May 15, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Attending

Dean B. Krafft, Mike Conlon, Jon Corson-Rikert , Paul Albert, debra hanken kurtz, Jonathan Markow

Regrets

Kristi Holmes, Melissa Haendel, Robert H. McDonald

= note taker

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

Agenda

Notes

Attending: Mike, Debra, Jonathan, Dean, Jon, Paul

Regrets: Melissa, Kristi, Robert

1. Updates
   1. Mike attending CASRAI/ORCID meeting in Barcelona Monday and Tuesday.
   2. Tech lead search update: Screening calls completed.  Three viable candidates.  Calls with the community and reference checks this week.  Steering committee meets next Friday.  May be able to put forward recommendation.
2. Leadership group agenda
   1. Item 6 (approaches to corporate sponsorship) had come up in one of our previous calls – not sure who should be taking the lead on it
      1. Over time there's been thoughts in the charter about the participation of corporate sponsors – initially quite restrictive, but more relaxed recently given experience to date
         
      2. Has been suggested that if we add 5 new members, one should be a corporate sponsor
      3. If one corporate sponsor is on the steering and others are not – would that lead to perceptions of special access?
      4. Design of the sponsorship program was to attract companies who have a marketing interest in VIVO, not to have them be part of the governance of the project since they had a financial interest rather than skin in the game – their interest was in exposure to VIVO's audience
      5. Election process tends to weed out un-engaged corporate sponsors
      6. And charter restricts corporate membership in Leadership to no more than 1/3 of members 
         
      7. Following discussion the item was removed from the agenda
   2. Augmenting the steering group
      1. Leadership will look to steering for our sense of what would work best
      2. Following discussion we will propose both and recommend adding five at once to comply with charter
   3. How much material should the leadership group get before the meeting?
      1. Notes from the previous meeting
      2. The options for voting
         
      3. The draft revised charter
         
      4. Present budget at the meeting
      5. Short progress report
   4. When should they get any material?  The Friday before (May 29)
   5. Revise the order for meeting flow.  Indicate items that have materials.  Provide materials prior and at the meeting
3. Charter revisions 
   1. Changed 'project' to 'VIVO', removed the management team, clarified contradictions in language about work groups, added task forces, collapsed the tables of benefits into one, made a new triangle diagram that's simpler
   2. No changes in the fundamental governance structure - updates reflect what has happened over the year
   3. important that the document exists in a current form and that the leadership has seen the document and understands how VIVO operates
      
4. Roadmap process
   1. We want to have a roadmap process in which the concerns expressed in the leadership meeting and at the summit can be addressed – pretty pointed language about missing features
   2. Need a process in which the was consideration of those high-level concerns, balanced somehow with some concerns that if presented properly could garner support of leadership and steering, such as improving the ability of developers to work on the code by doing more work on modularity
      1. Will need a heading of "make it easier for developers to participate in the project" – modularity, yes, but other things, too
      2. Need to address how to incorporate ontology in the work
   3. Other large-scale features such as getting more apps & tools into the finished product, deliver more stock data that is in a form ready to be used by non-programmers so it doesn't require a lot of local custom effort.  Deliver more end user experience –  visualizations, tables of data, drill down explorers
   4. The technical community probably has additional ideas, although easier development and more outputs occur frequently
   5. As a process, discussion of a process of progressive refinement
      1. Start with high-level things like "add a visualization suite to VIVO" – on the order of 10-20 big, not-perfectly defined things
      2. We can't likely commit to more than half, depending on community response, but we need everybody involved and then need some weighting process by which steering takes stock and makes a recommendation to leadership, following input from the community and leadership and steering
      3. Suggestions can go into the 10 top-level "features" or ideas – still pretty high level.  Go for the recurring themes
      4. likely take some of us aside as a task force
   6. Will need to have some evaluation of dependencies - which are gating features and which can go together in parallel
   7. Process in 2010 did involve dependency analysis, but focused more on VIVO internals
      
   8. Two potentially conflicting goals
      1. increase the ability of developers to participate
         1. may involve infrastructure changes that don't sound like new features to prospective developers
            
      2. Deliver end-user functionality to help users
   9. Have to address a little of both
      1. a pent-up demand for features, some of which are critical
      2. and we have to do underlying structural work
         1. name the functional goal and label the dependencies underneath
         2. look for some low-hanging fruit that can be delivered
   10. As far as the process goes, we need to talk it through, and the tech lead will be an important role
       1. DSpace is going through a similar process, but don't have a product manager/director to drive it forward but do have an ambitious road map
       2. They plan to do a very high-profile, visible improvement to the UI that can be done before a product manager is in place
          1. look at their road map and how they align it to their strategic plan – and Fedora's as well
             
       3. Are there some critical improvements we can do, like getting rid of the broken visualization suite
5. VIVO in Europe
   1. The usual partners will be there – euroCRIS, CASRAI, ORCID, OpenAire
   2. Want to talk less about how to work with other projects and more about why institutions have not adopted
   3. Ontocale could be useful since based in Europe
   4. We have to have a clearer story about the relationship of VIVO-ISF to CERIF
   5. We need to engage on efforts to share identifiers
   6. How to have the partners engage in our meetings, task forces, coordinated development sprints
      
   7. With the tech lead, we should start trying to target meetings to suit European timezones
   8. Thomson Reuters may also be able to help

Action Items

• Mike Conlon will revise the order of items in the leadership group agenda and indicate which have materials
  
• Jonathan Markow and Mike Conlon will make final edits to the charter