April 24, 2024 – VIVO Leadership Group Meeting - https://lyrasis.zoom.us/j/9963190968
LG members: @ Bryan Cooper, @ Robert Cartolano, @ Ana Guillamet, @ Derek Halling, @ Christian Hauschke, @ Bruce Herbert, @ Brian Lowe, @ Stefano Pinelli, @ Washington Segundo, @ Terrie Wheeler
Lyrasis: @ Laurie Arp, @ Mic Mennielli, @ Dragan Ivanovic
Regrets: @ Damaris Murry
Agenda
Times: 10 AM CDT; 11 AM EDT, 17:00 Europe
Meeting ID: 978 9514 1424
Welcome – All
- Selection of Notetaker (1 minute)
- Hiring Update CST Director - Laurie (3 minutes)
- Consent Agenda (Please read before meeting.) (1 minute)
- Report – Developer Updates (Dragan) - news from technical folks is: The VIVO 1.14.2 patch has been recently released – SEE https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/VIVO/VIVO+1.14.2+Release+Announcement
Report - Rio and Costa Rica Meetings (Mic)
Rio: On March 18-20 the Lyrasis Board met in Rio de Janeiro with representatives from over 20 Latin American countries. It was a meeting co-organized with LA Referencia.
The meeting was about the role and support of Open Source technologies in Latin America. Over 90% of the Latin American Academic Institutions are using DSpace as their Institutional repository and VIVO adoption in the Region is growing very fast.
A sub-committee was created after the meeting to explore options to better support the Region from a technological point of you and, at the same time, to create a way for them to support the software they use (financially and technically).
Costa Rica: On May 10 there was the launch of the new VIVO Site of the National University of Technology (https://comunidad.utn.ac.cr/). There were meetings with all the other universities in Costa Rica, the National Open Science Agency, the Research Managers of the Ministry of Education and Research where I had the opportunity to present VIVO, the value of open source software to manage research information. Other institutions are thinking to adopt VIVO at the institutional, national and regional level. We’ll now need to work on transforming the users into members.
- Barcelona Declaration: Per prior meeting and agenda item by Christian: LG members can continue to familiarize themselves in the coming month with https://barcelona-declaration.org/downloads/BarcelonaDeclaration.pdf on their own time. For May LG meeting we can include discussion and vote in support of VIVO formally supporting the Barcelona Declaration, with possible inclusion of VIVO as a signatory under “Other organizations” at https://barcelona-declaration.org/signatories/. (Signatories are organized as universities and other research performing organizations; research funding organizations and governments; and other organizations (we would fit under the latter).
4. Partner Update -VIVO in Brazil - Washington (15 minutes)
5. VIVO Budget - DEFICIT: Discussion Points (35 minutes)
- Do we raise membership level contributions? (10-year inflation impact)
- Can we keep our current model of Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum and survive?
- Can we re-incentivize and retain our current large contributor funding structure?
- How do we increase new paying memberships?
- Do we build re-define membership to grow members internationally and in developing countries – using financial and in-kind contribution structures?
- Is there a pressing need to identify and track all VIVO software users?
- If we were forced to cut any budget expenditures, where would/could it occur?
- Quick start to VIAB, or Docker module to jump start ease of implementation / user increase?
6. Approval of Budget (5 minutes – Terrie leading)
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Notes
VIVO LG Meeting 24. April 2024
Laurie: Bringing on Bridget Almas; new director of CST; starting May 8th. Strong technical and sustainability and business background. Working through how to onboard; VIVO is one program that she will probably be introduced to earlier.
Bryan: Consent agenda: attempt to roll up things for quick approval. In the future might have separate document listing the consent agenda. If you ever want to pull something out of the consent agenda, you can. Christian and I have been talking about the Barcelona Declaration and we will be voting on it in May. Seems like a no-brainer, and good PR for us. Please read up on it and let me know if you have reservations before next meeting.
Partner update (Washington):
BrCris - CRIS of Brazil. Idea is to have one place for all the information about Brazilian research ecosystem. Had a system that was focused on results of research (Oasisbr); started to extend this portal to a broader vision of research with all the entities behind the results (BrCris). Started to collect information from Lattes national CV platform; has more than 8 million CVs. Integration with other national platforms, such as evaluation platform. Integrate with external sources like OpenAlex and OpenAIRE research graph. Information is deduplicated in LaReferencia platform; exported to two interfaces, VIVO and ElasticSearch search engine. Built interface for ElasticSearch and integrated it with some dashboards. Search for different types of entities. Currently adding research projects. From ElasticSearch results for person can jump to VIVO using ORCID iD. VIVO has some additional visualisations (output by national production research areas, advising network, etc.) There is a translation to OpenAlex research concepts. Dashboards for publications, journals, any type of entity in the ecosystem are built using Kibana on ElasticSearch.
BrCris is still in development. Want to load all the data into VIVO but there is a hurdle in that VIVO depends on the Solr index. Don’t use this index and don’t want to expend the storage to build it, but don’t want to deviate from standard VIVO code. Want to work with development team to add a way to disable Solr.
By end of year want to load more OpenAlex data and have all data loaded with some level of curation control.
Bryan: Great presentation; would like to continue discussion during the next meeting.
Budget discussion.
Bryan: We have maybe three years until we’re insolvent. Inflation is also taking its toll; ~30% erosion in buying power of contributions so far.
Rob: We’ve had a fairly static price for membership that worked well when we had low inflation. But larger issue is that the membership model is not aligning with some of these institutions. I’m under pressure as well with gold membership. Declining membership issue is probably biggest single issue. One thing we keep talking about is that we tend not to want to require a registration process to know who are users are. More users than contributors; continuing problem for open-source projects like VIVO. Loss of Duke is not easily made up. More painful question is about the level of expenses, but my first target would be to look at the revenue side. Laurie, you’ve done a lot of work with It Takes a Village. Another approach is grant funding.
Bryan: Had a quick conversation with Christian the other day. Apparently India is a heavy user of VIVO, but we don’t know all those users. India is also a source of inexpensive software development services. I found some poignant statements in ITAV related to developing creative dues structure for developing countries possibly including in-kind contributions.
Christian: There are several things. I know of three German institutions who are thinking about becoming members. One has been thinking about it for way too long. Will happen this year, but will not replace Duke. I hear this from several institutions; maybe a consortium would be an idea. Worked well for DSpace: one consortium membership for German DSpace community. Got question from university management about changing membership structure. Having Lyrasis meetings is not interesting for German community; won’t travel for these, but maybe we can do something else. Discussed with Brian Lowe last year about restarting conference and getting revenue from this; maybe we invest something to get a company to organize conference.
Bryan: Are virtual conferences possible? Christian: we did this a few years ago, but no one paid. Maybe it’s possible to charge for a virtual conference, but I don’t have experience with this.
Bryan: Charleston Conference seems to be moving forward with both in-person and virtual, with same price for each. Can reach out to them.
Bryan: Is current platinum/gold/silver/bronze broken? Do we want to do something else?
Mic: I can share some experience I had with the other programs, particularly DSpace. The membership model has two additional tiers, supporter and [?] that are $500 and $1000. I worked a lot on consortium membership for DSpace, and I very much like that approach, but to be honest it’s not about benefits or levels of membership; it’s about whether you have or don’t have a story to tell. When I worked to boost DSpace membership, there was a story to tell (DSpace 7, new approach, revolutionary). We’re able to convince people to support that approach. What’s missing is story around VIVO. Just came back from Costa Rica; Guatemala is also looking at adopting VIVO for regional use. No one knows that VIVO needs support, and no one knows why they should support it. What will VIVO become in the next three years? If we had a story, we get the community to buy in. I agree that we’re missing important benefits at the membership levels, but we can at least tell people what to expect in the next three years.
Robert: I’ll add that when we were part of DuraSpace and we created what 20K and 30K levels for certain programs, it was not intended to be a long-term strategy. It was intended to be a temporary stopgap while additional smaller contributions were solicited. Not sustainable to rely on a few big players to contribute all the funds. DSpace is expanding its base of contributors; ArchiveSpace did it very well: open source, but certain use requires membership. Everyone who uses it contributes; the small memberships add up. At the time of installation, how do you capture identity of institution using it, and how do you tie it back to marketing a communications? But can’t sustain these projects with a few large members.
Christian: I agree; need more small members in the community. Washington had a very good statement at Barcelona virtual conference. One of the main points was that infrastructure needs commitment and funding from members. VIVO is well positioned; people know we exist and we have connections. Could provide value to OpenAlex and vice versa. Opportunities in developing countries: if we had 20 institutitions paying $500 it would replace a gold membership.
Bryan: What are the pieces of VIVO that would require membership?
Rob: You could philosophically be right [totally free] but not have a product. VuFind is the latest example of success in addition to ArchiveSpace and DSpace. We don’t have to look far; we just have to learn lessons from these projects.
Mic: I am happy to help; will have the role with VIVO that I had with DSpace. For tracking, the model is akin to Wikipedia. There is a header when you download suggesting that you register your instance in the registry (which is already available). Instructions for removing the banner; not intrusive. Just asking, but in this way we can track it. Have more users than members, but VIVO has a really great value proposition. VIVO can compete with proprietary solutions. We have to find ways to engage with the community and show then that we have a plan and are going somewhere. Robert mentioned something that has been my mantra in recent months: open doesn’t mean free; nothing is free. But if we explain it and have a low entry level, we’ll be better off than having a few large donors.
Washington: I just want to do my testimonial about VIVO. I came from the repository space and I started studying DSpace and wasted a lot of time in understanding how VIVO is positioned relative to the repositories. Need to describe how VIVO is different (relationships, broad vision of ecosystem; fits very well with Barcelona Declaration’s broad vision). Most valuable piece of VIVO and could be better promoted. People don’t know that don’t need to pay for Pure or other commercial solutions; don’t know that VIVO is able to fill the need.
Rob: One thing we did with Blacklight is put together success stores: screenshots and short stories. Washington’s is a good example. Putting together some highlights, testimonials, refreshing some of this on the website could do the job. Four or five really great stories that other people can align with.
Bryan: Also emphasize flexibility and not being locked into what commercial providers offer. Can we develop a start to VIVO in a Box as something that would require a paid membership?
Christian: Haven’t thought about this, so just shooting from the hip. Bryan, Brian and I talked about VIAB last week as a simple solution that can easily be installed with some easy configuration (front end colors, logo ROR ID for harvest). Would not be a production system; turnkey production system is a myth. I see this more as something to lure people into VIVO and attract them to contributing to core VIVO system. Just today talked to small university and they want us to install a VIVO on their VM so they can play with it and find out whether it works. Some percentage of people who do this end up using VIVO; with VIAB they could just start doing this themselves.
Bryan: How long is it going to take to develop roadmap? Set up a subcommittee?
Mic: Yes; other programs created subcommittees to develop strategic plans and then submitted them to larger leadership group.
Bryan: We need quick tactical planning. Will talk to Mic and Christian about establishing that subcommittee. Does that sound OK? (Mic nods in the affirmative.)
Bryan: Not any interest in looking at keeping big contributors happy? Seems like a broken model unless those big contributors are getting something back. Is there some way to reward those big contributors?
Laurie: I think engaging them in this plan is important; make it clear to them that we recognize that we’re asking them to pay too much. Tell them we’d all like to make it so that they can pay less.
Bryan: Can we encourage Duke to stick around?
Laurie: More compelling [to engage them in process?] than to plead for one more year. Maybe they would contribute at a lower level.
Terrie: Budget has been updated. Looking at a nearly 51K deficit. I as treasurer have been carefully building reserves. This is the rainy day we were building them for. I think we should approve budget so we can move forward.
Christian: Need to approach every community we’re not in contact with so that they know there are people working on the software; see what their money is going to.
Terrie: Call for vote to approve.
8 in favor; 1 abstention; budget is approved.
Yea: Halling, Lowe, Hauschke, Guillaumet, Wheeler, Segundo, Pinelli, Cooper
Abstain: Arp (Lyrasis)
