July 6, 2018, 2:00 pm US Eastern Time

Attendees

SG members

Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio, Eric Meeks, Paul Albert, DJ Lee, Mark Newton

Duraspace

Andrew Woods

Regrets

Michael Conlon

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Agenda

1. Creating a VIVO road map process. Discussion: all.
   
   1. How are development priorities set at your institution?
   2. What's the ideal way for priorities to be set in a community supported/open source setting?
   3. How might we be guided by a vision or mission statement? How should we proceed with the recent survey?
   4. Should we consider listing and ranking priorities? See an example.
2. Interest groups: should we continue or disband them? Discussion.

Minutes

• Attendees: Paul, Julia, DJ, Andrew, Mark, Eric, Alex
• Roadmap
  • Andrew: it's not clear to me what we see as an ideal state 2-5 years out.
  • Paul: I see VIVO as a series of components. I'm not sure we would be interested in committing to core.
  • DJ: I see VIVO as supporting profile display and data system. I think it would help to look at the survey and see what other institutions want.
  • Julia: the survey had a variety of feedback and it's not immediately clear what to make of this.
  • Eric: Being able to grow the community beyond the choir requires a different product base. People are expecting something turnkey and simple. I see the product evolution effort as critical to the 5-year plan. How do we create a new product simple for people to set up? Once you have VIVO data, then you can deploy more complicated tools. To do that, we need more strong product management. Otherwise, we're looking at things getting slowly worse. I don't think benevolent dictator is how you start but it should be how you finish.... I am okay with using the word "crisis." Spinning up a new VIVO should be easy.
  • Alex: We really need two product managers, one which talks to the business use cases coming from the Product Evolution group (someone like Paul), and another product manager (someone like Mike or Kristi) who champions the semantic webbiness of VIVO. The landscape of VIVO has changes since its inception. On the semantic web side, things have changed. If we're really going to be a next-gen semantic web application, who's going to stay on top of the new innovations, e.g., SHACL, JSON-LD? We would need an expert from that community.... On the other side, we don't really care about the semantic web community. We recently learned that BlazeGraph was acquired by Amazon and is now Neptune.
  • Eric: we need to prioritize one versus the other. Trying to have everything can pose a problem.
  • Mark: one of the problems we have is the multiplicity of inputs and stakeholders. Having some sort of org structure that can help you parse inputs and make choices. What needs to be in core, and what can be de-prioritized. I worry that the inclusivity path leads to a watered down product.
  • Eric: you can make everyone happy but you can't make everyone happy at the same time.
  • Andrew: 
    • Future #1: the legacy VIVO app continues to be incrementally improved but more or less in maintenance mode. In parallel, putting investment into new initiatives.
    • Future #2: bring some newer thinking into the limelight, while modularizing the legacy VIVO to support new initiatives.
    • To what degree is it conceivable the VIVO application can be decoupled? 
  • Paul: what do we think about the below stack as being the focus of the roadmap?
  • Andrew: there are some members of the VIVO community who would be interested in pursuing this, and others would be interested in sticking with the existing stack. My sense is that it's a 50/50 split.... I'm hearing from the core committers that they wish they knew more what's going on.
  • Julia: what are our next steps? I'd like to schedule a meeting with the existing Steering group. I have a process to propose. I'll send out a Doodle for the next two weeks.
  • Alex: before we invite others to submit their ideas, we should clarify how they can contribute, i.e., scratching their own itch.
  • Julia: what about disbanding some of the interest groups (implementation, outreach, apps and tools)? Answer: the dev and ontology groups seem to have some ongoing interest. Maybe the others should be cancelled.
  • Note: the following diagram was posted by Paul as an example of categories that could be used to classify development tasks. This is just an example of how classifications might fit together and does not represent the VIVO road map.