Here we recap the events of the past month.

Conference

1. The 2019 VIVO Conference will be in Podgorica, Montenegro, September 4-6, 2019.  Announcement here:  https://duraspace.org/save-the-date-vivo-2019-september-4-6-podgorica-montenegro/
2. Ruben Verborgh of Ghent, Belgium will serve as program chair.  Violeta Ilik is conference chair.  Nataša Popović is leading local arrangements.
3. Conference committee is Violeta, Nataša, Mike Conlon, Julia Trimmer, and Miguel Garcia from Clarivate.  Miguel is based in London.
4. Conference planning folder is here:  http://bit.ly/2skoNDc

Action Planning

1. Vision.  Has not met.
2. Governance and Structure.  Is meeting bi-weekly on Thursdays at 11 AM US Eastern.  Has developed a survey regarding governance. https://vivo.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bvAAVIwLZbgeRVz  
3. Product Evolution.  Meets weekly Wednesday 11 AM US Eastern.  Meeting notes here:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rhsW7EKhQyfHRrzh7wZNziosJAfliduXxQQVcT1w0bI/edit#  See Slack channel for pinned items and conversation.   Is developing a VIVO-sourced, developer friendly data model for driving an interface.
4. Community Development.  Is meeting monthly.  Contact Alex Viggio for details.
5. Resources.  Is meeting bi-weekly.  Contact Terrie Wheeler for details.
6. More detail on action planning activity here:  http://bit.ly/2OmFWGg

Task Forces

1. Membership Task Force.  First meeting was Thursday.  Identify prospects, outreach to potential members.  Coordinate with Michele Mennielli of Duraspace, on international memberships.  Consider bringing on David Wilcox of Duraspace, to help with outreach and contacts.  Update CRM (Zoho) information.  Run membership activities through out the year, particularly during the academic year.
2. Development.  Second community sprint 2018-09 Sprint, includes clarifying/decoupling search interface for use by ElasticSearch and Solr 7, internationalization work, documentation. Andrew Woods  organizes.
3. Research Intelligence.  Group is forming.  Has not yet met.  See Research Intelligence Task Force
4. Ontology.  Group is meeting every two weeks, led by Mike Conlon.  Current work in two areas: 1) identifiers and attributes of identifiers such as ORCiD, DOI, GRID, ISSN; 2) languages, language skills, and languages of scholarly works.
5. Internationalization.  Group is meeting every two weeks, led by Kitio Fofackof University of Quebec at Montreal.  TIB has a demo site for internationalization.  Group is identifying gaps.  Work planned for September sprint.
6. Task force home here:  Task Forces

Other

1. Initiative scoring completed.  Raw results here: http://bit.ly/2M6O8Is.  Discussion at our meeting of September 14.
2. MOU/budget work for 2019 has begun.  Mike Conlon, Julia Trimmer, Erin Trippworking to improve the work that was started last year.
3. VIVO Steering Group has been finalized. Eight members: Anna Guillaumet, Alex Viggio, Dong Joon (DJ) Lee , Julia Trimmer, Mark Newton, Mike Conlon, Paul Albert, and Violeta Ilik.
4. The VIVO web site has been refreshed as of Friday morning.  We moved from Duraspace hosted Drupal to Duraspace hosted WordPress.  Our site is "integrated" with other Duraspace sites (membership, registry, navigation, blog, news) limiting what we can do, but providing simpler updates, and improved look.  The new registry is much improved.  See the new site at the same address as always. http://vivoweb.org  
5. German VIVO workshop next week in Hannover, September 17-18.  Hackathon, ontology, German issues, multi-language issues. Christian Hauschke, Mike Conlon, Graham Triggs, Tatiana Walther, Anna Kasprzik, Ina Blümel, Lambert Heller, attendance capped and sold out at 60.
6. Mike Conlon will be at the Danish Technical University serving on an advisory board for their national RI project (Oct 2-3), then in Montreal for Force 11 (Oct 10-12) at the blockchain workshop, in Leiden for an RDA/FAIR metadata workshop (Oct 15-16).
7. Paper submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software regarding VIVO 1.10.  You can find the paper here:  https://github.com/vivo-project/VIVO/tree/develop/paper
8. A joint grant proposal with David Baker of CASRAI to develop research management information models (RMI) based on CASRAI and using VIVO as an RMI information source was not funded by CANARIE.  We scored well, above average in all scoring categories.  Baker and Conlon will develop joint models as a pilot for future funding.
9. Digital Science grant to Conlon and Alexander Garcia Castro regarding VIVO in a blockchain has made significant progress, scholarly wallet for assertions, put/get of assertions to an open blockchain for scholarship.  Interface work beginning.
10.  Violeta Ilik presented "Implementing Semantic Discovery for Researchers" See http://bit.ly/2OMn5UA on August 29th virtual workshop of the National Federation for the Advancement of Information Services.
11. All VIVO Updates here:  VIVO Updates