[Xerte] Xerte: An Apereo Community Project

[Julian Tenney]

Good people,
The Xerte Project has reached a very significant milestone, having graduated from the Apereo Incubation process to become a fully-fledged Apereo Community project.  When I wrote to our user and developer communities about looking for a new home for The Xerte Project back in March 2014, we were uncertain where the road ahead would take us, although we felt at the time that a foundation would offer the solution we were looking for.
We began engaging with both the Apache and the Apereo Foundations during the spring of 2014, and at the end of the summer we formally chose to join the Apereo incubation process, feeling that Apereo offered The Xerte Project a lot of opportunities to build relationships with other projects and access to new communities of users and developers with which we share a common problem space in Higher Education. You can find out more about the Apereo Foundation on their website: http://www.apereo.org.
The Xerte Project graduates the incubation process in much better shape than it entered: we have changed our licensing to the Apache license, which removes a big barrier to adoption associated with the ambiguities of the GPL. We have thoroughly audited all of the source code and addressed several issues around intellectual property and licensing, and we now have agreements in place with all the people and organisations that have contributed to the project's codebase. We have formed a board of governors to provide oversight, and we have put processes in place for decision making. We've made a lot of information available about how the project works and how to get involved.
We have engaged with new communities in Europe and the United States, and we've been blown away with the interest we are generating. With the release of the beta code for Xerte Online Toolkits v3.0 we are poised to bring you the next version of the software, with a host of new features and functionality.
You can get the latest code either from the xerte community site: http://www.xerte.org or from our github repository https://github.com/thexerteproject/xerteonlinetoolkits where you can also find a lot of new information on the wiki: https://github.com/thexerteproject/xerteonlinetoolkits/wiki.
All in all, this is an absolutely fantastic place for the project to get to. I'm enormously grateful to everyone who has contributed to this part of our journey and I'm delighted to be see the project going from strength to strength: there are very exciting opportunities for the project ahead.
Best wishes,
Julian

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