...
LG members:
Paul Albert, Ann Beynon, Robert Cartolano, Mike Conlon, Tom Cramer, Anna Guillaumet, Doug Hahn, Christian Hauschke, Anthony Helm, Bruce Herbert , Damaris Murry 
Terrie Wheeler
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Regrets:
Federico Ferrario, Robert Cartolano, Mike Conlon,Anthony Helm
= Secretary
Connection Information
Zoom connection information is available in the Outlook invitation.
Meeting Minutes
Announcements
Two new VIVO Community members announced:
Bruce: We have two new members that I have reached out to add to our VIVO Task Forces: Ann Beynon’s new son, Gary, and Mike Conlon’s new granddaughter, Betsy. (shows photos). We also welcome Ann back to the group!
Anna Guillaumet (in chat): Lovely!
Christian Hauschke (in chat): Congratulations! All the best to you and your Family!
Ann Beynon (in chat): Thank you!
VIVO Announces Dragan Ivanović as Technical Lead
https://duraspace.org/vivo-announces-dragan-ivanovic-as-technical-lead/
Bruce: We have great news that Christian, Damaris and Laurie helped identify and recruit Dragan Ivanović as VIVO’s new Technical Lead, starting August 9. Christian would have hired him for TIB if Lyrasis would not have made the offer first. Here is the link to the press release. The full announcement is below.
LYRASIS, the organizational home for VIVO, is excited to announce that Dragan Ivanović will be joining VIVO as the Technical Lead.
Dragan is a full professor and research software engineer at University of Novi Sad. He has extensive experience working on research eInfrastructures development at University of Novi Sad (dosird.uns.ac.rs/), as well as in the context of European Commission funded projects. His specialties include: data modelling, research information systems, interoperability, digital and data repositories.
As Technical Lead, Dragan will be responsible for the infrastructure of the VIVO application, facilitating distributed open-source development for the software, growing the development community, and contributing to the code base. He will lead the VIVO Committers group as they continue to build and strengthen our community of code contributors. In this part time role, Dragan will also work closely with community members and leadership as we all work to ensure the VIVO application meets the needs of the community now and in the future.
Dragan shared “I am excited to join the VIVO team and continue VIVO contributors’ great work in building software solutions for representing scholarship. I am looking forward to collaborating with all contributors in further development of the VIVO solution.”
VIVO has been fortunate that Brian Lowe of Ontocale served as interim Tech Lead while we engaged in our search. We deeply appreciate his important work on VIVO over the last six months.
Dragan will officially join VIVO on August 9th. Please join us in welcoming him to his new role in the VIVO community!
Damaris Murry (in chat): Thanks Laurie for leading the hiring effort!
Discussion
- VIVO Financial Statement
Laurie: Please refer to the VIVO financial statement sent to the LG earlier today. A budget is a plan. COVID interrupted the plan. Given this, we did far better than expected. Biggest loss was Andrew Woods but bringing in Brian Lowe was tremendous. We had less of Brian’s time given the recruitment lag time, so we lost some salary months, which lowered expenditures. We lost memberships last year, but we gained two memberships this year, as discussed last month. Mic might want to give a membership update at a future meeting.
Bruce: User group meetings help to build engagement in the community. We recently were approached by a university in France, for example. They had interacted with the Quebec team, and through these interactions grow our membership. Good financial health helps us to do the work that we want to do.
2. CINECA Membership on Leadership Group
Mic: Reviewed the current Leadership Group structure and noted that any silver members have a seat on governance (the LG). CINECA has been a silver member for past 2-3 years, however for internal reasons they couldn’t have someone represent them on the LG. However, CINECA is interested in renewing membership and appointing a new person to represent them on the LG to fill their seat once again.
Bruce: We will do introductions as soon as a new person is appointed to represent CINECA.
3. Suggestions to improve the representation of the VIVO community in the leadership group
Christian: After many conversations with various members of the VIVO community - some paying members, some not, but all active and productive in the community - I have collected a few points to propose to the LG to improve the electoral processes. The aim of the proposals is to improve the involvement of the community at large - especially the developers - in the discussion and decision-making processes, and to recognise practical work on VIVO also through the possibility of committee participation.
The suggestions are summarized as follows, with the full proposal in the link below. 1. Limit of one member per institution. 2. Community at large elects community members. 3. Committers group has one representative in addition to the technical lead.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t9yNNQ5oQi3mcehmHoCdmMT-0r58n9hUvI6yegK4Dsc/edit?usp=sharing
Christian: I would like the LG members to review the proposal this month, with a plan to discuss this at the next meeting.
Paul: We could institute limits on how long a person can serve on the leadership group.
Christian (in chat): Would a term limit for paying member be acceptable to institutions, if they have a certain person to serve on the LG? I don't think so.
Laurie: Membership levels are tied to leadership group membership.
Paul Albert (in chat): Good point
Ann: Your institution can get its seat as a result of membership as the current model states, but different representatives from the organization can hold the seat.
Bruce: We have four people involved in VIVO at Texas A&M. Hence our seat is taken by one of us, and the other is elected to an office.
Anna: It is similar at SIGMA.
Agenda
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Bruce: We will take a look at the document and discuss it further at our August meeting.
- Initiatives Reports
- VIVO-In-A-Box
- Need plans from the task forces, particularly Data Ingest Group
- Working with Ann at Clarivate to define their role
- Held the VIAB Town Hall
Bruce: This initiative is very interesting; the data ingest group is developing a plan to accomplish the concept of VIVO-In-A-Box. In the beginning we thought Clarivate might have a big role in this project, we need to work to define this role. What Clarivate decides to do will determine the resources available to put towards this effort.
40 people attended the VIVO-In-A-Box Town Hall, dominated by Central and South America. Very positive feedback from this meeting in both English and Spanish.
Mic: great to have an interpreter and to get good feedback from Spanish speakers as well as English speakers.
Bruce: At a place of uncertainty right now, due to not knowing what others will do. I encourage everyone on the LG to have their people document what they can do (or any issues to face) so that we can work from the documentation.
The VIVO-In-A-Box goal is to increase the number of VIVO implementations around the world, and recruit more paying members. We would target D-Space organizations and Clarivate customers. The number combined (DSpace installations and Clarivate customers) is about a thousand and two to three hundred. If we get just 5% of these, it would be 250 new VIVO implementations. This would bring us to more implementations worldwide than Elsevier has. If we can get 5% of the 250 as members, which would be 12-13 new members, then we would ensure sustainability of the VIVO Community through the VIVO-In-A-Box initiative. This is the plan. We do need the data ingest group to help develop technical requirements.
4. EuroCris MOU
- Signing the document
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QWC-9yx0B-qec15XuMDYdqpcUUwEScXD/edit
Bruce: This MOU has been championed by Anna. Our plan is to sign this document in the near future through DocuSign. This MOU outlines a couple of things to do on the VIVO side. In general, it requires collaboration of the VIVO and EuroCris communities, along with holding joint meetings. It will require our ontology group to align the VIVO Ontology with the CERIF standards.
Anna: The steps in the process are as follows: 1) Sign this MOU, 2) announce this collaboration broadly, and then 3) identify a first group of a few people who can define the main things we can work on together. This group can define actions, first, second, third, etc. We will have our new technical lead involved in the reorganization of the CERIF technology.
Christian (in chat): Thanks, Anna!
Christian (in chat):And it's good to have Dragan on board, because he is working on the new CERIF specification for EuroCRIS.
Anna (in chat): you're welcome!
5. Interoperability Working Group
- Forming the team (DJ Lee and TIB colleague are VIVO reps)
- Produce white paper in about six months
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/17AePgu57hxKIyTbDjiHaunR6fZb42QAT/edit
Bruce: I met with leaders of other Lyrasis programs and proposed that we form a short-term working group to write a white paper on what would be required to enable interoperability between the various Lyrasis hosted programs. Don Joon and Dragan are recommended to be the VIVO representatives to write this white paper. Hope this white paper may be done sometime in the Spring. Here is a link to the Interoperability Working Group Memo.
Proposed Knowledge Graph White Paper
- Form a small group from Leadership Group
- Develop White paper
- VIVO as part of an interoperable research management system
- Research intelligence
- Support for the emerging open knowledge graph
Bruce: I was really intrigued by the OpenAire presentation at the VIVO Conference and would love to see VIVO contribute to this. I am looking for interest among the Leadership Group to see who could write a white paper on VIVO’s support of the emerging open knowledge graph. This would help us chase research funding for open infrastructure. Tom, Damaris, Christian and Terrie expressed interest in this. This method (writing a white paper) helps us to focus our ideas and capabilities.
Anna: OpenAire could perhaps partner with us to draft this white paper.
Christian (in chat): Especially the EOSC programs.
Anna (in chat): Yes
Bruce: This would be a great idea! Perhaps we could consider Pedro Principe from Portugal, who is involved in the OpenAire project?
Mic (in chat): The OpenAIRE research graph: https://graph.openaire.eu/
Bruce: OpenAire is focused on building a knowledge graph of scientific research papers. One question I have is whether Lyrasis has the capability of making their cultural collections available in a similar manner, or if the Lyrasis collections could be included in a knowledge graph that VIVO contributes to?
Christian (in chat): About the knowledge graph for cultural artifacts have a look at https://nfdi4culture.de/index.html, Bruce. Ina Blümel is leading the TIB activities here.
Bruce: Ann and I need to work on the VIVO in a Box proposal now.
Terrie: Reminder that we are seeking officers for our next slate at this time. Please let any one of us know if you are interested in being an officer.
Meeting was adjourned: 11:57a