Agenda
- Introductions
- About the Outreach and Engagement calls
- Current issues and status of the group
- Discussion: community email list
- Future discussion items:
Minutes
Welcome!
Attendees:
Julia Trimmer, Duke University
Mike Conlon, DuraSpace
Kristi Holmes, Northwestern University
Carol Minton Morris, DuraSpace
Purpose: We'd like to open up the conversation about outreach with the community and offer help when needed. Mike thinks that this group could talk more about community-building and related issues and provide that feedback to Steering. There may be specific issues that we can tackle, for example, issues related to the conference, are there things that we could do about certain things. Kristi talked about environments, organizations and companies who are representing people data, which is rather complex. These organizations may need help learning about VIVO, and need VIVO evangelists.
Mike reminds us that we need to talk about partners and parterships with other related organizations, which is important to the project. Kristi's current research dovetails very nicely with VIVO and partners nicely, but it's nice to have different perspectives.
Carol wonders if there is a need for an evaluation event to gather information about needs. Mike would like to hear why people are not implementing VIVO. Why do we have so few implementations? This is a question for the outreach/non-technical people. Why isn't VIVO the obvious choice? We should have world-wide adoption. Alternate deployment models might be one approach. We have pathways that will help us get bigger, but we need to move on those pathways. We need to think big in how we get adoption of VIVO.
The road map asks people in the community what features they want. What we want to know is why people have not chosen VIVO. Kristi thinks the best way to do this is through personal and confidential conversations. We are moving towards implementing a lot of improvements but they aren't there yet. Much of this is outreach, and we need more people to do it. More proactive outreach at conferences would be great, with an on-point message, and make the blog more active, with a VIVO-centric, positive message – all these things would add a lot of excitement. Also we need better output, better visualizations, better reports.
A sample CSV with data for 20 faculty members would make it easier to ingest the first time. We can't do too much and we have to be very selective about what we choose to do: attending selected conferences and updating the blog are within our reach.
Meeting up with people at conferences and having VIVO events is important. We need to publicize our efforts to improve the ingest processes.
Carol thinks that what we're talking about sounds doable: pick a few conferences, add content to the blog, create meetups at conferences. DuraSpace does this for other products.
Mike feels like it would be helpful to choose six conferences here in this meeting now. This is the best way to get immediate results.
