Analysis
Identify Stakeholders - Generally institutional offices which are interested in using and contributing to a VIVO are those that collect or that use research information. This can be review committees, grants management offices, institutional repository managers, public affairs, fundraising bodies and others who need to find out about the research being conducted at the institution. These people can be invited to regular planning meetings or at least, included on emails updating the status of the project. The Local Adoption and Outreach Tips page contains a list of suggested groups to contact. See a sample project plan for a university.
Gather Use Cases - VIVO can be used to answer questions or identify experts, or it might be used to generate formal, regular reports about research. In either case, you may want to define those needs in the form of a use case. See: use case.
Design
Share Prototypes and/or Existing VIVOs - In addition to installing a test VIVO and inviting users to edit profiles, another way to demonstrate the value and impact of having a VIVO is to show other organizations with a fully populated site. This is an easy way to engage users in the project. See: Sites implementing VIVO.
Implementation
Identify Power Users - Data contributors or other stakeholders may be able to help identify those users who are likely to be active participants and who edit and update their profiles regularly. These might be people who have easily adopted other systems in the recent past. Under the Site Admin==>User Accounts page it is possible to sort by the number of user logins, which might also help identify power VIVO users who are actively using the system.
Develop Training Materials - Se examples of training materials on the Support page for Duke University's Scholars.Duke.edu.
Launch
Publicize VIVO - In addition to regular meetings with primary stakeholders, materials can be posted or mailed to those with potential interest. Marketing materials are listed here.
Hold Training Sessions - Training sessions are essential to community engagement. Don't be shy about offering training early and often. Not only is training a great way to meet and talk to users, announcing training makes people ask, "What's VIVO?" and it makes your team look more responsive to users needs.Training sessions can demonstrate not only how to login, enter data and navigate but also show which kinds of questions can be answered by your VIVO. When your VIVO aggregates data from other systems, training explains to users how to update the data on their profile.
There can be different kinds of training:
- End-user training for people with VIVO profiles or their delegates
- Power or super user training for those VIVO users with roles above that of the end-user or individual profile editor, who may be responsible for supporting a group of VIVO users or for training other trainers.
- IT staff or librarians who might become involved in maintaining local ontologies, designing and reordering pages or other oversight of your VIVO. Some training from a core group with VIVO experience would be helpful.
Maintenance
Find New Collaborators - Once your VIVO is live and in use, you will continue to engage with community members, and identify new collaborators who could contribute VIVO data or use the VIVO data in their own work. VIVO can provide data to use for websites in schools and departments, which benefits both the faculty and the VIVO instance by encouraging data currency. Specific kinds of information, like global scholarship data, can be consumed by other offices in your institution. For example, Duke's Global Office uses data from faculty profiles in their global map to identify where Duke faculty are working in the world. VIVO data can be used for reporting, for CVs, for visualizations, and for network analyses. The more that your VIVO data is used in other sites and processes, the better chance you'll have of users keeping their profiles updated.
Hold User Meetings - User meetings are a good way to receive feedback from your VIVO and to tweak design and structure according to local needs. Users can be defined as end-user/searchers or as those who contribute data. Ideally a good part of your data will be imported into your VIVO automatically, in bulk or from an institutional source rather than manually entered. Therefore it might be useful to include not only end users who edit their personal profiles, but data providers who can answer questions about where the data comes from and how it might better be filtered or displayed. Another group who might be interested in user meetings is anyone interested or active in semantic web technology since VIVO uses linked data/RDF.
See also: VIVO Community Pages
