It was a big week. Lots of updates.
Nominations open for the Steering Group. The VIVO Leadership Group had its quarterly meeting this week. It approved a revision to the VIVO Charter, a Roadmap Process, and a plan to add five new members to the Steering Group. Three new members will be added from those nominated and elected by the Leadership Group. Two new members will be nominated and elected by community members. The Steering Group meets each week and is a key element in making the VIVO Project go. Want to contribute your thoughts and expertise to steering the VIVO Project? The Steering Group is the place to do it. Nominations are open now – see here for details. Elections will be held the weeks of July 20 and July 27. Please consider serving in this important role.
Mozilla Science Global Sprint. Thanks to Alex Viggio for organizing VIVO's participation in the Mozilla Science Global Sprint. And thanks to Justin Littman for his outstanding work on ORCID2VIVO, serving as topic for the sprint. Ted Lawless and Mike Conlon contributed code. I had my first pull request as a developer. The sprint serves as a model for open source development and contributed to raising awareness for VIVO around the world. ORCID2VIVO will certainly grow in importance as more authors get ORCID identifiers and more publishers request and manage ORCID identifiers as part of their processes. The software also serves as a model for ingest software based on identifiers to external services. There are many examples of such ingests – PubMed, CrossRef, ORCID, repositories, and many others. Learning more about these types of ingests should be of great interest to many of us. Thanks again to the sprint team – Alex, Justin and Ted. See Justin's Github repo for the project.
Web site task force. Interested in helping with the new VIVO web site? Have experience with video, graphics, or writing for the web? Please consider joining the web site task force. With a little bit of elbow grease we should have the new site available in time for the conference. If you are interested, please drop me a note at mconlon@duraspace.org Thanks!
A roadmap process for VIVO. Over the years, many incredible ideas for new VIVO features have been suggested by members of the VIVO community. As an open source project, it is very important that we have an open process to share these ideas, thoughts about them, including preferences for particular features. And, of course, we do share ideas abut the future of VIVO every day in our normal community processes – work groups, task forces and governance activities. But as many have pointed out, we need an open process to coalesce these ideas and conversations into a roadmap. Over the past several weeks, the Steering Group has worked to develop an open roadmap process for VIVO – one that capitalizes on the ideas of the community, aligns ideas with the strategic plan, and leverages the interests of the community for contributing effort to building specific features. The roadmap process is now "open for business." A list of features that have been proposed by you, has been assembled. Please take a look. A timeline for a process to discuss these features further, express preferences, and assemble input into a coherent document has been drafted. Please take a look.
For the next month, we will be discussing these features, details of these features, and even more features that you will certainly propose. After that, we will conduct a preference survey, gathering input from the community, leadership and steering. A task force will take this input and draft a roadmap for review by Steering and adoption by Leadership. The entire process should be complete by the conference.
But that's just the beginning. Having a roadmap will do little good without effort to build the features described in it. Please consider how you, or someone at your institution can contribute to the development of features in the roadmap. We will go further faster with more contributed effort. And as with any open source project, if a group of institutions self-organize to implement particular features, that will be welcomed.
How does the VIVO Project work? Some folks want to know more about how the project works. How do we make decisions? How do we get work done? Who contributes time and effort? How do things get organized? Turns out three key documents "govern" the VIVO project, describing structure, membership, decision making, community participation and more. All three of these documents can be found with one click from the left hand menu of the VIVO Wiki home page. One click. Left hand menu. VIVO Wiki home page. The three documents are the VIVO Project Charter, the VIVO Strategic Plan, and the new VIVO Roadmap Process. Here's the skinny:
- The VIVO Project Charter describes how the project is organized, which groups exist and how they relate to each other. The project charter was recently revised by the Leadership Group to clarify the role of the project director, the tech lead, the work groups and the task forces.
- The VIVO Strategic Plan describes, at the highest level, what VIVO is for and what work we should do to be aligned with VIVO's purpose.
- The VIVO Roadmap Process provides an open means for gathering the ideas of the community and organizing them into a roadmap that is consistent with the strategic plan and can be executed according to the project charter.
Please take a look if you are interested in how the VIVO Project works. Thanks to all who have contributed to these documents and have participated in all the great things the community has been doing.
Recap. Opportunities to be nominated and elected to the Steering Group, participation in a global sprint to enhance the ORCID2VIVO software, opportunities to join the web task force, a new roadmap process, and some insight into how the project works. Whew.
Have a great week. I'll be in Indianapolis for Open Repositories. Hope to see you there.
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
