August 21, 2015, 1 PM EST
Attendees
Steering Group Members
Paul Albert, Jon Corson-Rikert , Kristi Holmes, Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald, Eric Meeks, Andi Ogier, Bart Ragon, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio
= note taker
Work group chairs
Chris Barnes, Ted Lawless, Jim Blake
Ex officio
debra hanken kurtz , Jonathan Markow
Regrets
Dial-In Number:
NEW DIAL-IN: 641-715-3650 (was 209-647-1600), Participant code: 117433#
Agenda
Item | Time | Facilitator | Notes | |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Updates | 5 min | All | |
2 | Review agenda | 2 min | All | Revise, reorder if needed |
3 | Conference follow-up | 10 min | Kristi | |
4 | Conference 2016 | 10 min | Julia | Recruiting marketing and sponsorship leads |
5 | South American Outreach | 20 min | debra | https://docs.google.com/document/d/10TcIE_rg_lmCtANReKnkM_to_2t2F0ZlnPhiak7j4KA/edit?usp=sharing |
6 | Future topics | 5 min | All | Task force work products; fall seminar series; fall events; implementation fest; training offerings; site survey, attribution/contribution efforts |
Notes
Updates
- Web site launch now expected week of August 31
- Email list consolidation, move to Google Groups, expected in Septembe
- Membership drive begins in earnest, follow-up from Leadership/Steering at conference.
Conference 2016 — Julia
- Conference Brids of a Feather session Friday about the 2016 conference with Kristi, Mike, Julia, and Mike Winkler
- will start a task force to encourage participation
- looking for people to take on the marketing and sponsorship roles
- Designing Events has promised a timetable for the year with milestones
- discussed lining up someone as co-chair who would then serve as conference chair for 2017 — a backup person learning the ropes
- Exciting for the Colorado crowd; may be able to recruit local volunteers from VIVO projects and/or local students
- Any options for tours or other ancillary activities unique to Denver? New train station
- The venue has been confirmed — Marriott City Center on California Street
- Dates are August 17-19
Conference follow-up — Kristi
- Went well — large registration bump over last year (185 over 165); great attendance supported in part by the Boston location; would be good to get word out early since Denver won’t attract as many drop-in people; workshop registration was also up
- Most of the bump due to not being co-located with SciTS — a number registered for that and attended VIVO
- There was a bump at the end this year, too
- The bump in the workshop attendance is good for the bottom line
- From Mike:
- VIVO disambiguation data on 7 million authors assembled by Harvard
- Recommendations for SEO
- Thomson Reuters continuing strong support
- We need to find ways to get people plugged into the process and committed to participating throughout — so that we can be more proactive than reactive
- Designing Events had to spend a lot of time chasing after the chair and conference chair to get material in time for deadlines — we need delegates to handle key parts
- Kristi can share the templates for documents, good candidates for the program review committee, ideas for speakers, instructions for setting up the conference submission and review site in Easy Chair
- Based on previous experience, inviting keynotes beginning in January was too late
- Should we schedule a meeting with Designing Events soon? Once we have the calendar, put together a proposal for a VIVO task force and put together the charge based on the milestones, to involve additional volunteers from the beginning
- We may not need to meet with Designing Events right away
- Suggested that Designing Events include Michael Winkler and Julia Trimmer in the post-conference wrap-up call
- The Symplectic Pre-Conference created a down day for people not attending workshops; may have possibly increased workshop attendance, and could cause some people to leave the Conference early
- Symplectic felt that people were burned out after the VIVO conference in previous years; they are considering a two-day conference
- Maybe we should have workshops helpful to Elements users
- About half of the Symplectic event attendees were staying for VIVO
- Would be good to have conversations early about schedule; maybe one workshop could focus on Elements as a way to bridge events
- Do we usually send out a survey after the Conference? yes — we might include some questions about the timing of the Symplectic event
South American trip
- Has general topic questions and also technical topics
- People do local extensions of the ontology all the time, but we are building a community approach
- Urge them to think of a community approach that leverages resources the community has developed including the wiki, the implementation fest, and the help available from Symplectic Elements and other vendors
- English should be workable, but the contacts at the Interamerican Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) would be able to provide technical help in Spanish
- and there are VIVOs in Spain. See Sites implementing VIVO
- Challenges — the hardest part of a VIVO implementation has nothing to do with the technology — connecting with data stewards and other stakeholders, the need for a champion who can carry the effort forward and orchestrate the process. Despite an open source project being free, it’s free like a puppy — requires care and feeding to thrive. This is a great way to plug into the community - other people have already encountered every problem. The engagement and outreach sections of the wiki have great resources about these institutionally-focused issues
- Feeder systems were very challenging — on the nature of technical help needed, especially when blending the Windows stack of Symplectic with the Java stack of VIVO
- VIVO could be part of a larger institutional research data integration plan, to have an overview of who’s doing what and where the strengths are
- Try to make sure what they want out of their installation, since different institutions want different things. Is it branding of the researchers, or data analytics, or to foster collaboration?
- What are the main benefits? Benefits to faculty members where they have an institutionally-asserted profile with their officially developed profiles and data put out there where it can be linked to, shared with other sites, etc.
- There’s a growing ecosystem around VIVO to bring data in and repurpose it from VIVO for other purposes
- What is the relationship from VIVO to Scholars (the people) — this goes back to the cultural perspective; VIVO can be implemented at the grassroots level through integration with the library and library relationships with departments and individual researchers, or can be a top-down, institution-wide mandate. Having a high-level champion is very helpful in keeping things moving; a strong engagement from IT helps on the technical side, and involving the library helps to leverage the service model and relationships that the Library has
- The faculty are not always the biggest fans, simply because they see any requests for data as a time imposition. The values come for faculty when data can be populated from existing systems or Elements, with only minimal participation from them, and then populate department sites
- Younger researchers see VIVO as a big benefit in establishing their digital footprint — it’s a presence my university establishes for me
- The fact that it’s open and not controlled by the marketing people is a plus
- And since the university team updates the data, that helps build buy-in from the researchers over time — they have less maintenance to do on their web presence
Action Items
- Jon will transfer notes and fill out a first pass at the questions for Debra's South American trip (Google Doc)