October 2, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert, Jon Corson-Rikert , Kristi Holmes, Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald,  Eric Meeks, Bart Ragon, Julia Trimmer

= note taker

Ex officio

Jonathan Markow, Mike Conlon,  Graham Triggs

Regrets

Melissa Haendel, Andi Ogier, debra hanken kurtz, Alex Viggio

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

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Busy week on the email lists.  Extended discussion of degrees, including vocabulary, associated awards, abbreviations, local variations in collaboration with Darren Weber of Stanford from the Linked Data for Libraries project.  Also discussion of policies and practices around closing out people when they leave an institution
   2. Updated relationship diagram by Jon Corson-Rikert for information representation around degrees.  See VIVO-ISF 1.6 relationship diagrams: Educational Training; use the unstructured supplemental text for now but there are fine point issues we should figure out how to deal with – and the institution may use variations on common degree names, for example, and people may want certain labels used; we can't reliably map abbreviations to a single degree type – e.g., BSN
   3. Nice post from TIB Hanover regarding the VIVO event there.  Several new sites mentioned.  See VIVP Updates http://www.tib.uni-hannover.de/en/news/news/newsdetail/article/tib-fuehrt-ersten-deutschsprachigen-vivo-workshop-durch.html
   4. Nice photo from Roberto Garcia of his Linked Data mug.  See https://twitter.com/rogargon/status/649162786510086144/photo/1
   5. Semantic Versioning proposal discussion with Patrick West.  Will clarify examples.  See https://goo.gl/i04Z02
   6. Community Pages upgraded (with photo bar header), and blog post
   7. Videos completed for web site.  Registry this week.  Final previews and checks, then launch.
   8. Alex is attending http://githubuniverse.com
2. Review agenda
   1. no comments
3. Leadership meeting schedule
   1. Time for a conference call – looking the afternoon of December 3rd or all day Friday the 4th, about halfway between the conference and the summit; Dean will send out a Doodle poll; sounds good as long as there's not a major event that takes a number of people away
   2. What is this meeting (who attends, how long, etc) – the Leadership Group are the people who have contributed significant resources and get to vote, and this is one of their quarterly meetings
   3. We typically review budget, staffing, project process
   4. Does Steering participate? Steering attends but the agenda is geared toward the Leadership; the phone calls are more like a board meeting, at a higher level most relevant for them. Some members overlap.  Leadership is an accountability mechanism – they remember what we said we would be doing at the last meeting, while we may get caught up with details in between
4. Asset inventory recommendations
   1. Julia, Robert, Graham and Mike met to go over the recommendations and came back with 4 things; 6 recommendations were considered straightforward and ready for action as is
   2. Four things did draw conversation
      1. Marketing – why do we have a Pinterest board? does it reflect well on VIVO? Mike asked Carol about Pinterest and she will find out what's involved in taking it down
         1. UVa Library has a board, but seems like a more visual venue and perhaps better for services – stuff that's useful for a library
         2. used fairly commonly by academic libraries, but if it's not being maintained
         3. academic libraries have beautiful images
         4. doesn't seem like it targets the right group
         5. Have to feed it if we want it to be useful, and consensus to take it down
      2. Email – general agreement that the proposal to remodel our email environment/presence along the lines described, but is very brief
         
         1. We have VIVO Community at Google Groups that we haven't yet embraced
         2. Need to get a concrete proposal of who, what, and when of how it would actually happen; Mike is happy to provide that
      3. Demo site – we have a http://vivo.vivoweb.org site – a VIVO, but not a current VIVO – intended to hold information about VIVO sites, not a demo of VIVO as a research networking system
         1. The subgroup felt we need a demo site instead, to show people VIVO
         2. One suggestion would be to partner with somebody who does have a demo site – with issues about using fake or real people, who hosts it, whether it's up to date, etc.
         3. Given where we are today, we would struggle to maintain a fictional demo site at scale owned and operated by the VIVO project
         4. One suggestion would be to partner with Symplectic – they have a demo site at scale with 40K real papers leading to the names of real authors, but the university is fictional
            1. But it doesn't have a significant organizational structure for the fictional university
            2. They have incentive to maintain it.  We have the incentive to build out some parts for demonstration
            3. We should take the current site down – doesn't show us well since not a demo site and not current on the technology
            4. What if the whole Q/C process before a release goes out is done on the demo site
               1. if at scale, would be a good test
               2. They have incentive to keep their data working with our current software
            5. Is it problematic from having a registered service provider host the demo site – would that discourage other vendors from becoming registered service providers because they think an existing service provider has a competitive advantage?
            6. Are there issues of a non-profit getting this close to a commercial entity?
         5. It's hard to maintain demo sites since they're not real – could we just showcase live sites?
            1. that's how we've done it in the past
            2. A demo site to make sure the release and the demo go together; working with a service provider has a lot of synergy in that regard
         6. Could we approach this some other way? We could approach at-scale release testing another way (we have so far gotten copies of databases)
         7. What is the purpose of a demo site? (1) for testing , (2) for showcasing, or (3) letting people mess around with data for a day knowing that it will be refreshed every day – which do we want/need?
      4. The notion of a CRM system
         1. DuraSpace has one called http://zoho.com, a hosted solution, that has a bunch of data in it and is used for membership drive support, but could be used for many other things
            1. The integration of data between mailing lists and Google Groups and Zoho is not fully implemented
            2. Numerous issues with data representation, quality and reach with current CRM practices
         2. This is a VIVO matter in that VIVO would like to have a CRM system that works for VIVO, but Zoho is largely a DuraSpace internal matter
            
            1. Want who's been contacted, who went to what meeting, in the context of all our people in all of our lists
            2. getting the data platform and tracking correct is a big problem but has value for an organization like ours that's trying to work with a number of volunteers
         3. Mike will follow up with DuraSpace to see how we can make Zoho more functional for VIVO and perhaps for other projects
5. Use of Maven
   1. Google Doc at https://goo.gl/PvihXQ
   2. A way to facilitate the work of developers that would be more familiar to open source developers
   3. Most open source Java projects use it, it's better at managing dependencies, it's a nice way to distribute the releases and to leverage a natural 3-layer build process where we encourage people to have a project that overlays on the releases in a Maven central repository and keeps their
   4. A no-brainer, after extensively using Ant and using Maven less
      1. better IDE integration and enforces best practices
      2.  we will end up there – if we can do it, go ahead, and it will help developers
   5. How much work?
      1. put together a proof of concept in about a day; has to be brought up to date and has to add up the bits and pieces of creating the VIVO home directory (another day), and there's also the process of establishing the release procedure to get it in the central repository (a day or two)
      2. Happy to guinea pig anything you come up with from a clean slate system, using Eclipse
   6. How would this change the release process?
      1. Doing this via Maven would be encourage people to switch to using Maven – a bit of a jump
      2. For anybody coming new would be easier to just pull it straight into their IDEs rather than the current process of setting up the whole infrastructure
   7. We receive questions about why we're not using Maven – likely just because we've been around for a long time and haven't moved yet, so we look like we're behind and not as automated and friendly as other projects
      1. Will be able to co-release Vagrant and eventually automate it
      2. Will help in distributing the software directly from GitHub as most projects do
   8. A good thing to discuss the release process with Cornell
      1. The pain they take in the transition to Maven will be repaid in the ease they then inherit; becomes a live and active project
      2. Probably a significant effort to do an upgrade anyway, so the additional change of switching to Maven is not significant, and longer term, this does give us the ability to split up into separate Maven projects and re-use in different contexts – such as the Harvester having dependencies on core VIVO code
      3. Action item is to put in VIVO updates, get feedback from the community
         1. Have had comments about semantic versioning with respect to the ontology, where there are significant discussions and even conferences on how to do it
         2. We could talk about Maven on an implementation and development call
6. Repository fields and values – https://goo.gl/c7xISd
   
   1. As we move toward a website integrated with Fedora and DSpace, they have a repository of their sties and we need one
   2. Duraspace web team has asked what fields we need about each site – based on what's in Fedora and DSpace site repositories – much of which is optional, but when they report we have the ability to structure information about the VIVO sites with some utility and provide a clickable link about sites in VIVO
   3. Might put into people's minds things like using an alternative triple store
   4. We don't yet have standard, enumerable customizations
   5. Add something about size (number of profiles) and an indication of hardware
      1. We have to be careful not to slim down the responses we get by asking too many questions, but they are optional; VIVO can compare number of triples easily, but it's not so simple to describe the hardware
      2. ust used free text, but typically got how big the disk, how many cores, the speed of the cores – the point being to lower the fear of the unknown hardware to have to throw at it to make this work
   6. also contact information
7. Future topics
   1. Mike would like to have Eric give us a presentation on Harvard Profiles – what is does, how many sites, what it does well and/or not so well, how does it compare with VIVO, what can we learn from each of our experiences
   2. There has been some discussion of changing the technology used for this meeting – some interest in using collaborative technology
      
      1. Google Hangouts, WebEx, Skype
   3. How the VIVO website update is going
      1. Content due to be finished this coming week and will then schedule it as a topic for this meeting
   4. We did promise the leadership meeting a proposal about in-kind contributions
      1. Jonathan will be scheduling people for a sub-group meeting as discussed last week

Action Items

• Dean B. Krafft will coordinate scheduling the Leadership Group meeting.
• Mike Conlon will provide details of an email transition for consideration by Steering
• Mike Conlon will follow up with Duraspace regarding functionality/utility of Zoho
• Mike Conlon will include the Maven proposal in VIVO Updates
• Paul Albert and Alex Viggio will arrange for Maven discussion on Implementation and Development call
• Jonathan Markow will schedule steering sub group regarding in-kind contribution and recognition