Steering Group Meeting 20150327 -- Draft Public Notes

March 27, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Dean, Jon , Kristi, Paul, Mike, Debra 

Regrets: Jonathan, Robert, Melissa

= note taker

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

Notes

I. IFest and Summit Follow-up

• The Summit
  • Mike will review the document notes from the leadership group to share with leadership and get comments, then post on the wiki
  • Mike will post slides from introductory talk to the wiki
• The I-Fest
  • some shared notes produced Wednesday – worth reviewing and recording in a similar fashion to the summit notes
    
  • some presentations from the sessions themselves – Mike will check with Melissa to see if we can create some working product from the event
  • A suggestion on the Thursday implementation and development call that another time we could benefit from an experienced facilitator
  • general agreement that an experienced facilitator would help manage conversation, encourage participation in conversation, help address topics of interest, help hear from a wider variety of participants

II. Task Forces forming

Four task forces appear to be forming as a result of IFest conversations.  Mike will follow up with each:

1. VIVO asset inventory.  Task force to review all VIVO assets: repositories, email lists, wikis, web sites, etc, record current status and attributes, recommend disposition/consolidation/expansion.  Mike to facilitate, Jon C-R, several others to recruit.
2. User Stories.  Successful stories of VIVO use across a variety of institutions. For use on web site and in promotional materials.  Julia Trimmer to facilitate.  Carol Minton Morris of Duraspace.  Others to recruit.
3. Implementation documentation.  Violetta Ilik to facilitate.  Organize existing materials in context of project management.  Technical/System, Data, Data Management, policy and local ontology extensions, User engagement and software enhancements.  Several sites with extensive experience on the non-system issues related to implementation.  Need to recruit these successful sites for participation.
4. Contributed software and VIVO.  Task force to recommend methods for sites implementing VIVO to consider and use apps and tools to augment core VIVO installation – more than a listserv mention, possible inclusion in QA processes.  Chris Barnes and Ted Lawless interested in facilitating.  Consider models from other open source projects – Hydra Labs and others.  Others to recruit.
   

III. Budget

It is currently budget season, and invoicing season.  VIVO has had good responses to invoices to date.  Elsevier will drop out as a corporate sponsor (see below).  We will have money for the tech lead, promotional activities, project infrastructure as presented at the Summit.  We will extend Jim Blake at 60% for 6 months to allow time for hiring tech lead (see below) and transition to tech lead.  Six mont period is from April 1 to September 30.

IV. Hiring a Tech Lead

• The job description is substantially complete. Will be circulated to Steering Group for one more additional review.
• A search committee for the tech lead will be formed with representation fro Leadership Group, Steering Group, Duraspace, and Community.  Mike will chair.  As people are asked and agree to serve, names will be shared.

V. Elsevier

• Daniel Calto and Holly Falk-Kryzinski contacted Jonathan to discuss the future of VIVO and Elsevier's role in it
• Jonathan took the call and shared his thoughts with
• Debra – spoke with Daniel and Holly directly
  • Holly as manager of community felt their contributions had not been acknowledged or that they had been engaged in strategic planning
  • The lack of advancement in the technical plan
  • Asked them if there was anything they could do – they said no; they would be making other overtures to other groups such as Harvard
    
  • Daniel was in a worse place than Holly; they are interested in staying in touch with the community
• Dean – some of us at least have been seeing Elsevier acting more like a competitor than a collaborator
  • Mike – ditto
  • Dean – seem to be using us to target opportunities to say why their solution is better than VIVO; unless is more synergistic may not be a good fit
• Kristi – I feel like them not being invited to the strategic planning meeting was a terrible slight – while they sometimes drive me crazy and we like the Symplectic people, it is important to treat both the same
  • But we'll be fine – and frees us from tiptoeing around
  • We should engage Thompson and CrossRef a bit more actively who have been showing interest
  • A real movement to openness happening in lots of places that is not
  • Pivot and knock their socks off
• Debra – probably wasn't a good fit, but once we partner with somebody, we need to work with them and give people the seats they have paid for
  • Dean – how were they left out? Not invited
  • Debra – this gives us a clear picture in our membership drive of what we have to do
• Mike – I did talk with Brigitte from Thompson and there are real opportunities there – openness

Steering Committee

• Our charter says we should have 11 members and we have 6
• We should be rotating 3 a year; we could add 3 this year and next until we are at the full complement
• Rotate one off next year, add 3 more, and that makes 11
• The following year we would go to the 3-per-year rotation
• 2 nominated and selected by all members; 3 from leadership – add 2 from leadership and 1 from all members this year and do the same next year
• Dean – is there reason not to do 5 this year? Gets us up to full size and more engagement across the community
  
• Mike – we could, but we'd have to maybe not offer some of those people a three-year term
• Clearly we are in a transition
• Jon – will be rotating off due to retirement
• Mike – we should take these two options to the leadership group for feedback soon – will get a draft to Dean to review and circulate with Steering before sharing with Leadership

Other business

• Kristi – need to bring up the conference
  • I'm supposed to be the conference chair but I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be doing, and I don't want to drop anything
  • Mike – let's have a conversation about this – for the first 4 years the contract was held by UF, and starting last year by DuraSpace
    • DuraSpace is financially responsible for the conference should it fail, with the hotel and the conference planners
    • the conference has residual funds that mitigate that risk
    • that's the framework Debra is speaking to
  • Debra – the logistics, not the programming; has time after this call
    
  • Kristi – wonderful that DuraSpace can facilitate things; Melissa doesn't have time to do the program, and as conference chair I have to worry about sponsorship – and I haven't been in the conference chair role before so I don't know what all needs to be done in that role – I need a Kristi to take care of what Kristi used to do
    
    • Rachel is our Designing Events rep again but doesn't understand the issue
  • Mike – let's have a meeting and go through it and let's have Designing Events on the call
    • go through the roles and responsibilities
  • Kristi – there are some places where DuraSpace could be very helpful – especially some of the follow up on sponsorship
    • Rachel is our direct person and is a challenge
  • Dean – did we ever have a conversation with Michelle about Rachel – happy to chime in from my perspective as well
    • Everything came through wrong
    • One sponsor said they would not renew if have to deal with Rachel again
      
  • Mike will coordinate a meeting – Kristi, Debra, Mike, Designing Events
    
  • Debra – Michelle had logistical issues to review for change from last year

• Kristi – ORCID will have an announcement about funding – wants to reiterate out commitment to collaborate with them and align our two organizations well
• Dean – a big chunk of money for marketing
• Debra – Laure is eager to work with all the DuraSpace projects and mentioned VIVO; they are moving to a membership model
  
• Kristi – taking Laure's position on the AAUDE meeting panel discussion and will talk about ORCID and VIVO
  • Also a webinar coming up in April – need help from the VIVO team
    
  • need to know what the vision is for VIVO and ORCID to work together
  • what have people done
  • not bi-directional data exchange yet, but want to work toward that
  • and thinking about properly structured information at ORCID
• K – opportunities for us to bring funds in, and to partner with them on something; also a big effort in the CTSAs – NCATS has a solicitation out for proposals for areas of work they should fund
  • Opportunities in platform-agnostic data sharing across the CTSAs
    
  • Thinking also on evaluation/reporting/visualization of data
    

The meeting adjourned at 1:53