October 30, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert, Jon Corson-Rikert , Melissa Haendel, Eric Meeks,  Alex Viggio, Robert H. McDonald

= note taker

Ex officio

 debra hanken kurtz, Graham Triggs, Mike Conlon, Jonathan Markow

Regrets

  Kristi Holmes, Dean B. Krafft (2 of 2),  Bart Ragon (2 of 3) Julia Trimmer, Andi Ogier

Dial-In Number:  

DIAL-IN: 641-715-3650, Participant code: 117433#  Local country dial-in codes

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Jim Blake is testing RC1.  Expect his results shortly.
   2. Force11 Portland April 17-19.  https://www.force11.org/meetings/force2016/program/agenda
   3. Registry making progress at http://duraspace.org/registry/vivo
   4. Alex has joined the University Colorado FIS team as Associate Director.
   5. D3 visualizations added to 1.8.1 to optionally replace co-author and co-funded network.  Does not require Flash (and so displays on mobile devices). Does require a modern browser (IE 9 or above)
   6. Conference prospectus nearing completion
   7. Tentative launch date for new web site is Tuesday, November 17.
2. Agenda review
3. Email lists – see discussion at https://gist.github.com/mconlon17/ad8e7d577b85a7267434
   1. To have an address that looks like @vivoweb.org you have a private list and people can't self-subscribe or search an open archive 
   2. So would go to @googlegroups.com to get the open, self-subscribing aspect unless we want to pay money to them to use @vivoweb.org
   3. We can re-subscribe everyone to these lists without bothering them, 10 at a time – the lists are short enough to be within our clerical means in order to avoid losing people
   4. We have a vivo-community@googlegroups.com list already that has been used to support the engagement group so far; and there is vivo-isf@googlegroups.com to support ontology discussion and development.  we can switch the other lists now
      1. Already having a little confusion, so it would be good to go forward
   5. We can mail all the mail that was in the old archive to the new archive – we have scripts to do that and our archives are pretty small in comparison to DSpace and Fedora
   6. Mike will let people know it's happening and move ahead
4. Rotation of Steering Group members
   1. The charter says 3-year terms but doesn't describe term limits; can stand for re-election
   2. Seems like all the people recently elected should have 3-year terms
   3. People who have been on Steering longer should decide whether to end their term or stand election for a new term
   4. It would be helpful to know whether people want to leave or stand for election this coming summer or in summer of 2017 – need 3 for each coming year, with the 5 that joined this year up in June of 2018
   5. Mike will ask each person privately how they feel about their individual term
   6. Takes 6-8 weeks to do the full election process – seeking candidates, announcing the election, doing the voting – works well to lead up to the Conference, but perhaps not as close as this year. Would be good to start before the end of May.
   7. Mike hopes to have the terms mapped out to present to the Leadership Group in December.
5. ORCID and VIVO – https://goo.gl/Fa87xZ
   1. Needs a more engaging title and a concluding sentence that brings people back to the big picture
   2. How do we help ORCID provide better interoperability of the data they collect and harvest (and call a profile) – can we have a project to work together?
   3. This document is aimed a people thinking of adopting a profile system and see ORCID as something existing, global, and free
   4. We believe everyone should have an ORCID iD for identification purposes, but should have a comprehensive, structured scholarly profile at their institutional home
   5. A good statement to have on our site, to help people understand 
   6. It's not a joint press release with ORCID – we expect review by an ORCID board member, but not more official sanction
   7. How detailed is an ORCID profile? Not as deep as VIVO, and can't be customized
      1. Anybody can create an ORCID iD and some people have more than one
      2. VIVO has institutional grounding and semantic representation as 2 key differentiators; the ORCID data structures are established for their convenience in storing or website display
   8. There's the VIVO product relationship with ORCID and also the VIVO-ISF ontology relationship, which is less competitive
      1. Becoming a DBpedia to their Wikipedia could be an interesting role – representing their data as LOD
   9. How open is ORCID? Do they encourage participation in their working groups?  Friendliness, yes, but perhaps more like our task forces
      1. They are having a codefest and would like to have DSpace and VIVO coders join
      2. We could advance their tools with them – we have the primitive connection for passing ORCID iD and a VIVO URI done under the Sloan grant in 2014, but we haven't yet committed to embedding the orcid2vivo tool in the VIVO software – it hasn't risen to a high priority yet
      3. There is an annual membership cost to use their API
   10. If we're going to create more of a relationship we'll have to show up more at their events and working groups, and commit in some way; at this time we're talking at a distance
   11. Perhaps we could invite Simeon Warner as an ORCID board member to attend one of our calls
   12. Eric is registering to attend the ORCID event in SF next week
   13. This will continue to be a discussion and there's work that will continue to need to be done – this one-pager is just a starting point.
6. VIVO calendar of events over the course of the year – https://goo.gl/6n7r7k
   
   1. Mike has been thinking about the future of the implementation fest – last year's in Portland was fantastic but more of a user group than an opportunity to implement
      1. We need events like that, and the same idea came up at the conference to have working group sessions there (somehow without interfering with the conference being a conference)
      2. A lot of demand for opportunities for 30-50 people to come together and go through some issues about VIVO in some depth with people who really care about it
         1. more whiteboard and less powerpoint; more discussion than presentation; more strategy and tactics than show and tell
   2. It ended up being more of a user outreach meeting – getting new users on board and oriented – but not a hackathon, which was disappointing for people who came for that
      1. So speaks for the need to have a separate hackathon event
      2. More donuts!
   3. For people who are really looking for implementation or advice or background, that seems now more like training – originally we needed the opportunity to develop and share ideas, but we know more about what the issues are now, from both a technical and community side
      1. The conversation should continue but it's not efficient to through newcomers into a room with 50 people who have been involved in VIVO for years
      2. Thinking about a small training event – 2 people each from 6 universities coming as students with a couple or three trainers
      3. Completely separated from anything else, as a way to get completely new people up to speed
      4. See these people on our listservs all the time – asking questions that could easily be addressed in a couple days of solid training presented as instruction rather than open discussion
      5. Build yourself up from what is the Semantic Web and RDF to where you're putting data in a VIVO
      6. Very different from a user group discussion
   4. Should a user group and hackathon be combined? They're often the same people
      1. Organize as a day of discussion and two days of hackathon or whatever – have to be clear about the agenda
      2. The Hydra project will often do concurrent sessions, one technical where hacking is done, while another session with more strategic and planning discussions; do it sequentially if people want to attend both
      3. We're not that big
         1. ORCID had 100 people in talks and 10 people at a codefest in parallel
         2. Some people who are hackers and technical will want to talk about the future of the product
         3. We just need more of the kind of conversation we had in Portland (but can you make the switch to hacking and get work done?)
         4. Helps to have specific tasks for the hackathon that helps you focus; okay if some people leave before the hackathon
   5. Maybe VIVO should go on a roadshow and have events at other community gatherings like DLF or Force16 
      1. Great idea; will try to draft a training outline and share it, based most likely on 2 days of activities
7. Future topics

Action Items