Friday September 29, 2017, 2 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Dean B. Krafft, Julia Trimmer,  Andi Ogier,  Lauren Gala, Eric Meeks,  Alex Viggio, Dong Joon (DJ) Lee, Mark Newton, Paul Albert

= note taker

Ex officio

Graham Triggs, Mike Conlon , debra hanken kurtz, Andrew Woods

Regrets

Mark Fallu,  Bart Ragon,  Mike Conlon

Location

Friday WebEx 

Agenda

Notes

• Attendees: 
  • Present: Julia, Debra, DJ, Erin Tripp, Graham, Lauren, Andi, Andrew
  • Regrets: Mark, Mike Conlon
• Facilitators: we'll be rotating through three people (Julia, Andi - next, ??)
• Note-taking: Paul will do this consistently
• Sponsorship update:
  • Michele is currently on his way to Spain. He has been talking about building 
  • He have a new gold membership in Duraspace from Tinyanka [sp?] from Spain. These fund go into the general fund.
  • Michele has also been talking about consortia in Germany.
  • We need to patient because the sales cycle can be a little bit long, but this early feedback is encouraging.
  • Erin Tripp:  I'm in business development for Duraspace. Working on developing partnerships. I see a lot of opportunities in all of the projects. I had breakfast with Mark Leggott, research director of Canada Research Data Management. He wanted to have a VIVO implementation up two years. He has been a real champion of VIVO. Mark has spoken with McMaster; he's also talking to U. of Montreal. The latter has the ability to contribute some internationalization resources. I just want this project to know that the VIVO project has support through Research Data Canada (RDC).
• Erin: I propose taking on the VIVO Stories initiative. I have a journalism background, so I enjoy interviewing people and telling stories. It would be a great way to get involved into the VIVO community. I'm interested in both production-ready stories, and those institutions that are in progress. I want to include lessons learned, so Isuggested soem new questions. I would like to begin work in November. Erin to send putting up the proposal on the wiki, then will send link to the group. 
• Julia: we've already done a VIVO story for CU Boulder.
• Feedback on VIVO management
  • Julia: Mike would look more engagement from this group. Sharing the meeting facilitation is part of that. That might inspire greater participation so we can steer towards topics we care more about it. Andrew: agreed.
  • Andrew: it seems the pending release of VIVO is a relevant topic. How can we move the VIVO release forward? One question: what's the actual number for the release? Another question involves testing the release; there has been some back and forth on that.
  • Lauren: is there a communication for the release? I could help with that. Graham: there's not an official template as such.
  • Debra: If we're going to version 2.0, perhaps we make a bigger deal out of this in terms of marketing.
  • Erin: how is testing done? Graham: we do have some tests that Cornell Ithaca developed. Debra: Graham will be putting up a test wiki page to collect feedback from the community. We should put out a communication soliciting feedback.
  • Paul: what's the division of responsibility between steering and technical? Andrew: Fedora 4 came out of the community. A couple strong sites said something needs to change. Steering for a project can be helpful where we feel like we need engagement and we aren't getting it. Leadership has some ability to rally the troops from their institution when there are very specific things to get done. We can talk more about the Fedora 3 to 4 transition later if you like.
  • Lauren: I want to help but I don't know how.
  • Paul: your perspective is valuable because you have the VIVO core use case: setting up a profile system.
  • Eric: I think there's the potential for two different competing visions. There's the data model and the profile system. We've talked about how to make the development process more efficient. What is the roadmap for the product and how is it going to be managed? What's the priority - breadth of use, ease of use?
  • Paul: we should prioritize. This is more important than that.
  • Debra: the idea of having higher level strategy is worth pursuing.
  • Andrew: I see a lot of email traffic on the list. What I see less of, is that the code development is all on Graham's shoulders. It doesn't seem like any grand plan should land all on one person's shoulders. One direction is to put a push on the community. We could have more technical meetings if we feel like there's a capacity in the community, of course. The other direction is hiring or paying for a team of dedicated folks to do the work. Right now, it seems like VIVO is in the middle of those two.
  • DJ: I spoke with Michael Bolton. We discussed how we need some kind of documentation specifically representing best practices for how faculty should manage their data. Also, we would like to see some best practices for extending the ontology.
  • Eric: it sounds like there are a lot of rogue extensions of the ontology. Are people doing development and not pushing it back?... Harvard Profile RNS focuses on making their system and not a lot of work. Boston U. did a lot of work with ORCID and then departmental pages, paying Harvard for the latter. We care about SEO and UI. The key is that the lead developer has an idea what the pain points are, and that drives the development. Development is bigger than a bug list.
• Debra: next time, we'll discuss the budget. We've had some success in turning projects around. I'm hopeful about the future.
• Julia: follow up? I think each of us should talk about how we think the whole project should address everyone's needs. Erin: we could collect stories from a form or structure interview that are not intended for publication. That could help guide conversations. Debra: great idea. We probably need to meet to set the direction of the project.
• Erin: heard from Jonathan Breeze from Symplectic about RSP involvement.

 Action Items