Attendees

Leadership Group members:  Dean Krafft, Michael Winkler, Karim Boughida, Julia Speer, Julia Trimmer, Mike Wright, Chris Shaffer, Amy Brand, Robert McDonald, Liz Tomich, Simon Porter, Paul Albert, Jonathan Breeze, Michael Bolton

Regrets:  Andrew Ashton, Malcolm Wolski, Jennifer Adams, Thorsten Hoellrigl

Steering Group members: Kristi Holmes, Jon Corson-Rikert

Ex officio:  Mike Conlon, Debra Hanson Kurtz, Jonathan Markow

Notes

Summit Meeting Recap

  • Excellent discussions, participation
  • Covered status of VIVO, opening up VIVO, the VIVO value proposition
  • Minutes approved without objection

VIVO Charter v 1.1 Changes

  • Management Team discontinued.  Workgroup chairs meets with Steering monthly instead
  • Clarified role of the working groups as standing committees
  • Task forces for time limited deliverables
  • Some other minor changes, formatting
  • Some simplified explanations re how governance works
  • Comment:  Is more stream-lined
  • Question:  What are connections between Steering, Tech Lead, Work groups, Task forces.  Ans.: Coordination of working groups and task forces is done by project director and tech lead
  • Task forces will develop out of discussions in working groups
  • Motion to adopt charter as revised:  Passed by acclimation

Augmenting the VIVO Steering Group

  • Steering group recommends proposal #2:  bring on the full complement of steering group members
  • Motion to proceed on Proposal #2 and second.
  • Proposal #2 is adopted by acclimation
  • Leadership is encouraged to make nominations, self-nominations; slate will be presented though email
  • Steering group nominees must be from member organizations; nominations open to all
  • Question:  How much time is needed to serve on steering group? Ans. One-hour call each week, preparation for the call
  • Nominations should go to Dean or Mike

Progress Report

  • VIVO 1.8 released
    • Modularity increased
    • Reduced time to migrate data
    • Bug fixes, enhancements
  • Task forces established on community-developed software, asset inventory, telling VIVO stories, implementation documentation task force; more technical task forces will be created when tech lead begins; 
  • Some significant contributions from community for v 1.8 (e.g., Symplectic Harvester, ORCID/VIVO integration, Upgraded VIVO Vagrant from Brown, VIVO Docker)
  • Good Implementation Fest at Oregon Health, well attended
  • Conference (See below)
  • Marketing activities
  • Joint VIVO/ORCID webinar hosted by DuraSpace
  • Joint work with CASRAI on CREDIT taxonomy
  • Kristi is co-chairing NISO work on attribution (metrics and persistent identifiers)
  • Melissa working with FORCE11 group on attribution modeling
  • "Telling VIVO Stories"  are being published
  • VIVO euro-conference hosted by Lambert Heller, Hannover Germany, September 9.

Tech Lead Search

  • 3 strong candidates
  • Recommendation by Search Committee
  • Technical review and final interviews by DuraSpace now taking place
  • Offer will be extended in a couple of weeks

New website design for vivoweb.org

  • Redesigned as a marketing website
  • Will be simplified
  • Will have newsfeeds, blog, other dynamic material

Transparency initiatives

  • Steering minutes published each week
  • VIVO update published each week
  • Working group leads meeting with steering once a month

Budget

  • $380,000 budget
  • $90,000 to be raised from new members

Concerns from Summit

  • Stakeholders want to see features in the software that provide value and are competitive
    • new roadmap process, engagement processes, participation
  • Can VIVO be more agile and productive?
    • New features in software and ontology must be easily incorporated as upgrades
    • Site survey will be more simple and focus on ease of use and ownership
    • Hiring tech lead, becoming more transparent, creating more modular software, creating improved open source development processes
    • Lower the burden to participation in development

Roadmap Process

  • Entire community must be involved
  • First create an organized list of features that have been proposed for VIVO
  • Three categories
    • End-user features for people who use it in their daily work
    • Data steward/administrator features
    • Technology features (for benefit of developers)
  • Community will review and discuss features, will lead to refined list with estimates
  • By mid-July, turn features into a survey to elicit preferences from stakeholders considering constraints;
  • Stakeholders will indicate whether they can commit effort to help with the features they value
  • Three-week effort of task force will recommend roadmap based on community responses
  • Question:  At what point are effort estimates made?  Answer:  Current tech team will group into rough scope categories
  • Comment:  This is very helpful!
  • Question:  How will roadmap be managed? Ans: Based on community response and commitments, sprints will be organized, new efforts will begin

Budget

  • Calendar year based
  • Revenue generating activities are listed
  • Tech lead hire will work with lead developer through September
  • Total expenditure is $329k on budget of $380k
  • We want to build $100k+ reserve

Membership

  • We need to raise $91k in new memberships
  • Leadership group will be invited to help with the appeal

Conference Updates

  • Melissa Haendel is program chair
  • Great keynote speakers, invited speakers
  • Invited speakers will address the entire conference
  • 20% increase in proposals this year
  • Large number of international registrants - as much as 1/3 so far
  • Working on sponsorships from commercial organizations

Partnership Updates

  • Great partnerships with Digital Science, Thomson Reuters, Symplectic, Plum
  • ORCID, CASRAI, FORCE11, NISO
  • Work on CRediT taxonomy
  • We anticipate support to incorporate VIVO ontology into ScienCV
  • Key opportunities are out there around compliance issues, federal mandates on open access, alternative research outputs, data sharing, discoverability and representation of research outputs
  • We want to work with DAM systems like Fedora, DSpace, BePress, etc.

Closing Comments

  • None

Next Meeting

The next meeting of the Leadership Group will be 1-5 PM Eastern US Time, August 12, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency, Cambridge, MA.  Room TBA.