Agenda
- Introductions
- About the Outreach and Engagement calls
- Current issues and status of the group
- Discussion: community email list
- Future discussion items:
Minutes
Welcome!
Attendees:
Julia Trimmer, Duke University
Mike Conlon, DuraSpace
Kristi Holmes, Northwestern University
Carol Minton Morris, DuraSpace
Purpose and notes
We'd like to open up the conversation about outreach with the community and offer help when needed. Mike thinks that this group could talk more about community-building and related issues and provide that feedback to Steering. There may be specific issues that we can tackle, for example, issues related to the conference, are there things that we could do about certain things. Kristi talked about environments, organizations and companies who are representing people data, which is rather complex. These organizations may need help learning about VIVO, and need VIVO evangelists.
Mike reminds us that we need to talk about partners and partnerships with other related organizations, which is important to the project. Kristi's current research dovetails very nicely with VIVO and partners nicely, but it's nice to have different perspectives.
Carol wonders if there is a need for an evaluation event to gather information about needs. Mike would like to hear why people are not implementing VIVO. Why do we have so few implementations? This is a question for the outreach/non-technical people. Why isn't VIVO the obvious choice? We should have world-wide adoption. Alternate deployment models might be one approach. We have pathways that will help us get bigger, but we need to move on those pathways. We need to think big in how we get adoption of VIVO.
The road map asks people in the community what features they want. What we want to know is why people have not chosen VIVO. Kristi thinks the best way to do this is through personal and confidential conversations. We are moving towards implementing a lot of improvements but they aren't there yet. Much of this is outreach, and we need more people to do it. More proactive outreach at conferences would be great, with an on-point message, and make the blog more active, with a VIVO-centric, positive message – all these things would add a lot of excitement. Also we need better output, better visualizations, better reports.
A sample CSV with data for 20 faculty members would make it easier to ingest the first time. We can't do too much and we have to be very selective about what we choose to do: attending selected conferences and updating the blog are within our reach.
Meeting up with people at conferences and having VIVO events is important. We need to publicize our efforts to improve the ingest processes.
Carol thinks that what we're talking about sounds doable: pick a few conferences, add content to the blog, create meetups at conferences. DuraSpace does this for other products.
Mike feels like it would be helpful to choose six conferences here in this meeting now. This is the best way to get immediate results.
Kristi remembers a page/feature on the wiki in which anyone going to a conference would post it on the wiki – anyone could edit and it would be easy to bring it back. This made it easy for Kristi to keep a long list of presentations about VIVO so that we could report it to the NIH and we could use it for the sponsors. There is a wiki page with all of the VIVO presentations at other conferences but we don't know how complete it is. The new website will promote upcoming events. We need the community to tell us when things are happening.
Also there's a major section in the wiki called "Community." It needs updating. In this area, the conferences page, events, calendar, survey, etc is all there. Information on how to change the wiki, marketing materials, PowerPoint, white paper, poster, references to books. Mike's been working on it and wanted to discuss it here first. We want to make it available for others but Mike would like to add to it first and get it a little more complete.
Kristi thinks that promoting this information would be really helpful to the community. Conference attendees need to know the other VIVO community members that are also present. She has seen a little more engagement in other projects.
Mike suggests that after the VIVO conference, we should start working on conferences and networking at these. We want people to share information that something important about VIVO is happening. This creates opportunities to collaborate about VIVO.
Carol observes that VIVO users also attend other conferences and wear many hats. It's an interwoven community.
Partners such as Altmetrics, Plum, Pure, Thomson Reuters/Converis etc. are synergistic with VIVO and we need to make sure that all of our partners are productive partnerships. We need to make sure that these ties really benefit VIVO and help to strengthen our partners.
Coming up with six key conferences is not so easy since we are widespread across a lot of fields.
Community mailing list
Is there another source of community contacts? Mike would like a community mailing list where people are talking about non-technical issues, adoption, partnerships, policy issues. People can ask and discuss anything that's not technical. This would pair with a technical list and they can be combined. So that people can ask non-technical questions about VIVO and get answers. Like how to introduce the project to their administrators, etc. They let the community step up and answer these questions. Kristi would like to provide a way for people to reach out confidentially. Maybe in the footer of the email, say, "To ask a confidential question . . " etc with an email address. Kristi suggests an opt-out to the conference attendees and presenters with an easy way to opt out.
Conference session update
"VIVO around the world" will be a 45-minute session to highlight all of the cool things happening with VIVO implementations. A call for participation will be released this week. Participants will get one slide, like a screenshot of the home page, and presenting for 3-5 minutes about their VIVO. Submissions will be welcomed from people who cannot attend VIVO in person, too (giving them a way to plug into the conference and more importantly, the community). The session will show the diversity in what we're doing and put a strong finish to the conference. We need to engage people on the list.
Next call: August 18 at 1:00 PM Eastern
Community Outreach and Engagement meetings are held every four weeks on Tuesday at 1 pm EST. Future meetings scheduled:
August 18, 2015, 1 pm EST
September 15, 2015, 1 pm EST
October 13, 2015, 1 pm EST
November 10, 2015, 1 pm EST
December 8, 2015, 1 pm EST
January 5, 2015, 1 pm EST
February 2, 2015, 1 pm EST
