September 18, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert, Jon Corson-Rikert ,  Melissa Haendel,  Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald,  Eric Meeks, Andi Ogier, Bart Ragon, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio

= note taker

Ex officio

Jonathan Markow, Mike Conlon, debra hanken kurtz

Regrets

Kristi Holmes

DIAL-IN: 641-715-3650, Participant code: 117433#

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Unknown User (gtriggs) starts this Monday, September 21.  Graham will join the Steering Group email list and calls next week.
   2. D-Lib magazine article regarding the VIVO Conference – thanks to Carol for her writing.  Thanks also to Kristi Holmes and Melissa Haendel for organizing a great conference.
   3. Second Outreach and Engagement call held this past Tuesday.  Very good attendance (9), discussion.  See 2015-09-15 Outreach Call.
   4. UF publishing VIVO data on GitHub.  See http://senrabc.github.io/vivo/2015/09/17/All-University-Of-Florida-Papers-Published-Given-Year.html – about 6,000 papers per year
   5. Alex is planning to leave Symplectic at the end of the month, but is very interested in remaining on the VIVO steering group and active in the community; his plans for next steps won't be set for a couple weeks but will definitely include VIVO, and he's eager to help with the Conference since it will be in Denver.
   6. Ontology event has been postponed.
2. Review Agenda
   1. no comments or questions
      
3. Sub group for asset recommendations
   1. Have a subset of Steering review the report and its recommendations and refine the response to indicate priority and timing
   2. Some recommendations may need further exploration and/or a task force to enact
   3. Several people (Alex, Jon, Paul, Mike) on Steering worked on the report – so would be good to have a different group review the report with perhaps one overlapping person
   4. Thinking of 1-2 phone calls as the scope
   5. Julia, Robert, Ted happy to help; others welcome to volunteer by email and Mike will contact more people mid-week if additional volunteers needed
      
   6. Would be a good orientation exercise for Graham
      
4. Sub group for in-kind contributions and membership levels
   1. We indicated at the Leadership meeting at the conference that we would have a proposal for the November meeting – Steering should be done with discussion of any proposal before the end of October
   2. Our charter describes membership at various levels and holds out the opportunity for in-kind contribution that could count in some way toward membership level
   3. This has led to a variety of interpretations and to lack of clarity – would benefit from examples in the charter, and there are examples from the field of contributions both from institutions that have made financial contributions and those that have not
   4. The original concept in the charter may vary from one Duraspace project to another, although some policies are necessary DuraSpace-wide
      1. Paying at certain membership levels gets you certain benefits, but most institutions are more interested in influence on the direction of the project – e.g., to have a seat on the Leadership Group to affect major strategic direction and budget
      2. Can also be elected by peers from among lower levels of membership
      3. The other path is to contribute at least half of an FTE to the project over a year – doesn't confer membership but is a path to Leadership
         1. That means that one or more persons put in aggregate a half FTE
         2. Requires making a plan with the Project Director
         3. Effort needs to take direction from the project, on tasks determined by the project – has to be work for the common good and usable
            1. Normally directed by the tech lead
      4. Half of an FTE is worth more than $20K cash so arguments have been made on the Fedora project that .5 FTE should also confer membership status, but opinions differ
      5. Projects have the right to customize policies if consistent with the general framework
   5. Key concept there is that the in-kind contribution is under the direction of the project, not focused on the local institution
      1. According to current policy, the reward is a seat on the Leadership Group, not a membership level
      2. We don't have examples of that; Very few examples in any projects, and we are trying to create more incentives for institutions to contribute time of their employees
   6. Fedora runs that way – they have sprints, and people sign up for sprints – but very few institutions can contribute .5 FTE
      1. A 6-month period has been divided up into 2-week sprints, and institutions can commit developers to sprints
         
      2. The rate of participation has diminished over time – some discussion of whether it would be easier or more fruitful to hire contractors
         
         1. Easier to get commitments to new feature development than maintenance or bug fixes
      3. Fedora is looking at other ways and exploring other incentives
   7. Some have volunteered quite a lot of time to the conference and ontology work, and including $30-40K of research funds on the ontology, as well as having a small contribution as a member
      1. There's a lot of work beyond the software – and in the case of the ontology, it's broader even than VIVO (includes eagle-i and other domains of interest)
      2. For any institution it will be an individual mix of both what can be contributed and what is of interest
   8. We can consider conference work, documentation, and other tasks
      1. But the criterion of having the work mediated by the project leadership is important
   9. Should every membership level have some expectation of in-kind contribution – we don't want to discourage institutions or people who are already doing in-kind contribution while also paying
      1. It may be easier to develop a sliding scale where institutions can change the mix but are expected to contribute some of both types of contribution
         
   10. Would it be useful to have a group look at this issue across projects?
       1. VIVO has some unique needs and types of contributions
       2. Other projects also won't fit the pure developer mode as well
       3. With Fedora and DSpace there would be another issue that comes in – the concept of split membership, with some going to VIVO or DSpace or Fedora
          
          1. That's a valid issue but not what we're trying to solve here
          2. The goal of the model is to encourage participation, and now we're even at risk of generating ill will because people feel unrecognized when effort is contributed
          3. Encouraging participation is also encouraging membership
       4. We should have conversations at the project level before trying to do so DuraSpace wide – each project will bring different thoughts and constraints
   11. Participants? – Dean, Jonathan, Robert, Eric
       1. Mike would be comfortable receiving recommendations from this group and would appreciate doing so
       2. Melissa is happy to review recommendations
       3. Jonathan will organize calls
          
5. Implementation documentation task force (Julia)
   
   1. Started work back in March – Violeta asked Julia and Damaris to revise the Planning a VIVO Implementation part of the wiki, and added Brian Lowe, Paul Albert, Alvin Hutchinson, and Benjamin Gross
   2. Met biweekly; first identified pain points in their own implementations and worked with Google docs
   3. A lot of existential challenges initially around scope and what they were writing
   4. Violeta and Damaris worked on a diagram at the bottom of the Planning a VIVO Implementation wiki, covering project management, technical, outreach and engagement, and data management
   5. Existing pages were plugged into one of those 4 groups and organized into the stage of the process – (analysis, pilot, implementation, staging, release)
      
   6. Came up with two versions of the structure and got some feedback; finished up in July
   7. Involvement ebbed and flowed but people returned – helpful to have the goal of the conference as an end date
   8. Mike – recommends the diagram to the group – the concept of an enterprise application that uses enterprise data and provides it to the institution
      1. needs the right components to be able to deliver
      2. (https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/KI4pB)
      3. Very important for people to understand the level of commitment needed before embarking with unrealistic expectations
         
   9. Weaving in new content and weaving in a container to hold it and make it more coherent – Violeta deserves a lot of the credit
      1. Helpful for the Duke team to see how working on a community project differs from a Duke project
   10. Kudos!
       
6. Future topics
   1. Please get topics to consider on the list; we have proposed having special meetings where we set aside an hour to go over a substantial project
      1. We have such a meeting set up for October on attribution and
         
      2. Mike would like us to get back to discussing the strategy of getting bigger – there's a long adoption and implementation cycle, but we want to see the numbers of sites running VIVO to go up
         1. We'd love to get from 28 sites in production to 50 and then 100
         2. What does everything have to look like for us to be able to grow – environment, technology, etc.
         3. We could then have that kind of discussion at the Leadership meeting – how does VIVO become the obvious choice for representing the scholarship at your institution
   2. No volunteers for attending the euroCRIS meeting yet, so Mike will follow up with the specific people we talked about in the last meeting
      

Action Items

• Mike will convene the asset review sub group
• Jonathan will convene the in-kind contribution sub group
• Mike will reach out to possible participants in the EuroCris event
• Graham will join the call next week