January 29, 2016, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert , Melissa Haendel, Kristi Holmes,  Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald, Eric Meeks,  Andi Ogier, Bart Ragon, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio

= note taker

Ex officio

Graham Triggs, Mike Conlon, Jonathan Markow, 

Regrets

debra hanken kurtz

Location

Webex Meeting Link

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   
   1. Jon's last meeting was last week.  Please share your thoughts with Jon.  He expects to be mostly off line for some time as he moves and adjusts.  He hopes to participate in the community in the future.
   2. Leadership elections will be held in February.  Five bronze members will elect one bronze representative to Leadership.  Steering Group elections are planned for April/May.
   3. Reminder – Summit meeting in DC March 17-18, hope to see you there.
2. Intent to merge (Lyrasis and Duraspace)
   1. Michelle Kimpton has been CEO of Duraspace and a consultant to Lyrasis.  Working with both groups, she saw potential synergy.  She spoke withthe respective CEOs who agreed about stengths of a merged organization.  A Duraspace board subcommittee was formed.  Mike Conlon served and represented VIVO.  The committee made a unanimous recommendation to consider merger.  Lyrasis follwoed a similar process.  And then each board voted unanimously to announce the intent to merge.
   2. This is an intent to merge - not a merger. There will be additional exploration and formalities.
   3. The biggest risk for me is lost opportunity cost for Duraspace. If there's a lot of attention on this merger, what could have been done instead?
   4. There's a lot of good will from foundations for exploring this merger, so it shouldn't be a money drain.
   5. There's discussion about more Hydra engagement with Duraspace. Will the merger cause others to look elsewhere?
   6. Hydra is very positive about the merger opportunity.... the merger will give us more of a runway for our projects
   7. How long will this due diligence investigation take? Should be done within 6 months.  Shorter would be better.
   8. Duraspace is library-centric but VIVO is not to some extent. To the extent that it isn't, there has been some awkwardness. Lyrasis is more library-centric than Duraspace. That puts the burden on the leadership and steering groups to support the health of the project.
   9. There have been some growing pains when VIVO joined Duraspace in terms of communications and public outreach. It seems like this merger could provide a better venue of outreach for the VIVO project.
   10. Lyrasis does have a consulting arm and a training group that is large and up and running. They also have a sales and marketing team. And financial stability.
3. Force16 and OpenVIVO
   1. Mike shared a GoogleDoc. The idea is to create a VIVO that could be used by the conference attendees in cases where they uploaded records to FigShare.
   2. Participation requires an ORCid. People in VIVO would be fully identified.
   3. Key functionality: users who puts in DOI triggers retrieval of a record.
   4. Another functionality: facilitate the attribution work so that when a person is entering a DOI, they can define their role.
   5. We would also provide an export capability where a person could do a full export of their profile. It would be sent to Git Hub where it would be persistently available.
   6. It would really help with the general visibility of the VIVO project.
   7. We're going to have all these data about conference attendees. Anyone who is registered and has a VIVO profile. The day-before hackathon will be a great opportunity to generate interest.... A large number of funding agencies and publishers will also be present.... This will be valuable as a way to unify a persons output by leveraging multiple identifiers.
   8. Have we talked to ORCiD? I don't want to speak for them but they do seem to be pretty enthusiastic about sharing their data.
   9. ORCiD is ready and willing to partner with VIVO but we haven't really spelled out how it would work. Getting data back into ORCiD can be difficult.
   10. I like the idea of having official or semi-official endorsement from ORCiD.
   11. We've struggled with org. identifiers for a long time. I think Digital Science's GRID system for org. identifiers is fantastic.
   12. Who is attending Force16 from this group? Mike, Melissa, Kristi are. I would urge as many of you as possible to attend. This is a really important opportunity for our community.
   13. I would be happy to contribute some of my developers to this work, but I would need to hear some estimates.
   14. Estimates will be developed.
   15. I like the OpenVIVO concept. Even if it's not done in time for the conference, we could submit to another conference. It would be a really nice demonstration to have.
   16. Agree. It might make sense to do a low-key launch prior to the launch. If it works well, then we could submit a press release.
   17. If it doesn't work out, there won't be any negative fall out.
   18. I think this is a fantastic idea. I would approach the SHARE people about doing a potential partnership.

Action Items