Tag: Meeting

Orbital project team meeting: notes

Paul Stainthorp / / Meetings, Project Management

Here are the notes of the most recent Orbital project team meeting (31 January 2013).

Present: Nick Jackson, Harry Newton, Paul Stainthorp, Joss Winn.

The project team discussed the following development tasks. The aim is for the following to be completed by the end of February 2013:

  • Demonstratable AMS-CKAN–EPrints workflow in Orbital Bridge (a minimal but operational RDM infrastructure);
  • Researcher dashboard to include projects and project metadata;
  • Users able to display and create datasets in CKAN from within Orbital Bridge (N.B. need to check changes to CKAN APIs between versions);
  • Demonstrator using the DataCite test API (until a budget is agreed for use of the live DataCite service);
  • Ability to publish dataset metadata to EPrints Repository, with a complete ‘publish’ UI in Orbital Bridge (to be tested on the University’s upgraded EPrints 3.3 Repository in March) – questions over versioning/locking of deposited metadata to be resolved;
  • Researcher dashboard to include analytics fom EPrints, CKAN, AMS, and bibliometric/citation services – add links to external profiles (Scopus, WoS, ORCID, Google Scholar) in the first instance. ACTION: JW to contact Planning to discuss reporting from the researcher dashboard (also data.lincoln.ac.uk; bibiometrics).

JW presented the Orbital business case to the University Senior Management Team on 14th January 2013. JW to work with the Dean of Research (Lisa Mooney) / Deputy V-c (Ieuan Owen) to discuss ongoing resourcing for RDM.

ICT are undertaking a cloud major scoping study, including RDM storage requirements.

The draft RDM policy is to be presented to the Research & Enterprise committee in April.

NJ, HN and PS are working on the display of RDM training and documentation in Orbital Bridge, with versioned text stored as Markdown in Github. Pages in Orbital can be linked to Github.

The next RDM training for postgraduate students will take place on 6th March 2013. ACTION: PS to embed a calendar feed of training events on the Orbital website.

Upcoming events:

Orbital Team Meeting 22nd November

Joss Winn / / Meetings

Present

Nick Jackson
Melanie Bullock
Joss Winn
Bev Jones
Paul Stainthorp
Harry Newton

Apologies

Annalisa Jones

Agenda

Policy & Business Case
Training
Technical
Dissemination
Budget

Policy & Business Case

Ieuan Owen has taken over senior management of research at the University.

JW met with Lisa Mooney and IO. Agreed policy and business case should be presented as “research services”, and include case studies where these have benefitted researchers.

JW to present business case to SMT on December 17.

Policy should be more presented more as collegial support than a university mandate. Policy to be re-worded to this effect.

Presentation to SMT – focus on long tail, benefits to institution, risk and benefits, “publishing of research data helped massively” in gaining new research grant. Roles required for RDM and institutional positions.

RDM proposed to be through existing roles, except for Data Scientist. LM suggested research funding for study into how role will fit into Lincoln.

Action: JW to circulate draft documents for business case and SMT presentation to Orbital team.

Development of policy and business case are on schedule.

Training

PS has developed an outline of a 1 hour training workshop covering RDM. Action: PS to blog this outline.

No success in getting PhD students from engineering to partake in initial sessions, will talk instead to Graduate School.

Training is not technical or software/process specific, instead focussing on high level concepts and best practice for RDM. Target is for training to be prepared by Christmas, even if sessions are not running by that time.

Existing RDM blog is to be used as authoring environment for policy and training documents and syndicated to permanent RDM site. Action: PS to talk to NJ and HN about ingestion of this content to Bridge.

When new Library Repository Officer is appointed, it was agreed they should become part of Orbital team, and involved in RDM.

Technical

Technical development continuing broadly to plan, with exception of OpenStack which has suffered various setbacks.

JW to include conceptual overview of Orbital Bridge in presentation to SMT.

Meeting planned with ICT to discuss Awards Management System (AMS) integration last week was cancelled due to illness, and has been rescheduled. AMS integration is highly desirable, but not essential.

NJ/PS/BJ/HN spent time on mapping concept of a ‘dataset’ within Orbital Bridge to ePrints using the SWORD deposit method.

Most of SWORD mapping is also valid for DataCite specification, which also informs sanity checking of data within Orbital Bridge.

Cost for membership of a DOI service to go into business case to SMT. DOIs should be minted at point of deposit to ePrints (‘publication’), and not at point of original dataset creation.

AMS project IDs are key for collecting items in a project together. AMS could also handle unfunded projects, but this will require extension of the system and is outside its current scope. Orbital avoids reliance on AMS by using Nucleus data store as primary keys and project IDs.

Dedicated time should be set aside for OpenStack work.

Dissemination

JW and PS went to JISC project meeting in Nottingham. JW presented on adoption of CKAN, as a result Bristol have adopted CKAN. JISC programme manager is encouraged by seeing us using CKAN.

JW went to DCC forum in Cambridge.

Management of active data is now a high priority in the RDM field.

JW submitted abstract for conference in Cologne on providing critical evaluation of CKAN for academic use. The resultant paper, if accepted, could inform JISC on the use of CKAN in academia.

A member of the Orbital team should attend DCC conference in Amsterdam, including specific themes on “what is a data scientist”. This will help inform a new role at Lincoln.

Budget

Funds remain for hardware and dissemination. It was suggested that some of this might be spent on developing a more permanent hosting solution for the Nucleus data warehousing platform.

Money is also required for a dedicated CKAN server and Orbital Bridge server, as well as possibly a dedicated database server for CKAN’s DataStore.

It is necessary to integrate Orbital with research impact analysis and recording systems. Action: MB to send NJ/HN information on impact recording systems.

A job description is being written for the post of “Research Information Management Developer” in the Library.

First week meeting notes

Joss Winn / / Meetings

Paul and I met earlier to catch up on where we are after the first week of the Orbital project.

We have:

  • Advertised the Lead Developer post. Interviews taking place Wednesday 19th.
  • Completed NOV/JD for Developer post, to be advertised 01/02/12
  • Arranged the Steering Group calendar
  • Met with Jill Stewart, Head of Engineering and most of Project Team for an informal briefing
  • Set up a recurring monthly team meeting
  • Started to put together a reading list
  • Started to arrange for accommodation for the project team
  • Written an article for the Staff Magazine
  • Set up a project website (needs more work)
  • Set up an issue tracker, code repository and project mailing list

We need to:

  • Set up initial meeting with Engineering users
  • Paul to contact Mansur Darlington (ERIM project) and DCC
  • Joss to write Project Plan for 26-10-11
  • Project Website needs work: member bios, press pack, etc. Check given examples.
  • Clarify MRD Programme objectives for everyone at next team meeting,
  • Book conference attendance: USTLG Workshop on research data and Warwick conference. Also, DCC event in Cardiff.
  • Joss to send Simon Hodson, JISC Programme Manager, the project template
  • Lead Developer to join JISCMail when recruited
  • Paul and Joss to book on Programme launch workshop on 1-2/12.

Where appropriate, I’ve added these to our Project tracker.