May 20, 2016, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

 Paul Albert ,  Eric Meeks,   Kristi Holmes,  Julia Trimmer, Robert H. McDonald, Alex Viggio

= note taker

Ex officio

Graham Triggs, Mike Conlon,  debra hanken kurtz

Regrets

Dean B. Krafft, Melissa Haendel, Bart Ragon,  Andi Ogier, Jonathan Markow,

Location

Webex Meeting Link

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Mike and Graham will be at Open Repositories with a poster on OpenVIVO – Dublin, June 13-16.  Mike will be at Digital Science meeting in Manchester, UK, June 16.
2. Community Leadership Summit and OSCON
   1. Twitter #CLS16 https://twitter.com/search?q=%23cls16&src=typd
   2. Jono's community survey presented at CLS: 
   3. Symplectic event:
      
      • 4th Annual Symplectic North American Conference
        Date: September 13 - 14, 2016
        Location: Duke University, Durham, NC
        Time: To be confirmed
3. Community Leadership Summit
   1. It's a different feel than most conferences. The event is designed to bring community managers and anyone who tries to wrangle volunteer communities. Provides strategies for how to satisfy the mission in these groups of people. Main focus: be kind, respectful, considerate of everyone's perspective. Before the conference, John O'Bacon sent out a survey with a couple questions involving topics and tools/technologies. Modelled good behavior. Gave advice about how to deflect occasions where people go off topic. Particularly enjoyed the un-conference portion.
   2. Significant topics of interest:
      1. Growing community participations
      2. Metrics and measurement of community. If you can't measure something, how can you improve it?
      3. Governance and leadership
      4. Real-time discussion
      5. Project management
      6. Code collaboration
      7. Event management
      8. Finding experts in your community
      9. Creating a pull request culture. Another spoke about reaching out to new members. Often times, a community can be offputting to new members.
      10. Kat Allman at Google suggested a session on asking for money. Gave some tips for how to make pitches for money. Some advice: don't say in your pitch to large companies, "If you're not the right person, please forward this to the right person."
      11. Dealing with trolls
      12. Using New Relic. Perhaps a free version could be used to point at a VIVO.
      13. How to make introverts feel more comfortable. A lot of conferences have an introvert space or work together on a quiet project. At one conference, they made the mistake of stipulating, "You are not allowed to eat lunch by yourself."
          1. At MLA, there's something called "world cafe" in which people rotate through the roles of talking or writing/drawing notes. Additionally, groups rotate through discussion of various topics.
          2. I find it's important to thank people for their work. People sometimes assume that contributions to a project are done for other motives.
   3. Alex Wade brought up using Microsoft Academic Search for VIVO.
   4. Elements is having their user event in Durham in October. I would be interested in helping put together a group of VIVO attendees around the time of this event.
4. Funding situation
   1. Summary of funding
   2. We need more members
   3. We're going to do a more directed mailing this year. We're going to send a mailing to everyone we have. 
   4. Does VIVO have a prospectus for corporate sponsorship? I sent a prospect to Internet2 about corporate sponsorship.
      1. We had levels. We had a clear understanding of how we wanted to move forward. But then that somewhat conflicted with Duraspace's modus operandi, i.e. "Everything needs to be aligned across projects."
      2. Early on, we were extraordinarily concerned about having too many corporate members. I don't see that we have that problem.
   5. We have fabulous top end members, but not a lot of bronze member institutions.
   6. What's our thinking regarding how dire the situation is? I feel like if we could frame this as a really pressing message, a lot of lower level people could create some urgency. 
   7. The situation is serious.  VIVO must increase the number of members providing financial support.
   8. Could we have a conversation about what the blocker is in terms of supporting this project?
   9. Let's discuss this at the next steering meeting.

Action Items