December 4, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

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

= note taker

Ex officio

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

Regrets

Kristi Holmes, Melissa Haendel

Dial-In Number:  

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

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Duraspace retreat Dec  7-9, Palm Coast Florida.  Graham and Debra in Gainesville Dec 5-7.  Steering will meet Dec 11.
2. Agenda review
3. Leadership to be rescheduled
   1. Mike felt he needed to have a clear view of the budget position to present, and don't yet have that clarity yet
   2. Estimating to re-schedule for next week or the week after – before the holiday break
      
4. Leadership election process
   1. Firming up the process – we went through some clarification of how Steering gets elected, and need to do so for Leadership as well
   2. Basic principles are clear – nominations and elections on an annual basis, related to the members as of the beginning of the year, proceeding by level
      1. Platinum members are automatically elected
      2. If we have more than two gold members, two gold members need to be elected from the pool of gold members
      3. Similarly with silver and bronze.
      4. Mike will write up a Leadership elections document and share it
         
5. Spring events
   1. We've normally had an implementation fest in the spring – we may be outgrowing that as originally conceived
      1. The meeting in Portland last year had two main purposes, with good things about both
      2. One was to function as an implementation fest, which that event was less strong on
         
      3. Was in fact more of a user group meeting for those already engaged and implemented – was not new sites figuring out how to get up and running, but more a set of VIVO thought leaders comparing notes on what they were doing and planned to do
         
   2. The original concept of an I-Fest was to have a few presenters to present and share knowledge for people new to VIVO – not exactly training because we weren't yet sure what training should encompass
   3. Plus there's the concept of hackathons – and whether they should be tacked on to other events, or should remain separate and focused as an in-person sprint where people come together to build something
      1. To date we've had a variety of hackathons from unstructured to structured
   4. And the idea of training as a formal activity with instructors, exercises, and specific take-home outcomes is moving closer
      1. Conceived of as a paid activity, with a small number of instructors going through a well-designed curriculum of presentations and exercises over a period of about 2 days
      2. More organized than the recent I-Fests where people talked about what they had to report on a variety of topics
   5. Will have a conversation on this topic at the Tuesday Outreach & Engagement call
      1. Wanting a discussion to collect thoughts and ideas from the community
      2. A great idea to get community input
      3. One of the other topics that has come up with our other projects is the need to extend outreach beyond North America, for both DSpace and Fedora
         1. Will be publishing a Spanish-speaking newsletter and would be great to have some content about VIVO – knows we have activity in Spanish-speaking countries (Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain)
            1. Is the idea to have the same content or different content
            2. The goal is to solicit content; have a contact in Latin America and there is interest in VIVO by that party
               
         2. If there is to be a Fedora or DSpace training event, perhaps there could be a VIVO day attached
      4. Traditionally we've tried to stay as far away from the Conference as is possible to avoid competing for attendance, and are we thinking one event and trying to decide the type, or thinking of doing several smaller events?
      5. IFest has value; staff benefited last spring from the technical networking
      6. Could also plan a multi-day event that has very different styles on different days
      7. Think of the challenges around data and the relationships of the data to the rest of the university – the definitional issues around enterprise data
         1. The technical aspects aren't as much the hard part, though technical people will want to talk with each other
         2. It's data managers and data stewards who do that work, not systems people or programmers
         3. We can create training for that, too
   6. One new idea has been talked about a new training benefit for a new level of institutional sponsors for the conference (distinct from membership in VIVO), perhaps added on to the conference, but could also be a separate event, and it may be too soon to try to add a new feature to the conference for 2016
      1. The benefit would be something like a 2-hour event, perhaps even as a limited-attendance webinar remotely
      2. Could have one hour on business and data concerns, one on technical, and one on outreach and using VIVO data
      3. Can be a fair amount of preparation to host a multi-day event
      4. Important to make it personal and individual interaction – you get to talk about your site and get direct feedback and answers to questions
      5. Could also lead to the development of materials for more general training
   7. What if we try and focus the I-Fest on new site implementation again? All about setting up and owning VIVOs, with technical content but also the institutional challenges
      1. Wouldn't be a big event – maybe a dozen to twenty sites, recommending that sites each send a technical person and a manager type
      2. We could do invitations and see who's interested, perhaps calling it a workshop, and figure out how we would need to staff it
      3. In previous discussions we've talked about having an example data – could we use the workshop to work through the process of putting it up and building a VIVO
      4. Would need to use the cooking school approach to time-shrink it a bit to present two weeks of work in two days
      5. Some value in understanding the whole process
      6. Changing the name to set new expectations – wouldn't be a user group meeting, but uncharged training as a dry run on what we would expect to run another year
      7. Would address the need we're sensing in the community that people need help getting their VIVOs up and running
      
      
6. Open Discussion – what should we be talking about on these calls that we never bring up or never get to
   1. Have talked about stepping back from the Implementation Group co-lead role to focus on the Conference this year, and that brings up where working groups fit in our new structure of task forces
      1. Paul has agreed to carry on, but how are successors recruited? Do you have somebody in mind?
         
      2. There's been talk of consolidating to one day a week – but now there are new Tuesday outreach and engagement calls
   2.  Jon – with my retirement and Jim's reduced time on the project, is timely to discuss, and perhaps combining with Apps & Tools makes sense; the ontology calls have not happened for a while as community support calls but a small technical group is meeting under Melissa and Shahim's leadership
   3. We may want to have a similar technical call around development that is not community support but more of a sprint meeting
   4. Graham might lead a different type of call for a different audience
   5. Addressing different subjects and audiences, so discrete groups for implementation and apps & tools make sense
   6. One issue is that we end up with the same people coming to both calls; would be wonderful if implementation calls could be friendly for first-timers, but people are only implementing for 3-6 months and then would get bored
      1. It may well be better to have one-on-one discussions specifically about one university, at a workshop or as a benefit of conference sponsorship
   7. Implementation calls is as site updates, which is fine and brings out useful stuff about development work going on – but that could happen on more focused development calls
   8. Merging in the Apps & Tools as part of a weekly community call, with 1st Thursday development, 2nd Thursday apps & tools, 3rd Thursday site updates
      1. Has been hard to recruit a theme presenter for every other week – bringing in Apps & Tools would alleviate that, and there would be one canonical time slot
   9. We have to be careful to facilitate people who have stepped up to volunteer in leadership roles move on to other roles without feeling they have to find their own successor
      
7. Future topics
   

Action Items