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
DIAL-IN: 641-715-3650, Participant code: 117433#
Agenda
Item | Time | Facilitator | Notes | |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Updates | 5 min | All | |
2 | Review agenda | 2 min | All | Revise, reorder if needed |
3 | Sub group for asset recommendations | 10 min | Mike | Would like to have 3-4 people review and recommend priorities regarding assets. See Asset Inventory and Recommendations Task Force |
4 | Sub group for in-kind contributions and membership levels | 15 min | Mike | Develop proposal for Steering Group review. See VIVO Project Charter v 1.1 |
5 | Implementation Documentation Task Force | 20 min | Julia | See Planning a VIVO Implementation |
6 | Future topics | 5 min | All | attribution/contribution efforts (10/16); training program; rotation of Steering Group members |
Notes
- Updates
- Unknown User (gtriggs) starts this Monday, September 21. Graham will join the Steering Group email list and calls next week.
- 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.
- Second Outreach and Engagement call held this past Tuesday. Very good attendance (9), discussion. See 2015-09-15 Outreach Call.
- 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
- 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.
- Ontology event has been postponed.
- Review Agenda
- no comments or questions
- no comments or questions
- Sub group for asset recommendations
- Have a subset of Steering review the report and its recommendations and refine the response to indicate priority and timing
- Some recommendations may need further exploration and/or a task force to enact
- 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
- Thinking of 1-2 phone calls as the scope
- Julia, Robert, Ted happy to help; others welcome to volunteer by email and Mike will contact more people mid-week if additional volunteers needed
- Would be a good orientation exercise for Graham
- Sub group for in-kind contributions and membership levels
- 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
- 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
- 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
- The original concept in the charter may vary from one Duraspace project to another, although some policies are necessary DuraSpace-wide
- 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
- Can also be elected by peers from among lower levels of membership
- 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
- That means that one or more persons put in aggregate a half FTE
- Requires making a plan with the Project Director
- Effort needs to take direction from the project, on tasks determined by the project – has to be work for the common good and usable
- Normally directed by the tech lead
- 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
- Projects have the right to customize policies if consistent with the general framework
- Key concept there is that the in-kind contribution is under the direction of the project, not focused on the local institution
- According to current policy, the reward is a seat on the Leadership Group, not a membership level
- 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
- Fedora runs that way – they have sprints, and people sign up for sprints – but very few institutions can contribute .5 FTE
- A 6-month period has been divided up into 2-week sprints, and institutions can commit developers to sprints
- The rate of participation has diminished over time – some discussion of whether it would be easier or more fruitful to hire contractors
- Easier to get commitments to new feature development than maintenance or bug fixes
- Fedora is looking at other ways and exploring other incentives
- A 6-month period has been divided up into 2-week sprints, and institutions can commit developers to sprints
- 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
- 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)
- For any institution it will be an individual mix of both what can be contributed and what is of interest
- We can consider conference work, documentation, and other tasks
- But the criterion of having the work mediated by the project leadership is important
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Would it be useful to have a group look at this issue across projects?
- VIVO has some unique needs and types of contributions
- Other projects also won't fit the pure developer mode as well
- 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
- That's a valid issue but not what we're trying to solve here
- 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
- Encouraging participation is also encouraging membership
- We should have conversations at the project level before trying to do so DuraSpace wide – each project will bring different thoughts and constraints
- Participants? – Dean, Jonathan, Robert, Eric
- Mike would be comfortable receiving recommendations from this group and would appreciate doing so
- Melissa is happy to review recommendations
- Jonathan will organize calls
- Implementation documentation task force (Julia)
- 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
- Met biweekly; first identified pain points in their own implementations and worked with Google docs
- A lot of existential challenges initially around scope and what they were writing
- 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
- Existing pages were plugged into one of those 4 groups and organized into the stage of the process – (analysis, pilot, implementation, staging, release)
- Came up with two versions of the structure and got some feedback; finished up in July
- Involvement ebbed and flowed but people returned – helpful to have the goal of the conference as an end date
- Mike – recommends the diagram to the group – the concept of an enterprise application that uses enterprise data and provides it to the institution
- needs the right components to be able to deliver
- (https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/KI4pB)
- Very important for people to understand the level of commitment needed before embarking with unrealistic expectations
- Weaving in new content and weaving in a container to hold it and make it more coherent – Violeta deserves a lot of the credit
- Helpful for the Duke team to see how working on a community project differs from a Duke project
- Kudos!
- Future topics
- 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
- We have such a meeting set up for October on attribution and
- 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
- We'd love to get from 28 sites in production to 50 and then 100
- What does everything have to look like for us to be able to grow – environment, technology, etc.
- 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
- We have such a meeting set up for October on attribution and
- No volunteers for attending the euroCRIS meeting yet, so Mike will follow up with the specific people we talked about in the last meeting
- 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
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