Purpose

The Outreach Working Group (WG) oversees development of the ARKs-in-the-Open (AITO) community, as well as the promotion of awareness, understanding, and adoption of ARKs, the only major persistent identifier scheme that is truly open, decentralized, non-siloed, and non-paywalled.

Objectives

1. Campaign strategy. Develop a process to gather requirements, priorities and models for shared community and infrastructure management (eg, consider using the ARK community survey draft created by the BnF).

2. Communications and Marketing. Clearly articulate what ARKs are, how they can be used, and why they are essential (the “value proposition”) and implement a plan for promoting their adoption and use.  Examples include creating an “ARKs brochure” website using the arks.org domain name (similar to doi.org), keeping a world map of ARK assigning organizations updated automatically via geo-locations in the NAAN registry, organizing events such as the 2018 ARK summit, spreading the word in international conferences, etc. 

3. Counting ARKs. People want to know how many ARKs there are in the world (as ARKs can be assigned without permission from a central assigning authority), and some organizations may opt to let us harvest stats from them about how many ARKs they have assigned. Work with the Technical WG to (a) draft requirements for simple summary counts that ARK assigning organizations can voluntarily post and maintain, (b) specify how those counts, once harvested, should be publicized, and (c) recruit organizations to opt in.

Deliverables

• Kickoff: clarify objectives and assign roles for the three objectives

• Month 1: share draft campaign and awareness strategies with the AG for early feedback and share it with sustainability WG for review

• Month 2: draft requirements (and share with the Technical WG) and a vision for publicizing ARK counts; after feedback, begin implementing the campaign and awareness strategies

• Months 3-5: several rounds of review, feedback, and revision, including public review via the arks-forum list; expect also interaction with the Technical WG when they share designs and prototypes

• Month 6: work with the Technical WG to test the counting ARKs prototype; propose plan for ARKs brochure site; analysis from the results of the survey and share early basic results with the Technical WG for the needs for the standardization process

• Months 7-12: reach out to recruit more organizations with ARKs to be counted

• Month 11: production-ready brochure site, including publicity about the survey; production-ready ARK counting is in place

• Month 12: updated WG objectives and deliverables for the coming year, with an accordingly updated overall AITO roadmap

Resources

• Not yet built out arks.org domain name (currently pointing to n2t.net)

• n2t.net – current ARKs “home” website; detailed background information on ARKs is available at http://n2t.net/e/ark_ids.html

• Notes from ARK "Experts" meetings in 2018, with discussions of surveys, ARK spec changes, counting ARKs, sustainability, etc

  • Latest draft survey

• Technical WG

• General WG features common across AITO working groups

• AITO roadmap

Working Group Members

• Bertrand Caron, (AG Liaison), BnF 

• Peter Sachs Collopy, Caltech

• Kurt Ewoldsen, CDL

• Maria Gould, CDL

• John B Howard (AG Liaison), University College Dublin
• John Kunze, CDL
• Bess Missell, Smithsonian Libraries
• Julien Antoine Raemy, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland

• Tracy Seneca, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Carlos Norberto Authier, independent

Meeting Times

Teleconferences are generally held once a month, 16:00-17:00 UTC, on the fourth Thursday. Connection details included in calendar invitations.

Communication Channels

aito-outreach-wg@googlegroups.com, archived at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/aito-outreach-wg

Agendas and Notes