Tuesday, May 26 at 11:00 EDT

LG members:

Paul Albert, Ann Beynon,  Robert Cartolano, Mike Conlon,   Tom Cramer,  Anna Guillaumet, Doug Hahn, Christian Hauschke,  Anthony Helm, Dong Joon (DJ) Lee,  hannah sommers, Julia Trimmer,Alex Viggio,   Terrie Wheeler

LYRASIS:

Laurie Gemmill Arp , Robert Miller, Michele Mennielli

Regrets:

Virginia (Ginny) Pannabecker,Federico Ferrario

= Secretary

Connection Information

Zoom connection information is posted on Outlook.

Preparation

Please read the 2020-05-26 interest groups and task force status updates before the meeting.

Agenda

Documents are linked from Outlook invitations.

1. Status of membership renewals as of today (Julia, David, and everyone, 30 minutes)
2. Update on MOU (Julia and Laurie, 5 minutes)
3. Annual report template (Laurie, 5 minutes)
4. Strategic communication plan draft (Anna and Julia, 5 minutes)
5. Governance schedule for next few months (Julia, 10 minutes)

Notes

Agenda and Meeting Minutes

Julia Trimmer – welcome everyone to meeting, with a note that the next couple of months will be busy, so please take a look at the calendar in Google Drive: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14SgAdeXEmMw5vwoSF__1d1kw3d5O8Gj0Hqfp_7qPUUs/edit

As the meeting started, Julia shared the link with task force and interest group work: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/VIVO/2020-05-26+interest+groups+and+task+force+status+updates

1. Status of membership renewals as of today (Julia Trimmer, David Wilcox, and everyone, 45 minutes) 

We’re sharing the spreadsheet that tracks renewal status. Link https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18NzRQJ_Ghhjxf96N0tqOOaDQOEzq61I3-dGF-MnUHso/edit#gid=1477910400

David Wilcox explains how the membership interest group has determined status reflected on this spreadsheet.  VIVO membership forum will be held, probably in mid-June.  Plans still being worked out on this.  Fedora anticipated a 15% budget reduction in their FY21 budget. May want to consider this on the VIVO side. 

Laurie Arp – from the Lyrasis perspective: still early in the renewal process.  Other programs have very little information overall.  The DSpace membership forum was very useful, and Lyrasis is planning such a forum with the VIVO and Fedora communities in the near future.   

David responding to question from Robert Miller about Virginia Tech.  Erin Tripp reached out to Virginia Tech when they announced they would not be renewing. She noted that they maintained a membership at the general level, but did not maintain their VIVO membership. 

Michele Mennielli notes that Germany (Berlin) did not question their plan for a Platinum membership, but did note they were not yet ready to join.  They expect to know more in June.

Julia invites everyone to comment on membership in reverse alphabetical order:

Terrie Wheeler  – no questions about membership; did note that Weill Cornell’s membership is not due until December, however were weighing whether to pay at this time or in December.

Alex Viggio – not yet on call.  Joined later.  After he joined, he noted he had no comment on membership: he is a community member, not a dues member.  Boulder expecting budget cuts.

Julia – glad to see we have a lot of commitment from folks that have already renewed.  Looking forward to VIVO value proposition tomorrow. 

Hannah Sommers – no questions.  For GW, not there yet regarding confirmation of renewal, but no indication of this membership being cancelled at this time.

Dong Joon (DJ) Lee – no questions or comments

Anthony Helm – nothing new yet on Brown’s end. Plan to “squeak by” this year, but next fiscal year may be more questionable for Brown.

Christian Hauschke – Might have some cuts at TIB this year, but expect some big cuts next year.  Christian notes that he sees German governments spending more money on digital infrastructure in future for research institutions, maybe in next 2-3 years. This is still in the discussion phase. Suggest we could downgrade membership to keep institutions in the project who cannot pay this year.  Fedora community voted to extend some memberships for free for one year to a few institutions in dire straits.

Doug Hahn - no comments

Anna Guillaumet – working with Spanish universities to do Spanish consortia.  Raised the idea of individual fees. 

Julia - We have spoken about individual memberships before. 

David – other communities have discussed this, but does not bring in very much revenue overall.  Have not seen it be enormously successful. 

Tom Cramer – No questions, comments or ideas.

Mike Conlon– This is about a value proposition. We haven’t had a new member since 2018. We should not frame this as everyone is in a budget cut because of the virus, but rather why don’t we have 400 members?

Rob Cartolano – explore how other communities are doing to provide value for membership.  Small numbers can add up, and also cognizant that second year is going to be more difficult than this first year.

Ann Beynon – reviewing budget with Laurie. 

Paul Albert – consider gaming out different scenerios that involve organizational survival.  This would establish a threshold for its existence.  What is the tangible value for VIVO?  Why aren’t institutions getting further with VIVO? Why aren’t VT users rioting because VT is not supporting it anymore.  How could VIVO be more desirable?  How could user interface get more buy-in from both users and from stakeholders?    

(End of round robin comments on membership.) Julia invites Rob to address what he has already written in the chat.

Robert – We have a gift of one year.  Year two is going to be a cliff – a drop off, that would impact us more.  Think outside the box: can we have everyone left contribute an extra $1000 to make up the VT loss?  Need to determine what is the one most important criterion, and if we address this one thing, we can make VIVO viable in this one year.

Alex – Can I share an observation?  At Boulder, have been supporting VIVO with time, not funding.  Boulder has seen the Symplectic interface, and Boulder is asking if they should transition to the Symplectic product?

Ann – VT moved to Symplectic.  This is critical for us to know and address.

Paul – Its always the product.  We need to have turn-key, cloud hosted VIVO.  We need something where we don’t have to worry about vertical scaling, horizontal scaling, etc.  If we have a hosted VIVO – we would have a solution.

Mike – We already tried a hosted VIVO site in Australia.  This didn’t work.  The hosted site was not heavily customized.  They wanted more customization.  Open source customizations not brought back to the main product. 

Rob – question of customization a valid point. How much do we need to do without developer resources to incorporate some customizations?  How much developer resources are needed?

Mike - The Florida instance did not customize, used a plain interface. Mostly a backoffice tool.

Paul – We did a lot of exploration with Product Evolution.  We need a specific strategy going forward.  Do we have the courage to have a “new VIVO”?  Do we have enough runway to complete our pursuit of the VIVO Scholar interface?

Mike – Supports the claim that product we currently have doesn’t meet a faculty member’s use cases.  What does a faculty member think they need to be able to do? 

Paul – Product evolution did develop a list of use cases and possibilities.  We have already done this. 

Mike- Good, then let’s revisit what use cases product evolution evaluated.

Christian – We have a lot of use cases in the conference submissions.

Tom – This is great group at looking at what could be, but we need a group that can develop a roadmap.  We need to make hard choices.  If it were to be different this time, what would be implementable in one year?

2.  Proposal for Annual Review Template

Laurie – to be consistent across divisions, using economies of scale to complete a simpler, more readable template, similar to the infographics that the VIVO Annual Report.   Annual report planning around the July – June cycle.

3.  MOU update

Laurie and Julia working on this.  The MOU is fairly close to be ready for review. We’ll make it available for review before the June 23 LG meeting (aiming for mid-June if possible).  The LG will need to vote to approve it.

4.  Julia – Congratulations to Christian, who was elected to be the Bronze member representative for this coming year! 

5.  Anna – The Strategic Communication Task Force’s work to date is shown here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O_DDRW7gJN5WOUqM7keVeB8r4S7dHYnpYWST7bWoKS8/editThey now would like to move this task force to an interest group.  Everyone is welcome to join their June 3 task force meeting to discuss the Strategic communication plan draftin further detail. 

Meeting adjourned at noon.