Poster deadline extended. There's still time for you to submit a poster to VIVO 2016! This is a great opportunity for you to share your work with the VIVO community. The deadline for poster submissions has been extended to May 23. See http://vivoconference.org
Conference registration open. And, by the way, conference registration is open. Our keynotes this year are Sören Auer and Kaitlyn Thaney. Should be a fantastic meeting in Denver, August 17-19. Take advantage of early-bird registration rates. http://vivoconference.org
LYRASIS and DuraSpace Announce Dissolution of "Intent to Merge". After several months of due diligence, the boards of Lyrasis and Duraspace have dissolved the intent to merge. The full text of the press release can be found here: http://duraspace.org/articles/2879. As a full participant in the process, I believe the result is a good one for our communities. I look forward to strong years ahead.
Duraspace Retreat. Mike Conlon and Graham Triggs attended a bi-annual Duraspace retreat in White Plains Georgia, May 9-12. We had an opportunity to review the past six months and plan for the next six months with the rest of the Duraspace crew. Many people help with VIVO. debra hanken kurtz and Jonathan Markow are heavily involved – attending our meetings, helping with membership, strategy, and governance, and introducing us to people across the community. Valorie Hollister handles the money. Kristi Searle manages events and maintains our contacts. Carol Minton Morris organizes communications and branding strategy. The other Duraspace projects and services were represented by their managers and technical leads – David Wilcox and Andrew Woods for Fedora, Tim Donohue for Dspace, Carissa Smith, Bill Branan and Danny Bernstein for Duraspace services including DuraCloud and Dspace Direct. Together, Duraspace seeks to enable the preservation of digital assets in scholarship and cultural heritage. It's a great group of people who care about open source, and the missions of our institutions.
Use of the VIVO email lists. The VIVO email lists – vivo-community@googlegroups.com and vivo-tech@googlegroups.com are for the use of the VIVO community. "VIVO" is now a common trade name – there are many VIVO's around the world. Our VIVO, this VIVO, the VIVO we participate in regarding open source, and representation of scholarship, is often confused with telecommunication companies, and nongovernmental organizations. Our email lists are open – anyone can subscribe, and any subscriber can post. This seems appropriate for an open source community. The consequence of this openness is that occasionally someone will join the list and post something that is not appropriate for us. This happened recently. In each case, I responded to the poster privately, explaining the purpose of the list and the nature of our community. I then unsubscribed the poster. Our lists serve as open forums for the exchange of ideas about VIVO – its software, its ontologies, and its use in scholarship.
Apps and Tools call this Thursday. The Apps and Tools
VIVO User Group Meeting. We had a great VIVO User Group meeting in Chicago at the Galter Health Science Library. You can find materials from the meeting on line here. The two day meeting sessions included:
Introductions. Logistics. Session Topics. Ground rules. Work Products for the user group
Showcasing scholarly work. Design. User experience. Optimizing -- landing, person, org, and work pages. Performance
- Expert finding. Research Discovery. Search. Cross-site linking and search.
Accessing works – linking to works on the web, in repos, use of public APIs. Ingesting data – domains of ingest, tools, data packages.
Community change management for ontology changes. Notices, training, documentation, tools, support for changes.
- How to improve VIVO. Software architecture. Tools. Process. Releases. 1.9. 1.10. VIVO Labs. VIVO Futures
Read back, summary, action items. Next meeting. Meeting adjourns
The group discussed action items that will follow from the meeting. Each of these will involve community input on the VIVO calls and email lists, and possible task forces:
Develop an Ontology development process - how is the ontology developed?
Release 1.9 (before conference) – including new technical documentation
Organize VIVO Labs – a method for experimenting with new VIVO capabilities. See the Contributed Software Task Force Report
Develop a 1.10 roadmap – using the VIVO Roadmap Process, continue the user group discussions to develop a roadmap for version 1.10
Approach to Expert finding – consider how best to move forward with significant new capability in expert finding
Approach to Central Services – consider how best to establish significant, sustainable, central services for cross-site search and disambiguation
- Approach to VIVO Futures – consider how best to further discussion regarding technical debt, and architectural issues for future VIVO software.
Thanks to all who attended! Attendee list is here https://goo.gl/yFmWea The discussions were incredible!
Special thanks to Kristi Holmes for hosting the meeting and to the staff at Northwestern for their hospitality and assistance. Chicago is a lovely city, and the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern is close to the lake and close to Michigan Avenue with many top attractions, amazing food, and shopping.
The group considered when to meet again. VIVO will likely have an in-person meeting sometime in late fall to discuss the strategic plan – more about that in the coming weeks. A second user group meeting might occur in early 2017 (February?) to assess progress, and discuss direction. Please share thoughts on vivo-community@googlegroup.com Plans for future meetings will be summarized here in VIVO Updates, along with any specific announcements of meetings.
We will have more regarding the user group meeting in a trip report, and user group meeting report to come. Stay tuned.
Community Leadership Summit. VIVO folks Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio, and debra hanken kurtz will be attending the Community Leadership Summit in Austin Texas, May 15-16.
Duraspace Retreat. Mike Conlon and Graham Triggs will be attending a bi-annual Duraspace retreat in White Plains Georgia, May 9-12. This is an opportunity to connect to other Duraspace projects, and develop strategy for the next six months. We will report back here next week.
Duraspace/Lyrasis Board Meeting. Mike Conlon will be attending a joint Duraspace/Lyrasis board meeting in Atlanta Georgia, May 15. The intent to merge will be discussed.
Development Call. The Development Interest Group will have its call this Thursday at 1 PM US Eastern time. Developers interested in VIVO 1.9 should plan to attend.
OpenVIVO. A VIVO anyone can join. Have you tried OpenVIVO? 162 people in 12 countries have signed on to OpenVIVO, with 975 works entered from ORCiD, PubMed and Figshare. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
All are invited to hear about tools and applications regarding VIVO.
See OpenVIVO at Open Repositories. Graham Triggs and I will be at Open Repositories, Trinity College, Dublin, June 13-16. Stop by the OpenVIVO poster. We'd love to meet youComments on all things VIVO. Questions, comments, concerns, ideas for VIVO? Non-technical items are always welcome on vivo-community@googlegroups.com Technical items are best shared on vivo-tech@googlegroups.com. The VIVO community is always looking to help and always interested in questions and comments from all!
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director