February 26, 2016, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert ,   Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald, Eric Meeks, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio

= note taker

Ex officio

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

Regrets

Bart Ragon, Melissa Haendel, Andi Ogier, Kristi Holmes

Location

Webex Meeting Link

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Apps and Tools meeting
      1. Rodney Jacobson from Dartmouth presented his PubMed ingest tool using the Catalyst PubMed pub finder.  Very slick.
      2. 20 people on the call.  Good questions.  Very well received
   2. Mike presented VIVO/SHARE with Rick Johnson from Notre Dame/SHARE in the first of the three part Duraspace webinar series on VIVO plus SHARE.  48 people on the call.  Many good questions, mostly about VIVO.  Slides available on Figshare
   3. Ted Lawless posted locations of his code for hooking up external vocabularies to VIVO. Also very slick.
   4. Hannah Sommers of GWU elected to the Leadership Group.  She will attend the Summit.
   5. Open VIVO progress.  See OpenVIVO Task Force

Minutes

1. Steering Group membership
   1. There are 3 members whose terms will end in 2016 (Robert, Jon, and Paul). Any of those could stand for re-election. This would happen after Force16. This would mean the elections would happen in late April to early May. This process typically takes around 8 weeks. This would finish in late June. That would be sufficiently in advance to give them time to be oriented prior to the Conference... which would be an improvement compared to last year.
2. Summit planning
   
   1. The meeting is happening March 16-17 at Cosmos Club in Washington DC
   2. There will be several VIVO program elements including a high-level view of VIVO
   3. Dean will give a talk on direction of VIVO
   4. Would like to use the Summit as an opportunity to explore how the Fedora and VIVO communities can collaborate. We were thinking there would be an hour breakfast meeting on the morning of the second day to start the conversation.... I had a conversation with Sandy Payette about this, but I don't have preconceived notions about what might result. We might need someone from both projects to serve as facilitators. If you know of anyone who might be have personal interest and/or experience, let Mike Conlon know.
   5. Project-oriented breakout sessions. Last year we had several engaging conversations. In general, we will probably have less presentation and more discussion. We will have time for two conversations. In the past, we've had more than that, but a portion of the program is focusing on the merger. The sessions will be 45 minutes each. One will be on membership including the adjustments we're making to avoid 2015. The second is open.
   6. Second session:
      1. Is VIVO more a faculty profile system or a data infrastructure?
         1. What would VIVO look like under those two scenarios?
         2. Depending on which one you choose, maybe you invest effort in a Fedora integration, or integration with ORCID.
         3. The mission speaks to supporting scholars and scholarship. If we focused on the fundamentals of the semantic web and information representation, VIVO would look a lot more like Fedora. The effort we're doing with OpenVIVO more supports the idea of VIVO as a profile system.
         4. These directions are not mutually exclusive. Activities in pursuit of goal #1 may help #2. Shouldn't this come from our community?
         5. Key question would be where are we getting our funding from?
         6. If we're making a decision to build VIVO at CU-Boulder today vs. 5 years ago how would things change? How has the competitive landscape changed?
         7. U. of Florida went exactly through this process recently. They asked themselves, what other options are there? They brought in everyone. It took them a year. When they were done, they came up with Symplectic and VIVO.
         8. None of the things we've done to support one track has undermined the other
      2. Another question could be what types of partnerships should we pursue?
      3. What about exploring the difference between getting sites to adopt VIVO vs. adopt the application using the ontology?
      4. Another topic could be discussing the development roadmap. This group could discuss a feature roadmap.
      5. I think it would be valuable to hear from the Leadership group and get them talking. It seems like the direction is kind of one-way. We should ask them, "What's on your mind?"... I also like to focus on what the next steps are. I want something to come of these discussions.
      6. Suggest we send out discussion topics well ahead of time. 
      7. There will be an agenda with topics.  Follow up will occur at the VIVO Conference. If something came out of the Fedora conversation, the Fedora technical lead is located in Colorado, so he might be able to make an appearance at the Conference, if need be.
      8.  We've been flying blind with regard to the needs of the community. OpenVIVO represented a great groundswell of interest. Perhaps there are additional areas of untapped interest.
      9. We need to focus on how to get the community more involved.
      10. What made OpenVIVO successful and how can we replicate it?
          1. Anyone can join (not institution specific). Anyone with an ORCID can use it. And when you get there, data has been put in there. We have a compelling way for users to put in their own publications. Rodney Jacobson demonstrated something similar at Dartmouth. Based on a PMID, Rodney retrieves pubs using the Catalyst API, which presents a set of options to the user, the user can claim or disavow these publications, and then these can be imported into the system.... We are seeing a kind of coalescing around common data that can be presented to VIVO. We couldn't make calls to CrossRef five years ago. Another appealing feature: we will fully export that data to Git Hub every day. Everything that goes into OpenVIVO will come out. Dave Eichmann will take that data every hour. The corpus of VIVO data will grow before our eyes.
      11. Newer sites are coming online quicker these days, perhaps because of better documentation.
3. Introduction to VIVO workshop
   1. If anyone has any leads on who might organize this workshop, please let Julia Trimmer know.

Action Items