Theme: Community

 
Outreach – convey usability, maturity, and coherence in all aspects of web presence. Crowdsourcing will not accomplish this.
 
Streamlined web presence; straightforward, timely communications that can be easily understood by prospective users or contributors
 
Communicating where we are as a community, what we offer, and how we can partner with other organizations and movements to achieve goals such as shared identifiers and data interoperability
 
Clearer communication of community activities ( user documentation, software release schedule, working groups, etc) so that active members know where things are headed and potential members can learn about activities.
 
Improve communications, transparency, and participation
 
Create apps that address the various purposes for VIVO above.
 
A stable community built and supported ontology. VIVO needs to build a larger and more stable ontology community that is in sync with downstream consumers of VIVO data. For example, Profiles RNS sites still exist emitting data in 1.4 ontology. What is the
 
More contributions to both the software and ontology from community members who are using the platform to solve real information problems and deliver services
 
Make community-based VIVO apps and tools discoverable, reusable, maintainable
 
Increased open source commiter activity on the Vitro and VIVO projects, e.g. coordination of more code sprints and hackathons.
 
Strengthen the open technical community and provide more training and "VIVO in the wild" showcases (e.g. it seems hard still to find out who is running instances at their institutions, which increases the difficulty of understanding who is doing what and 
 
Key partnerships with outside community
 
Having a closer partnership with each VIVO instance
 
The management structure is to complex and top heavy, there are too many WGs, steering committee meetings/levels.
 
A more transparent governance process
 
Governance must determine goals; developers are only qualified to determine methods toward those goals.
 
How do we create a value proposition so compelling that institutions will overcome the resistance of IT shops to learn something new?
 
To solicit new leadership and find ways to get feedback from all of our member institutions.
 
Explaining what we do, why we do it, and how newcomers (and even some long-timers) can effectively participate, meet their own goals, and contribute going forward
 
Building confidence within our community that we can survive changes in personnel and even changes in partnerships as institutions, movements, and priorities change over time
 
Transitioning from reliance on a passive “build it and they will come” approach for data, ontology, and software to delivering coherent and robust tools and visualizations that show the significance of the data we have collectively gathered and how it can
 
Exclusive community- needs to expand out of Cornell in effort and perception
 
Encouraging more VIVO implementers to share their extensions as open source.
 
Developing the software and ontology in an open manner with contributions from more community members.
 
There seems to be a tension expressed between those who value VIVO "ownership" of the VIVO-ISF ontology and those who want to engage non-VIVO-users in adoption of the ontology for other purposes. How do we resolve this?
 
Developing a sustainable ecosystem of development around VIVO, including the adoption of the ontology in other products and platforms.
 
There isn't enough PR or people to do it.
 
Information sharing is not as accessible or transparent as it could be, and is too distributed, which diminishes PR and development process efficiency.
 
Establishing clear communications (see above) so that community efforts can be as productive as possible.

Theme: Sustainability

 
A software release process that's driven not by incremental improvements desired by existing users but by exciting and useful new features that can capture the imagination and energy of new adopters
 
Transforming an informal network of committed individuals into a sustainable community offering transparent governance, the capability to deliver production-quality software and ontology, and an openness to new ideas and directions
 
Clearer articulation of the value proposition to the academic community
 
Clearer communication of VIVO's value proposition over other systems or data model in this space.
 
To grow the installed base, we need to improve the value proposition.
 
Better marketing and branding, not only of the product(s) but of the community's vision
 
Expand the community to be more inclusive, democratic, and diversified so can start building a robust community source project
 
Increase the number of adopters worldwide, including lead institutions that can set an example for others and contribute to the project
 
Expanding the core services beyond the university faculty/staff information use case.
 
Increased adoption by universities and research institutions, e.g. having more than 100 active VIVO implementations in production.
 
Increased adoption
 
Uptake: -> incease in new Universities using VIVO platforms
 
Global adoption
 
Grow the installed base. This brings new people, ideas, resources to VIVO and creates a positive feedback loop. More effort, better product, more adoption, more effort.
 
More developers. VIVO needs more developers. VIVO needs to work on getting in tune with the preferred working methods of the cohort of probable developers in the communities that seem to be attracting themselves to VIVO. This may require surveying or reac
 
Attracting new contributors (financial and in-kind) to the community by broadening VIVO’s reach in the sciences and biomedicine, in the humanities, and in libraries through closer integration with DuraSpace’s other communities supporting research data and
 
Develop a growing community of members who value VIVO and want to support it
 
Create a thriving, diverse community of VIVO committers and contributors
 
Figure out how to best attract, fund, organize, and retain resources for getting work done
 
Growing the user community and resources available for that community. The current scale of development and implementation is quite small. Though there are a number of high profile members, the scale if VIVO development and implementation must expand sign
 
Governance must develop and impart some momentum to the project.
 
Lack of focus- trying to be too many things, without clear value proposition
 
To avoid being fractured into too many initiatives and directions and to stick to our core missions.
 
Establishing a evolving road map definition and evaluation process that reflects the best ideas in our community, makes those ideas more tangible, and points out where the biggest challenges remain
 
Build trust in the user base that any new functionality will still align with VIVO's goals and core technical concepts
 
Building positive energy about future possibilities; not letting these discussions get set aside or drowned out by current problems or issues
 
How do we get from 100 installs to 200 to 500 to 1000?
 
Not enough boots on the ground to do the work.
 
Lack of resources to do the work needed
 
Mobilizing resources / raising funds
 
To grow our community and strengthen the options for providing help and support to members.
 
Clearly identifying (and aggressively promoting) benefits to institutions who sign on to contribute financially as members
 
Funding, sustainability
 
Sustainable funding
 
Plans for collaboration outside of VIVO are fuzzy, yet key for adoption and success of the consortium- be it the app, the ontology, or the data.
 
Becoming an integral part of the LOD ecosystem
 
Commercial profile solutions
 
The emergence of new players in research profiling external to institutions. Systems like researchgate, academia.edu and others could supplant the institutional drivers towards development and implementation of research profiling systems.

Theme: Technology

 
Data integration and standardization across multiple systems - Cerif, ORCID, SciENcv, Profiles, LOKI, etc.
 
Quality ontology/standards management and development for a better integration into the software stack (or for other applications as well).
 
Providing input for use case driven evolution of the VIVO-ISF data standard.
 
Maintaining the technical and feature advantage of VIVO over other platforms, particularly ones deployed outside of institutions, eg. academia.edu, researchgate, impact story, figshare and the like. All of these external platforms have compelling value propositions for individual academics and may impact on take up of VIVO at an institutional level. Effective integration with all of these external platforms may act to reduce the challenge they represent.
 
Better integration with content management systems from fedora (data management app development frameworks) to drupal (standard off the shelf content management) will prepare VIVO for a future of facilitating direct access to research data and related resources.
 
Finalising a solid draft of the VIVO-ISF ontology, developing mappings to other comon related otonlogies and driving the adoption of VIVO-ISF in other products will be instrumental in growing the develper base, tools and utilities around VIVO. Keeping third party sofware vendors along for the transition to this ontology (eg. Symplectic) will be key. Bringing other vendors to the table, eg. Elsevier Pure, etc will ensure that VIVO is a standard choice, rather than a difficult one for institutions looking to deploy a research profiling system. Future ontlology development will require better tool for migrating data and ingest pathways from one iteration of the ontology to another. Ensuring that existing VIVO installs have the documentation and support required to migrate to up-to-date versions of the platfrom/ontology will ensure that the landscape within the VIVO community does not become too fragmented.
 
Releasing VIVO Search or supporting a similar solution like DIRECT2Experts.
 
A key strength of the technology is the distribution (federation) of data ... this needs more attention in the beginning with stronger and more compelling demonstrations of that strength (this is particularly a problem when you don't know who is running VIVO)
 
Progress on VIVO search
 
To develop a VIVO search tool, to expand our capabilities to support new VIVO implementations and to add/improve features like CVs, visualizations, embedded content and other cool "gadgets"
 
Getting VIVO search up and running
 
More complete and accessible documentation
 
Researcher personalisation: allowing some look and feel choice (citation style etc)
 
SEO (how to get as much traffic as an academia.edu/ research gate )
 
Humanities and social sciences (HSS) ontology development
 
Grants management enhancements
 
Increasing the discoverability of and display of information presented via VIVO, eg. search engine optimisation by enhancement of templates with mappings of information to schema.org (for search engines) and markup for social sharing on facebook and twitter. Decreasing the "bounce-rate" and short duration of visits to VIVO sites by automating the production of "sticky" content that users will engage with. (Better linking between entities in vivo sites, not just as a product of direct relations, but for "similar" content etc)
 
Core – continue to improve modularity, with plug-and-play triple-stores and reasoners.
 
Core – lower the bar to entry with a binary distribution; no database, no Ant, no Tomcat, no Vagrant, just a Java runtime required.
 
A more modular software structure where user developed functionality could more easily be plugged into the software build
 
As part of the challenge outlined above - a specific set of tasks exist around modularising the codebase to allow for small targeted contributions of code and to facilitate the deployment and configuration of 3rd party modules that enhance base vivo functionality. Aligned with these activities is the facilitation of activites to allow VIVO to be deployed within a wide variety of software stack eg. use of alternate triple stores etc. (ie. more of a loosely coupled architecture) without harming the "easy to get started" experience for less technical users and institutions.
 
More data out. The community needs to give more effort into producing ( or facilitating the production of ) secondary data sets that are useable by administrative folks (aka donors, funders) and academics alike. Dave Eichmann at IOWA is doing a great job of this using harvested VIVO data.
 
Achieving performance optimisations
 
Make an easy to install, default configuration, application- reduce flexibility and increase simplicity
 
Ingest – select (or develop) an entry-level ingest tool and thoroughly support its use with tutorials, examples, and workshops.
 
Encouraging the release and development of community developed tools and software to support VIVO implementations.
 
Make it easier for new institutions to implement VIVO
 
Improve the value proposition for VIVO by reducing the effort required to create and maintain a VIVO.
 
No technical project manager tying things together and helping prioritize work, dependencies, etc.
 
Enforce standard code practices
 
Move the whole VIVO community onto VIVO 1.7 (including SciVal and Research Profiles) : reduce technical debt.
 
Ontology developers must become user-oriented, and with an eye toward practical performance levels.
 
Growth of Technical support community
 
Determining the community model for software development. Will VIVO continue to be primarily a single web application that aims to serve nearly all implementation needs (data display, editing, search, etc) or will the VIVO community become a group of solutions that can be deployed individually to solve related problems (like the Duraspace affiliated Hydra project). T, features, strategy, arch, doc
 
Increased clarity on the Vitro project, i.e. will it be promoted to other user bases or remain focused as a tool for the current faculty/researcher user base? Should it be renamed to amplify the VIVO brand, e.g. VIVO Core?
 
Is Vitro something the community wants to push forward as a solution? There is great potential value in Vitro as a platform to develop Linked Open Data solutions, which there is a a great deal of interest in related communities. Should this become more of a prominent offering? How does it fit in?
 
Reduce the barriers to entry to enable and demo the technology (this will probably come in the form of better demos and expanded coverage of the ingest use cases)
 
Complexity of implementation
 
Demonstrate more compelling integration use cases -- most institutions already have some form of the data being ingested, but it is not so clear how to quickly show the value add of VIVO with existing systems that may already have data but lack an understanding of its value in the VIVO context
 
Streamlining data ingest, improving user interface design/usability, cross-instance information sharing (e.g. cross-organization exchange of information about the same person, project, or topic)
 
How do we radically reduce the effort required to implement and maintain VIVO?
 
Best supporting backwards compatibility and data migration for older VIVO implementations as the VIVO-ISF ontology evolves.
 
Ensure the current VIVO user base upgrade to the recent version
 
Ensure future upgrades are less prone to problems
 
It seems like there are significant problems upgrading to some new releases of VIVO. How do we deal with this in the short-term for current adopters and longer-term for future adopters?
 
The original Indiana visualization tools are not being maintained. What do we do about that?
 
Addressing performance issues in the application and its software dependencies.
 
Identifying or providing more linked open data sources for commonly referenced individuals such as institutions, journals, and concepts (ex. MeSH).
 
Better improvements in key functions such as templating i.e which template renders what and gets included where?
 
Going beyond biomedical ontologies and taxonomies to be useful to everyone, no matter what their discipline
 
How do we identify the killer apps for VIVO?
 
Leveraging internal semantic data to expose data in form best suited for consumption and syndication by external systems (schema.org, google scholar, google news, facebook open graph, json-ld, etc)
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