Our interest groups and task forces VIVO has interest groups – sort of permanent recurring groups that meet to discuss topics of shared interest, and task forces – time limited groups that meet to create a work product. Anyone can create either.
We currently have two interest groups – Development, which meets weekly, and Ontology, which meets every other week. To join an interest group, just show up. The groups are very friendly, there is no other requirement. Showing up is easy, just dial-in or use Zoom (free software you can download to your computer) using the instructions on the meeting page (click on the links for each group to see the meeting pages).
We have a bunch of task forces:
- Product Evolution Experiments in a new front end.
- Conference Planning We're all going to Montenegro! Want to help? No experience required.
- VIVO Camp planning Want to be an instructor?
- Theming and UI Improving the VIVO UX
- Telling VIVO Stories An occasional group that helps tell the stories of VIVO implementations
- Membership Want to help VIVO grow its membership? This is the place.
- Internationalization Working to improve the use of languages in VIVO
- Research Intelligence This group is forming an interest group in 2019.
All have Slack channels and wiki sites (linked above). To join VIVO slack, see http://bit.ly/vivo-slack To join in the work of a task force, just show up. And see above, the groups are very friendly and joining a meeting is as easy as dialing in or clicking on a Zoom link.
Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) This week I attended the CNI fall meeting in Washington DC. CNI is always interesting, a simple conference format – half day to start, 3/4 day to wrap-up. An opening and closing plenary keynote. Parallel sessions providing "project updates" – work of interest to those working on information approaches in scholarship, with an emphasis on libraries and librarianship. Long breaks to provide plenty of time for catching up. Held twice a year, CNI is one of my favorite conferences – a good chance to catch up with colleagues and to see interesting work.
The fall meeting was a chance to catch up with Duraspace board members Tyler Walters, Dan Cohen, Evviva Weinraub, Rob Cartolano, and Tom Cramer, David Wilcox who helps with membership, and Erin Tripp CEO of Duraspace, many of our supporters and friends including David Carlson and Michael Bolton of TAMU, Mike Winkler, Dean Krafft, Kristi Holmes of Northwestern, Rick Johnson of SHARE, Ken Klingenstein of Internet 2, Laura Wruble of GWU, Valrie Minson of UF, and many others.
Some of the more interesting things I saw:
- SHARE is working on some cool technology for harvesting metadata using Node-RED.
- Ken Klingenstein caught us up on current work in identity systems and attribute management
- Jason Priem gave an update on ImpactStory – they have an open API and have harvested much open metadata regarding scholarly communication. Likewise, Internet Archive has an active scholarly communications harvesting business with an open API. These sources join a growing collection of open metadata at scale including Research Graph, SHARE, and others. With these emerging resources, and work on disambiguation at these sources, there is much to look forward to.
- Patricia Brennan gave the closing keynote on work at the US National Library of Medicine. Having come from this world, it was very exciting to see the discoveries in preventive medicine, public health, and treatment resulting from advanced informatics.
See you in 2019 This is the last VIVO Updates for 2018. We've got some meetings this week, and then a break for the holidays. We'll see you all in 2019 with a first VIVO Updates coming January 6.
A 2018 was a fantastic year VIVO had a fantastic year in 2018. So many good things happened. All because of our wonderful and growing community. As we head into a time to reflect on the year that was and consider the year to come, I want to extend a special thanks to all the great people who work on the VIVO Project.
See you in 2019 This is the last VIVO Updates for 2018. We've got some meetings this week, and then a break for the holidays. We'll see you all in 2019 with a first VIVO Updates coming January 6.
I hope you have a wonderful holiday break!
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director