Illicit fishing may account for up to 26 million tonnes of fish a year, or more than 15 percent of the world’s total annual capture fisheries output. Besides economic damage, such practices can threaten local biodiversity and food security in many countries.
A collaborative approach is needed to stop this practice. FOCUS shares the idea presented by FAO that to successful deter IUU activities timely and reliable cross-disciplinary information in order to establish baselines, monitor changes, and support decision-making is needed.
FOCUS wants to provide a reference implementation of an integrated suite of applications implementing global standards to address this need. If we can start by sharing data and reach a common understanding of the information, knowledge will follow.
The long term roadmap for FOCUS is to become a vivid, agile community of dedicated individuals with a “can-do role-up-the-sleeve mentality”, working in collaboration for a healthy and sustainable sea. We aim for a future where all parties have all the tools needed to do their job, the information to decide and direct when they need it and the combined knowledge of the global community of fisheries management experts at their hands.
FOCUS believes that communication is one of the pillars of collaboration and trust. Standards for exchanging information therefore needs to be produced, maintained and promoted.
The fisheries management community also must have an arena where all parties can communicate. FOCUS want to make the FLUX transport protocol a global channel where all parties can share information and provide the software to do it.