May 1, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald, Jon Corson-Rikert , Kristi Holmes, Melissa Haendel, Paul Albert

= note taker

Management Team members

Chris Barnes, Ted Lawless, Jim Blake, Alex Viggio, Julia Trimmer

Ex officio

Mike Conlon

Regrets

debra hanken kurtz, Jonathan Markow, Brian Lowe

Dial-In Number:  (209) 647-1600, Participant code: 117433#

Agenda

Notes

I. Review of VIVO governance

• Leadership group (might have been called sponsors or a board of directors) – put money and effort of their developers or other staff into VIVO
  • Appoints people to the Steering Committee
  • Project director serves at their discretion
  • Meets quarterly – twice by phone, twice in person (summit and conference)
• Steering group 
  • meets weekly
  • Currently 6 people plus project director and Jonathan Markow ex officio, Debra Hanken Kurtz attending
  • Makes decisions about events and other things that need to happen
  • Support and advise the project director 
  • Should have 11 members but currently has only 6
• Our community has two types of additional groups
  • Working groups (Chairs on this call)
    • Are really interest groups about common themes, who meet to discuss on calls but are not groups intended to produce work
    • On other projects these groups are called interest groups
    • An on-ramp to the project for people who can participate at any level
    • Work group chairs organize the meetings
  • Task forces
    • Project teams that are self-organized, scoped, and time limited to do something and then go away so that the people involved can do something else that needs doing
    • Produce recommendations, requirements, reports, and we want them to begin to do development effort as well
  • • Have had good community response in initial task forces and they are moving forward

II. Future of the Management Team

• • The working group leads started meeting to fill a vacuum and to get cross-group collaboration going
  • Concern in having a standard, repeating call when maybe the vacuum has been filled
  • If there is some work to do, we may be able to come together in different ways – task forces with tech lead, for example
  • Management Team hour of a standing meeting could be usefully applied elsewhere, and if there were another, discrete channel for the leadership of the project to meet
  • Has been valuable to have the information discussed on the calls
  • Would a monthly mind dump work?
  • Would be fine to have WG chairs to meet once a month with Steering
  • Following discussion the group agreed to have monthly WG calls with steering, rather than a separate management team call
  • Perhaps add a monthly "All VIVO" forum where there could be a presentation, all community members invited, all questions welcomed
    • This idea will need further discussion at a future meeting
  • How to address information updates?
    • Excellent material in the weekly dev/implementation calls
    • All people on the listservs feel they are getting regular, quality information about the project
    • Call time is very valuable and should be used for discussion, not just information delivery
    • Following discussion the group agreed to have a weekly VIVO updates email with content solicited from the WG leads, from the WG wiki pages, and from the listserv archives.  The project director will collate, organize, edit, send to listservs and post in wiki.  VIVO Updates should come out on Monday morning.
    • • Example item – the ORCID to VIVO translator posted on dev-all
    • Can the call schedule be adjusted to have one call per week. Ontology every four weeks, Apps and Tools every four weeks, Imp and Dev every other week.
      
      • Schedule might regularly have times that are better for international participation
      • This item will need more discussion on a future call

III. Mechanism and timing of augmenting the steering committee

• Next leadership meeting will offer two options
  • add 3 new members before the next conference, and do that every subsequent year (with 3 more in 2016 and one rolling off); then 3 new and 3 rotate off in subsequent years
    • two plus one at-large; one plus one at-large in the 2nd year
      
  • add 5 new members to get to 11 by the conference
    • two at-large steering members elected from all DuraSpace VIVO members
  • preference?
    • nearly doubling the size of the group might be a challenge, but we'd get all the way there – plus have more people feeling ownership for the project
      
    • adding only 3 might be perceived as too slow
      

IV. A road map process for the VIVO community

• As we think about the next version of VIVO,  how do we engage the leadership group, the community at large, and the people working on various aspects of VIVO to consider priorities
• How can we create a process by which the various elements of the VIVO community have input regarding development work to be done in the future
  • Those likely to contribute will want to contribute to something that will benefit them – creating value for the people donating that effort
• We have a value proposition and strategic plan.  We need a road map process by which people can become involved
  
• Any thoughts regarding road map process would be very welcome - a huge topic, and we need all the various elements of the community to participate
• Need simple processes for participating in developing the roadmap and in contributing effort to the roadmap
• Will need a process for prioritizing work to be done
• Roadmap is Incredibly important to the sponsors - their contribution and their effort to go to things they value
• We have many proposals
  • Things in JIRA
  • Ideas that we hear repeatedly in email and personal conversations
  • Competitive analysis of what we're lacking that others have
• These proposal are not currently formalized – how to submit, how do we review, how do we prioritize, how do we assign effort?
• Any thoughts we have over the next month or so will be incredibly valuable. We are just beginning consideration of processes for developing roadmap.
  
  • Review/suggest processes that other projects have
  • What are the principles (e.g., clear and open process that everyone knows about and how to participate, are there other principles?)
  • How do we encourage participation in the process?
  • How to include apps and tools that are near ready?
    • There are a great deal of outstanding apps and tools
    • A task force is currently considering how to include apps and tools
    • The roadmap process should include prioritizing which apps and tools might be included

V. Next Joint Meeting

• Another joint call in a month
• Draft minutes of this meeting will be sent to attendees for review Monday.  Minutes posted end of the day Monday
  

Action Items

•  Mike Conlon will prepare minutes and notify group for review
  
•  Mike Conlon will post the minutes late Monday
  
•  Mike Conlon will schedule a joint steering/workgroup chair call for one month out (Actually 4 weeks, May 29)
  
•  Mike Conlon will initiate a weekly update email.  Assembled on Sunday, to go to "vivo-all" (currently several listservs) on Monday mornings.