Agenda
Does anyone has any particular questions or issues to discuss?
Spring events: we will be talking about options for VIVO get-togethers in the spring of 2016:
- Is the Implementation Fest helpful for new implementations or would formal training be better?
- Is a User Group meeting a good idea?
- How about a Hackathon?
- Ideas for location, date, time, duration?
This is an open discussion for anyone who's interested!
We'll be using Duke's WebEx service, so use this link to join the WebEx meeting:
https://dukeuniversity.webex.com/dukeuniversity/j.php?MTID=mc24050703e3752f858391227209751f3
Meeting number: 738 650 423
Meeting password: VIVO
Attendees:
Julia Trimmer, Duke University
Alvin Hutchinson, Smithsonian
Kristi Holmes, Northwestern University
Ethel Mejia, Texas A&M
Michaeleen Trimarchi, Scripps Institute
Justin Littman, George Washington University
Ted Lawless, Thomson Reuters
Bruce Herbert, Texas A&M
Alex Viggio, CU-Boulder
Minutes
Julia: As Mike explained, the Implementation Fest started out as a way to give guidance and support to new VIVO institutions without doing formal training. It was sometimes chaotic and that was fine. Last year’s iFest turned out to be more of a discussion with experienced VIVO community members about more technical topics. Mike asked, is it time to transition to a more formal training?
Kristi: Most of the previous iFest events were more highly structured. Maybe we could go back to the structure of the older events—maybe we need more structure?
Alex: There seemed to be a need for deeper discussions with more experienced people last year. But there were newer people who were out of their depth. If we do a user group meeting, how would we accommodate newer implementations?
Andi Ogier at VT had an idea for providing expertise through an institutional sponsorship for the conference and providing a number of hours of consulting time. This idea is still being considered and developed. It may not be ready for 2016 conference. Maybe it’s a benefit of VIVO community membership? It could be broken down into multiple sessions, like the first could be an overview, then a technical session, followed by an ontology session.
Alvin likes the idea of remote training; he came to the iFest in Durham but not to Portland. He thinks new folks could benefit from a webinar. Like a screen share, or introduction to VIVO kind.
Alex: we have some webinars already, and that’s a great idea.
Kristi: the iFest was much more than training but it was also a way to create meaningful connections. We should have a community-oriented effort to support these training activities.
Alex: I hope we can come up with an option for formalized training that they could set up people for more in-person events. Hopefully they will increase the desire to attend in-person events so they can benefit from the community participation
Justin: I attended iFest as a newcomer last year and agree with other assessments. I thought it was helpful but not an introduction to VIVO. The Duraspace folks came to DC and did a 2-day local training for Fedora which was a great model.
Bruce: By the way, Ethel Mejia joined our group as a data analyst. I think a formal training is really key – online session for two hours, then a two-week gap and then another two-hour training. This can be a cost-effective and gives people a chance to process what they learn in between sessions.
Benjamin: I also came to the iFest as a newcomer and a lot of the discussion was over my head. Could remote training be on demand? Universities are implementing at different schedules.
Alvin: How do we get feedback on what new implementers need? We need to know why people have given up on their VIVO implementations – how do we catch those people early on?
Kristi: This isn’t as big an issue as it was in the past. The community is fairly collaborative and robust. It’s more important to direct new people to the right training resources in the community. At first, people were just trying VIVO out to see how it works. Committed sites will take whatever support they can get. We should spend some resources helping to drive home the value statement for vivo, what you stand to gain. What’s the percentage of VIVO downloads to actual implementations? Probably pretty low – but it’s the serious implementations that really need to be supported.
Alex: How much existing content like webinars, videos etc, would be helpful to these new sites? It seems like we’ve generated a lot of good content over the years – is there another way to measure interest or track who’s looking? What could we put together to figure out who’s interested and where they are? The new website might be a way to measure things engagement by new folks.
Kristi: There are ways to measure engagement and that might be one of them.
Julia: It sounds like we have broad support for remote training sessions, potentially given a few weeks apart. What about a user group meeting?
Alex: A user summit might be a better way to describe it. It could be augmented by working sessions around ontology, development, etc.
Kristi: Will this dilute other events? Can these discussions be held at the conference?
Michaeleen: The user summit might go well paired with an introductory session. That way, the new users could hear the issues, the discussions from the established community. Or we could do an opening session for new users followed by open discussions. The user summit is a great name and better than “user group.” Also, we could organize people who had done training or talks on a particular topic before, and extend those to become training.
Alex: Some conferences events have focused plenary sessions in the morning and more unstructured time in the afternoon.
Michaeleen: Here’s a link to https://stellagroup.wordpress.com/ which is an unstructured conference, and this might be a good model for us to think about. (Michaeleen also sent this:
http://nnlm.gov/ntc/fundamentals-of-bioinformatics-and-searching-course-overview/ which is an asynchronous online workshop with 7 lectures & homework, then participants who finish the class can apply to attend a 5-day on-site workshop, I think held at the National Library of Medicine.)
