The core mission of the Apereo Foundation is to assist and facilitate educational organizations which collaborate to foster, develop, and sustain open technologies and innovation to support learning, teaching, and research. Apereo provides a common organizational umbrella for higher education open source software projects and communities. Apereo is a 501(c)3 charitable non-profit organization, and was formalized in 2012 as the merger of Jasig, Inc and the Sakai Foundation, which both had similar missions and communities.