The FIWARE Community is an independent open community whose members are committed to materialise the FIWARE mission, that is: “to build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors”.
The FIWARE Community is not only formed by contributors to the technology (the FIWARE platform) but also those who contribute in building the FIWARE ecosystem and making it sustainable over time. As such, individuals and organizations committing relevant resources in FIWARE Lab activities or activities of the FIWARE Accelerator, FIWARE mundus or FIWARE iHubs programmes are also considered members of the FIWARE community.
The FIWARE platform provides a rather simple yet powerful set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that ease the development of Smart Applications in multiple vertical sectors. The specifications of these APIs public and royalty-free. Besides, an open open source reference implementation of each of the FIWARE components is publicly available so that multiple FIWARE providers can emerge faster in the market with a low-cost proposition.
FIWARE Lab is a non-commercial sandbox environment where innovation and experimentation based on FIWARE technologies take place. Entrepreneurs and individuals can test the technology as well as their applications on FIWARE Lab, exploiting Open Data published by cities and other organizations. FIWARE Lab is deployed over a geographically distributed network of federated nodes leveraging on a wide range of experimental infrastructures.
The FIWARE Acceleration Programme aims at promoting the take up of FIWARE technologiesamong solution integrators and application developers, with special focus on SMEs and start-ups. Linked to this program, the EU launched an ambitious campaign in September 2014 mobilizing 80M€ to support SMEs and entrepreneurs who will develop innovative applications based on FIWARE. Similar programmes may be defined in other regions.
Although it was born in Europe, FIWARE has been designed with a global ambition, so that benefits can spread to other regions. The FIWARE Mundus programme is designed to bring coverage to this effort engaging local ICT players and domain stakeholders, and eventually liaising with local governments in different parts of the world, including Latin American, Africa and Asia.
Think globally but act locally is a distinguishing mark of the FIWARE ecosystem. The network of FIWARE iHubs will play a fundamental role in building the community of adopters as well as contributors at local level. The FIWARE iHubs Programme aims at supporting the creation and the operations of iHubs nodes worldwide.
Independence in decision making, openess, transparency and meritocracy are the cornerstone and founding principles of the FIWARE Community. An important part of the “FIWARE Culture” is also the proper balance between the individuals who invest their time and effort, the companies that build businesses on FIWARE and the application developers who build and deploy new applications based on FIWARE technologies. The structure of the the FIWARE Community encourages all forms of contributions and provides safeguards against losing the balance between the various members of the community.
The work in the FIWARE Community is organised in dedicated teams: FIWARE Chapters, Technical Committees and Ecosystem Support Committees. FIWARE Chapters and Technical Committees deal with coordination of activities that are of technical nature, while FIWARE Ecosystem Support Committees are focused in non-technical relevant activities such as those linked to the FIWARE Accelerator, the FIWARE Mundus or the FIWARE iHubs programmes.
