Overview

The project team held an initial kick-off meeting on February 20/21 in Berkeley, CA, to realign all team members and other participants around the current status of the DMPTool and new objectives supported through the grant.  Following the kick-off meeting, the team has begun weekly conference call meetings and developed specific project deadlines and goals.  A complete meeting report was prepared.

Technical Team

The initial focus has been on posting of application developer positions, interviewing and hiring, and review of proposed technical specifications.  One developer is scheduled to start work on 4/1, and additional interviews are finishing up for the second position.  Technical specifications are being reviewed and updated and plans are underway for moving forward with use cases and wireframes.

Communications/Outreach Team

This team has focused thus far on filling the 50% roles for the Sloan and IMLS grants and recruiting and preparing advisory boards.  The IMLS outreach coordinator has been hired and the Sloan outreach coordinator position is still being processed by UIUC.  Both the Researcher and Administrative advisory boards are nearly full and initial meetings are presently being planned.  Additionally, Facebook and Twitter presences have been established and are gaining followers.

The process of implementing the proposed governance structure has begun, and originating institutions are now signing the official Collaboration Agreement document.  We will then begin enrolling institutions that have setup institutional authentication, and then we will shift into public enrollment of new “Partners”.

Metrics

We have not yet fully settled on metrics for use in evaluating 1) project success or 2) impact of the new DMPTool.  We have an extensive list produced at the kick-off meeting, but are still sorting and determining best choices.  We plan to gather feedback from the advisory boards on this topic as well.

Overall Project

We remain generally on track to finish within 12 months, considering the startup delay from receiving and processing awards at the main institutions.   Once our key hires of application developers and community engagement/outreach coordinator are settled, we should proceed more smoothly.   We continue to get inquiries into new collaboration and integration opportunities, and remain aware of new developments with funders (ie. February OSTP mandate).  Recent opportunities include integration with Columbia’s IEDADATA DMPTool, VIVO, and eagle-i.

-Andrew Sallans, University of Virginia Library, DMPTool2 Project Manager