Notes: Conference call 11-06-09
Vendor subgroup minutes
Attendees:
Fred Zhang, MSU
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2
Andy Ingham, UNC-CH
Foster Zhang, JHU
David Kennedy, Duke
notes - kennedy
AGENDA
- Updates
- 2nd tier vendors
- list on wiki
- draft letter on wiki
- process for institutions to "sign up" - expectations on participating institutions
Action Items
[AI] All - continue recruitment conversations at our respective campuses
[AI] Woodbeck - draft a SurveyMonkey survey for gathering participants
[AI] Kennedy - contact some individuals to participate in this process
[AI] Ingham - refine the wording of the letter to properly set expectations
[AI] Woodbeck - send each of us the name of our campus' designated executive
Discussion
Updates:
Kennedy - Worked with Laura Wrubel and Mark Williams to identify 2nd tier vendors
- Initial draft of invitation on wiki
- Continued conversation at Duke for inviting vendors to join InCommon
Ingham - Created a case study document on the wiki for UNC's ezproxy. Intends for this to be referenced from cookbook. The Gliffy diagramming plug in to the InCommon wiki was very useful to creating the diagram in the wiki. Might be good for a few more use cases to go along with those that already exist.
- Email to ezproxy listserv a few weeks back
- Continuing the conversation at UNC for inviting vendors to join InCommon.
Fred Zhang - MSU is definitely ready to participate more in the vendor group efforts. Fred is in IT group. They are well coordinated with library and Shibboleth, and run both library systems and ezproxy for the library. Well suited organizationally.
Discussion of 2nd tier of vendors:
Feel the need in our current conversations at our universities that we need some concreteness in a couple of areas - a draft letter, a sense for what vendors are being targeted, a sense for who else might participate, and a sense for what the expectations of involvement will be.
Agreement among this group that the draft letter needs some work, but is concise enough that we can use for conversations at our respective campuses. Letter needs some better language to lower the expectations that every campus on the letter has the same immediate capabilities to participate, and that in some cases this is laying the groundwork.
Agree that to have sufficient weight to the invitation, we should have a minimum number of universities on a letter of about 10 or 12. Probably our best bet at this point is to recruit from institutions and individuals who have actively participated in the InCommon Library Services group over the past few years.
Discussed what expectation would be of institutions that sign the letter. Agree that there should be three ways to participate. The first is that there would be a lead institution for each vendor; the lead institution would coordinate communication, coordinate testing by various campuses, and act as sponsor for InCommon membership (or potentially coordinate the sponsorship). The second way to particpate would be to act as one of the tester institutions. The third would be to support the effort but not necessarily be willing or able to test right away.
For these different levels of participation, we weren't sure how high up within our organizations we would need to go for a signature. In other words, who at an institution would need to authorize that they would be a tester on one of these letters. Not clear, but may be a barrier for participation if we require more than the lead institutions to go all the way up the chain to get a UL or CIO backing.
We also discussed the risk that we could get 12 institutions to sign a letter, and if they don't have sufficient backing at their own institutions, a vendor could join InCommon and 6 months later, none of the 12 institutions would be using the technology. Recognition that there is a lot of latency at our institutions for making change, but there is the same latency on the vendor side, so we might as well start the process now on both ends.
Sponsorship may be a barrier at our institutions. Once you get to the right person at your campus and convince them to take action, the steps to sponsor are simple. But there is often a disconnect from the library staff who are motivated and the person sufficiently high up in IT that needs to sign the letter. Dean will supply each of us with the name of our own campus' designated InCommon executive.
All 4 institutions on the call will be continuing appropriate conversations at our respective campuses for participation in this process.
Dean will work on Survey Monkey approach that we will send out.
When it is ready, we will want to spatter this survey as well as we can. InC-libsrvcs, incommon-participants and ezproxy list. We will also do some individual recruitment immediately.