Tech Lead Search.  Thanks to all who participated in the tech lead search open calls and to those who completed on-line candidate feedback.  We have three strong candidates and received significant and extremely useful feedback from the on-line process.  We expect an offer to be made very soon.

CASRAI/ORCID event in Barcelona.  I had an opportunity to attend the CASRAI/ORCID event in Barcelona, as did Brian Lowe.  Presentations over the two day conference focused on research impact – how to assess the value to society of research expenditures by funding agencies.  The conference was focused on European processes and there are perspectives from the EU as well as each country's national perspectives.  VIVO can play an important role in assembling data regarding research for the purpose of assessing impact.  See trip report https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/7QodB 

Mozilla Science Global Sprint. The Mozilla Global Science team will hold its second annual global sprint on June 4-5.  This is an opportunity for people in the open source science community to learn about VIVO, and a chance for us to spend a couple of days producing things of value for VIVO.  I plan to be on line those days contributing to the sprint.  Please contact Alex Viggio if you have ideas about how we might participate.

Upcoming events.  Several events are coming up of interest to the VIVO community:

• Mozilla Science Global Sprint.  On-line/world-wide.  June 4-5. See https://www.mozillascience.org/global-sprint-2015
• Open Repositories.  Indianapolis, IN.  June 8-9.  See http://or2015.net 
• VIVO Conference.  Cambridge, MA.  August 12-15.  See http://vivoconference.org. Register today!
• VIVO Europe.  TIB Hanover.  Sept 9.
• International Semantic Web Conference.  Bethlehem, PA.  Oct 11-15.  See http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/

Apps and Tools call. Ted Lawless reports "On May 21st, the VIVO Apps and Tools working group met.  Jim Blake from the Cornell team described how he used the VIVO SPARQL API to debug an issue (issue 898 https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/VIVO-898). He walked everyone through techniques for saving SPARQL queries as text files and running them from a terminal with curl.  Rodney Jacobson, from Dartmouth College, demonstrated a VIVO data ingest tool that he developed with Python.  His unique approach is able to learn from sample data loaded into a VIVO and map new data in CSV format to VIVO RDF.  Rodney's code is available on Github (https://github.com/jacobsonr/vivo-csv-tools). 

The Apps and Tools call will meet again on June 19th.  Presentation slots are still available (5 to 10 minutes) and interested presenters can sign up at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18t0TNc56Xx1wPlDIgmV4lEp03qNM1mRRG8Un3mq8_gU/edit"

Leadership Group meeting June 2.  The VIVO Leadership Group will have their quarterly meeting June 2.  They will review progress since the March meeting at the Duraspace Summit, review the budget and consider a proposal to increase the size of Steering Group.  If your institution is not yet participating in the Leadership Group, you may wish to consider your level of membership and how you might participate.  The Leadership Group meets again at the conference.

Using the wiki. The VIVO wiki can be daunting to all of us.  It is big (>1700 pages), and has quite a bit of historical (one might say obsolete) content.  Here are some tips for using the wiki:

• If you see something wrong, fix it.  It's wiki.  You can edit it.
• To find something, use the "Search the VIVO wiki" in the left hand menu.  It has a variety of ways to find things in the wiki.
• If you are writing for the wiki, use some tags.  they help people find things.  In particular, if you are writing meeting notes, please use the "meeting-notes" tag.  Pages with the "meeting-notes" tag automatically show up on the meeting notes page in left hand menu.  Thanks Violetta Ilik for introducing this to the wiki.
• Take a look at the left hand menu.  I hope this presents the high-level topics of interest to the VIVO community.  These topics drive much of the conversation and over time, the material under each should improve through our joint effort.  We have a current task force – the Implementation Documentation Task Force – that is working to improve the "Planning a VIVO Implementation" See https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/1KMOB for an overview of their charge and to join the effort.
• See https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/AQYGAg for some general tips on writing and editing the VIVO wiki.

Got a question or comment? If at any time you have any comment or question about the project, please feel free to send me an email.  I’d love to hear from you.

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director