August 21, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert, Jon Corson-Rikert , Kristi Holmes,  Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald, Eric Meeks, Andi Ogier,  Bart Ragon, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio

= note taker

Work group chairs

Chris Barnes, Ted Lawless, Jim Blake

Ex officio

debra hanken kurtz , Jonathan Markow

Regrets

Mike Conlon, Melissa Haendel

Dial-In Number:  

NEW DIAL-IN: 641-715-3650 (was 209-647-1600), Participant code: 117433#

Agenda

Notes

Updates

1. Web site launch now expected week of August 31
2. Email list consolidation, move to Google Groups, expected in Septembe
3. Membership drive begins in earnest, follow-up from Leadership/Steering at conference.

Conference 2016 — Julia

• Conference Brids of a Feather session Friday about the 2016 conference with Kristi, Mike, Julia, and Mike Winkler
• will start a task force to encourage participation
  • looking for people to take on the marketing and sponsorship roles
• Designing Events has promised a timetable for the year with milestones
• discussed lining up someone as co-chair who would then serve as conference chair for 2017 — a backup person learning the ropes
• Exciting for the Colorado crowd; may be able to recruit local volunteers from VIVO projects and/or local students
• Any options for tours or other ancillary activities unique to Denver? New train station
• The venue has been confirmed — Marriott City Center on California Street
• Dates are August 17-19
  
  

• Went well — large registration bump over last year (185 over 165); great attendance supported in part by the Boston location; would be good to get word out early since Denver won’t attract as many drop-in people; workshop registration was also up
  • Most of the bump due to not being co-located with SciTS — a number registered for that and attended VIVO
  • There was a bump at the end this year, too
  • The bump in the workshop attendance is good for the bottom line
• From Mike:
  • VIVO disambiguation data on 7 million authors assembled by Harvard
  • Recommendations for SEO
  • Thomson Reuters continuing strong support
• We need to find ways to get people plugged into the process and committed to participating throughout — so that we can be more proactive than reactive
• Designing Events had to spend a lot of time chasing after the chair and conference chair to get material in time for deadlines — we need delegates to handle key parts
• Kristi can share the templates for documents, good candidates for the program review committee, ideas for speakers, instructions for setting up the conference submission and review site in Easy Chair
• Based on previous experience, inviting keynotes beginning in January was too late
• Should we schedule a meeting with Designing Events soon? Once we have the calendar, put together a proposal for a VIVO task force and put together the charge based on the milestones, to involve additional volunteers from the beginning
  • We may not need to meet with Designing Events right away
• Suggested that Designing Events include Michael Winkler and Julia Trimmer in the post-conference wrap-up call
• The Symplectic Pre-Conference created a down day for people not attending workshops; may have possibly increased workshop attendance, and could cause some people to leave the Conference early
  • Symplectic felt that people were burned out after the VIVO conference in previous years; they are considering a two-day conference
  • Maybe we should have workshops helpful to Elements users
  • About half of the Symplectic event attendees were staying for VIVO
  • Would be good to have conversations early about schedule; maybe one workshop could focus on Elements as a way to bridge events
• Do we usually send out a survey after the Conference? yes — we might include some questions about the timing of the Symplectic event
  
  

1. Has general topic questions and also technical topics
2. People do local extensions of the ontology all the time, but we are building a community approach
3. Urge them to think of a community approach that leverages resources the community has developed including the wiki, the implementation fest, and the help available from Symplectic Elements and other vendors
4. English should be workable, but the contacts at the Interamerican Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) would be able to provide technical help in Spanish
   • and there are VIVOs in Spain.  See Sites implementing VIVO
5. Challenges — the hardest part of a VIVO implementation has nothing to do with the technology — connecting with data stewards and other stakeholders, the need for a champion who can carry the effort forward and orchestrate the process.  Despite an open source project being free, it’s free like a puppy — requires care and feeding to thrive. This is a great way to plug into the community - other people have already encountered every problem. The engagement and outreach sections of the wiki have great resources about these institutionally-focused issues
6. Feeder systems were very challenging — on the nature of technical help needed, especially when blending the Windows stack of Symplectic with the Java stack of VIVO
7. VIVO could be part of a larger institutional research data integration plan, to have an overview of who’s doing what and where the strengths are
8. Try to make sure what they want out of their installation, since different institutions want different things.  Is it branding of the researchers, or data analytics, or to foster collaboration?
9. What are the main benefits? Benefits to faculty members where they have an institutionally-asserted profile with their officially developed profiles and data put out there where it can be linked to, shared with other sites, etc.
   • There’s a growing ecosystem around VIVO to bring data in and repurpose it from VIVO for other purposes
10. What is the relationship from VIVO to Scholars (the people) — this goes back to the cultural perspective; VIVO can be implemented at the grassroots level through integration with the library and library relationships with departments and individual researchers, or can be a top-down, institution-wide mandate. Having a high-level champion is very helpful in keeping things moving; a strong engagement from IT helps on the technical side, and involving the library helps to leverage the service model and relationships that the Library has
    • The faculty are not always the biggest fans, simply because they see any requests for data as a time imposition. The values come for faculty when data can be populated from existing systems or Elements, with only minimal participation from them, and then populate department sites
    • Younger researchers see VIVO as a big benefit in establishing their digital footprint — it’s a presence my university establishes for me
    • The fact that it’s open and not controlled by the marketing people is a plus
    • And since the university team updates the data, that helps build buy-in from the researchers over time — they have less maintenance to do on their web presence

Action Items

• Jon will transfer notes and fill out a first pass at the questions for Debra's South American trip (Google Doc)