Here we recap the events of the past month.

Conference

The 2019 VIVO Conference will be in Podgorica, Montenegro, September 4-6, 2019.  Announcement here:  https://duraspace.org/save-the-date-vivo-2019-september-4-6-podgorica-montenegro/

Ruben Verborgh of Ghent, Belgium will serve as program chair.  Violeta Ilik is conference chair.  Nataša Popović is leading local arrangements.

Action Planning

1. Vision
2. Governance and Structure
3. Product Evolution
4. Community Development
5. Resources

Task Forces

1. Membership Task Force.  First meeting was Thursday.  Identify prospects, outreach to potential members.  Coordinate with Michele Mennielli of Duraspace, on international memberships.  Consider bringing on David Wilcox of Duraspace, to help with outreach and contacts.  Update CRM (Zoho) information.  Run membership activities through out the year, particularly during the academic year.
2. Development.  Second community sprint
3. Research Intelligence
4. Ontology
5. Internationalization

Other

1. Initiative scoring completed.  Raw results here: http://bit.ly/2M6O8Is.  Discussion at our meeting of September 14.
2. MOU/budget work for 2019 has begun.  Mike Conlon, Julia Trimmer, Erin Trippworking to improve the work that was started last year.
3. VIVO Steering Group has been finalized. Eight members: Anna Guillaumet, Alex Viggio, Dong Joon (DJ) Lee , Julia Trimmer, Mark Newton, Mike Conlon, Paul Albert, and Violeta Ilik.
4. The VIVO web site has been refreshed.  We moved from Duraspace hosted Drupal to Duraspace hosted WordPress.  Our site is "integrated" with other Duraspace sites (membership, registry, navigation, blog, news) limiting what we can do, but providing simpler updates, and improved look.  The new registry is much improved.  See the new site at the same address as always. http://vivoweb.org  
5. German VIVO workshop next week in Hannover, September 15-16.  Hackathon, ontology, German issues, multi-language issues. Christian Hauschke, Mike Conlon, Michele Mennielli, Graham Triggs, Tatiana Walther, Anna Kasprzik, Ina Blümel, Lambert Heller, attendance capped and sold out at 55.
6. Mike Conlon will be at the Danish Technical University serving on an advisory board for their national RI project, then in Montreal for Force 11 at the blockchain workshop, in Leiden for an RDA/FAIR metadata workshop.
7. Paper submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software regarding VIVO 1.10.  You can find the paper here:  https://github.com/vivo-project/VIVO/tree/develop/paper
8. A joint grant proposal with David Baker of CASRAI to develop research management information models (RMI) based on CASRAI and using VIVO as an RMI information source was not funded by CANARIE.  We scored well, above average in all scoring categories.  Baker and Conlon will develop joint models as a pilot for future funding.
9. Digital Science grant to Conlon and Alexander Garcia Castro regarding VIVO in a blockchain has made significant progress, scholarly wallet for assertions, put/get of assertions to an open blockchain for scholarship.  Interface work beginning.