Wednesday, April 28 at 11:00 EDT
LG members:
Paul Albert, Robert Cartolano, Mike Conlon, Anna Guillaumet, Doug Hahn, Christian Hauschke, Anthony Helm, Bruce Herbert , Damaris Murry 
Terrie Wheeler Benjamin Gross
LYRASIS:
Laurie Gemmill Arp, Robert Miller, David Wilcox, Michele Mennielli
Regrets:
= Secretary
Connection Information
Zoom connection information is available in the Outlook invitation.
Meeting Minutes
Announcements
- Accessibility Audit
Bruce Herbert: Laurie has initiated a new project on accessibility audits – working with Brian on potential pages for testing in audit (Laurie)
- Accessibility audit for VIVO
- Laurie Arp: Contracted with Deque for an accessibility audit on VIVO. Reviewing some top level pages for accessibility, with a report to follow.
Christian Hauschke (in chat): Legal requirements by EU: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32016L2102
Mike (in chat): Accessibility is a great initiative — people considering VIVO have often asked about accessibility.
- MOU Process with Lyrasis – VIVO MOU with Lyrasis renews in June
Laurie: A Memo of Understanding (MOU) was created during merger with VIVO and Duraspace. It was updated last year when it came under Lyrasis’ purview so that it automatically renews on an annual basis. Just a heads up that the MOU is renewing in June.
- VIVO Conference Invited Speakers
Christian: contacted several speakers for the VIVO Annual Conference. Have three keynote speakers, as follows:
- Carly Robinson is the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) Assistant Director for the Office of Information
- Paolo Manghi CTO, OpenAIRE, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione (ISTI)
- Ludo Waltman Professor, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University
Many congratulations in the chat regarding the speakers.
Christian: We will need people to introduce our speakers, so please let us know if you are interested in participating in the VIVO Annual Conference.
- Spanish-speaking VIVO Users Meeting Date – May 13
Anna Guillaumet: We are working on a webinar on May 13. Just opened the page in the VIVO wiki https://wiki.lyrasis.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=208340780 To be clear, this is not just one meeting, but a series of webinars. This May 13 webinar is the first of several to come. We plan to hold another one in about two months.
- New member Onboarding Plans
David Wilcox: Have a welcome meeting scheduled for May 10 at noon Eastern time. UC Davis and Florida International University. Should be fairly easy to replicate as we have new members join.
Benjamin Gross: I wanted to introduce myself in place of Ann Beynon. [Several members inquired about how Ann was doing.] Ann is doing well, and enjoying some well-deserved time off.
Bruce: Robert, How are things at Lyrasis?
Robert Miller: As we look toward FY 2022 (start in July), there appears to be guarded optimism across our 1832 members. This does not mean the fiscal spigots are turned on. Value still is the watchword along with thrift. This is in marked contrast to last year where the momentum from the previous year (FY 2020) carried funding into FY 2021. Said another way, FY 2022 was forecasted to be a very tough year. That is appears to be changing as the impact of vaccinations extend across the US and campus shift to expecting students on campus this fall.
Discussion
- FY21-22 Budget process
Laurie: Shared a draft budget with us via the listserv. It assumes a flat budget, but also assumes membership stability. We do have $64K in reserves. Discussion around increasing adoption and membership. A vision or direction (such as VIAB) is helpful in growing engagement and membership. Laurie will resend the draft budget out. Terrie will send a prompt to vote on it.
- VIVO Community Sustainability Spreadsheet
Laurie: A sustainability spreadsheet is available: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IV_lR1uaBevojRbr2T_2eJzi_uJStYclZf9BGoTj12o/edit#gid=455715174 Two tabs. First tab is a path to get to $500K via diversified revenue streams. Second tab shows current VIVO members. This can be a tool to look at different revenue sources and consider how to proceed. Bruce asked what a reasonable (financial or membership) goal for the next year would be.
- Strategies to Increase Membership
- New membership levels – personal/supporter memberships?
Anna: We have considered a new membership level, which would be personal membership. The cost for personal membership would be $100.
Benjamin (in chat): The market for individual memberships is dependent on the benefits; though we can place an upper limit perhaps based on how many people are involved with VIVO total.
Members asked what the estimated number of people who would join at the individual level? Anna and others estimate that about 100 people might join at the personal membership level.
Benjamin (in chat): I'm not sure how many people will sign on by opening their own wallet... probably not many. But if it's a small subscription (like a society membership) it seems more likely they can get small pools of money from their institution to support that.
Robert M.: I wonder if we try to encourage individual to sign on to show support - a “wall’ of supporters who will help show the power of community support. Adjacent (next) to this “wall” would be a GoFundMe place to donate with a suggest $100 per individual.
Said another way -
- The ‘wall’ of supporters show the support of the user community. That is free to express their support.
- The GoFundMe would be a way to solicit (ask) for individual donations ($).
Terrie: These are two very interesting and creative new ways to raise more funds for the VIVO Project! Please let the VIVO Leadership know if you like either or both.
- Membership Task Force
David: Florida International membership came out of the NA VIVO group meeting. Encourage more regional VIVO meetings. Have been following directly with members who attend the VIVO regional meetings. Need a vision to campaign on. VIVO in a Box can be this. It has been the experience of other open-source software groups, namely Fedora, that a strong vision will enhance our ability to increase membership. It is possible that VIVO’s strong vision of VIVO in a Box as a way to increase VIVO membership.
Rob Cartolano (in chat): +1 David - I am more likely to devote dollars to directed development like VIAB - than just membership - I need to make hard decisions in the next fiscal year - and directed development is preferred over dropping funds into a non-specific use
David (in chat): Yes, thanks for mentioning that Rob - in addition to using VIAB to market membership we’d like to also ask for one-time funds to support specific aspects of development (similar to asks we’ve made for Fedora development). This would be in addition to membership funds.
Anthony Helms (in chat): I’m inclined to agree with David and Rob as well, especially in the absence of a particular value proposition for individual membership.
Christian (in chat): Benjamin, I think individual Membership of the VIVO Community would be beneficial to the community. People like to say I'm official member of this and that. We even have a faux property for this in VIVO. Additionally it would maybe worth a thought to think of waivers/reduced fees for low income countries.
(Only 15 minutes left, turned over to Bruce to discuss VIVO In a Box – Brian will share update via e-mail)
Brian Lowe (update via e-mail): The main development points are:
Blocker issues for 1.12.0 have been resolved. We are currently updating wiki documentation and READMEs, and then 1.12. RC1 (Release Candidate 1) will be made available for community testing. There has been discussion about how to make testing as easy as possible so as to encourage participation from beyond the core group of developers. One potential impediment in past releases was the need to record test results on the wiki, which required having an account. William Welling of Texas A&M has drafted a Google form that would allow anyone to submit test results without having to request wiki access. In recent weeks developers/committers have also been discussing their reactions to the VIVO in a Box proposal and have drafted a set of potential technical issues and questions in a Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lfTzXSXrtpRVT3CVWAj55XOou94kIg7QJ2NrHPQewUM/edit#heading=h.jf3chedgjfp1
- VIAB Process (20)
Bruce: Regarding VIVO in a Box, we need to define features/system requirements. Brian, do developers have any ideas with regards to this?
Brian: Biggest challenge to VIVO in a Box is data ingest. Is ReCiter the magic tool to do this, or will some other tool do this? We need to define the specific data. Will VIVO in a Box have ontology and semantic web as a core value?
Robert C: I had a good meeting with Weill Cornell (Paul) regarding ReCiter, and another good meeting with Clarivate (Benjamin and Ann). There is an opportunity to take ReCiter and improve it to ingest additional data sources. I would vote to put ReCiter in the VIVO in the Box. It will take a body of money to do this. A lot of the work on ingest has already been done with ReCiter.
Rob C (in chat): ++++1 ReCiter
Christian: Take the data ingest question to the Data Ingest Task Force. We also have an admin app. Ask the Task Force to give a recommendation.
Anthony (in chat): In that case, Christian, perhaps it is as Rob suggested, consider different streams—a membership stream and a directed development stream.
Christian (in chat): Agreed, Anthony.
Rob C: Can we get a recommendation from the data ingest TF in the next 4 weeks?
Benjamin: While it would be good to hear from the TF, many members are invested in a certain institutional strategy. I am not sure that they would be willing to deviate from their institutional investment.
Brian: TF may not be able to make a conclusive recommendation.
Christian: TF probably doesn’t know we are considering ReCiter. We should let them know that ReCiter is being discussed.
Mike: Are we framing this conversation differently?
Rob C: We need a decision that won’t fit everyone, but may fit some or many of our use cases. Can we get an agreement on some ingest method. Most of the ingest tools need to be modular.
Bruce: What I am hearing from many institutions is that we need to make the system as simple as possible, so they don’t need IT resources.
Rob C: Just modular code. If Clarivate can build it and Lyrasis can run it for me, then Columbia is interested. Columbia doesn’t want to pay developers to do the data ingest.
Paul: ReCiter would get a lot more adoptees if the barrier for adoption were lower. Institutions generally have more money than developer talent, they generally prefer to “buy” this service. I have proposed a “subscription based service”. The idea is to sign up some biomedical institutions as clients first and then use the revenue to develop functionalities and integrations of interest to institutions that aren’t so discipline specific.
Paul (in chat): The abiding question for publication management is: will publication curation be done in VIVO itself or in a third-party tool?
Benjamin (in chat): Regarding Paul’s question: that’s an interesting one, since I think if we are marketing a VIAB, the perception will be that the 3rd party tools packaged with VIVO are actually part of it (even though it’s a completely separate application).
Anthony (in chat): Does it meet the 80% threshold needs as a service/tool?
Paul (in chat): My hot take: offer a publication management tool as a subscription-based cloud service. There isn't the developer talent at institutions to support the software otherwise.
Benjamin (in chat): but I assume separate installations for each institution. Lyrasis could provide a hosted app, but the data ingest + disambiguation activity occur on separate apps for each institution.
Paul (in chat); Exactly, Benjamin.
Rob C (in chat): +1 Paul - I can allocate one-time dollars before I can allocate developers
+1 Paul - a good path forward
Bruce: Once the VIVO in a Box proposal is complete, I will send it to all of us for comments and input. This project has opportunities for building membership. We will discuss this at the May 26 VIVO LG meeting and gather feedback by June 8. As we gather feedback, we will present it to the VIVO Community (including VIVO Task Forces) in a Town Hall on June 16, and again to the wider profiles community at the VIVO Conference between June 23 – 25.
Bruce: Meeting adjourned at 12:03p
