Jekyll2026-03-05T13:03:18+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/feed.xmlResearch Software Engineers InternationalThe website of the international RSE community International RSE day2021-07-29T00:00:00+00:002021-07-29T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2021/07/29/International-RSE-dayPhoto by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash.

Authors

  • Ben van Werkhoven, on behalf of the Council

The International Council of RSE Associations has decided to declare the second Thursday in October to be “International RSE Day”. The first annual International RSE Day will be Thursday, 14th October 2021.

The International RSE Day is to celebrate Research Software Engineers around the world and raise awareness for the increasingly relevant discipline of Research Software Engineering. The International Council encourages national and local RSE associations to hold regular or special events on this day, such as:

  • Keynote talks
  • Networking events
  • National meetups, possibly in combination with the annual AGM
  • Awareness campaigns
  • National RSE information sessions

The Council is happy to list and advertise International RSE Day events on its website.

]]>International Council Endorsement for RSE Conferences2021-07-29T00:00:00+00:002021-07-29T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2021/07/29/council-conference-endorsementPhoto by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash.

Authors

  • Ben van Werkhoven, on behalf of the Council

The International Council of RSE Associations is happy to endorse RSE conferences and similar events. The Council will list and promote endorsed events on its website and other communication channels, and encourage its members to promote these events to their membership. In turn, the event organizers are expected to mention the endorsement on their websites and communication.

The following are required for endorsement by the Council:

  • The event should be clearly RSE branded, e.g. through organisation by a national RSE association, or a clear thematic focus.
  • The event should be open to all. Reasonable fees can be charged for participation.
  • The event should be publicly advertised online and a link provided for inclusion on the Council website, and ideally published via public calendar for inclusion in the Council programme of events.
  • The event should have a Code of Conduct. Event organizers are welcome to adopt the Council’s Code of Conduct if they don’t have their own.

If you would like the International Council of RSE Associations to endorse your event, please contact the council.

We would appreciate it if talks were recorded and made publicly available after the event. Ideally, all video recordings should have captioning and subtitles translated to English (automated translation). We are happy to include links to the recordings on the Council’s website.

]]>How RSE Associations work financially2021-04-02T00:00:00+00:002021-04-02T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2021/04/02/RSE-financial-organizationsPhoto by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash.

Authors

  • Daniel S. Katz
  • Anne Claire Fouilloux
  • Ben van Werkhoven
  • Frank Löffler
  • Stephan Druskat

This blog post is intended to talk about how different RSE associations financially function (purely volunteer; income from membership, events, sponsors, etc.; costs for events, staff, other).

While it is now being posted as a blog, it’s really a snapshot in time, as we expect the RSE associations to change their financial models over time. This post may be useful to the existing organizations that want to consider changes, and to new organizations that need to make financial decisions.

  • be-RSE: The Belgian Research Software Association is not a formal organisation yet, nor is it financially independent. All efforts are driven by volunteers of various organisations. At the moment, two organisations, VIB and KU Leuven are driving the activities.

  • de-RSE: Is a formal association with charitable status (includes tax exemptions), financed through membership fees (€60/year for full membership; €30/year for discounted membership), used exclusively to support chartered aims, e.g., local groups, national conference, etc. Financial support for deRSE19 came from corporate and charitable sponsors and the Gesellschaft für Informatik. Society uses academic and commercial infrastructure for work (GWDG’s chat and cloud, GitHub).

  • Nordic-RSE: Does not have its own finances as of yet. All efforts are driven by volunteers from various organizations. No membership fees yet.

  • NL-RSE: Is not a formal organization in any way. Membership is only to the mailing list. NL-RSE is backed by the Netherlands eScience Center which has promised a community manager to actually organize events on behalf of NL-RSE. The Netherlands eScience Center has also paid for the venue costs at the NL-RSE conference in 2019. We had several companies approach us for sponsoring the 2019 conference, but since we are not a formal organization with a bank account we couldn’t accept any sponsoring at the time.

  • RSE-AUNZ: Is not financial as yet. All effort is volunteer. We are interested in finding out about paths that get us to a place where we can begin financing our own website, media, events, etc.

  • Society of RSE: Is registered with the UK Charity Commission as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with Charity Number 1182455. As such, it has a bank account and annual reports finances to the government and to its membership (e.g. in 2020).

  • US-RSE: Is not currently a formal organization in any way. Membership is only via our mailing list. As of early April 2021, we are in the process of setting up a financial account for the organization via Open Collective Foundation.

]]>Introducing the International Council of RSE Associations2021-01-27T00:00:00+00:002021-01-27T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2021/01/27/introducing-the-international-council-of-RSE-associationsPhoto by Mat Reding on Unsplash.

Authors

  • Daniel S. Katz
  • Stephan Druskat
  • Ian Cosden
  • Paul Richmond
  • Anne Fouilloux

A blog post from the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop 2020.

The RSE movement has been very successful, leading to thousands of both formally titled and self-described RSEs, about 7 national or multinational RSE associations, and a series of international RSE events (SORSE). This growth has led to a challenge, that there is no formal mechanism to ensure that the national associations collaborate internationally. This means that there is no clear view on who should be running international branded events such as an “International RSE Conference” and no active coordination to ensure that the national associations don't compete for conference dates by accident. In addition to organisational aspects, associations often face similar governance and policy challenges as well as potentially duplicating initiatives that could be run across associations. At the same time there is a need to provide resources and a point of contact for aspiring communities. It is necessary to find a working model for communities with a broad spectrum of maturity levels, giving a forum to the ones further ahead in the process of establishing an initiative, while providing means for others to get started.

The solution

Based on discussion at the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop, a set of national and multinational associations

have created the “International Council of RSE Associations” (“The Council”) as a forum to communicate and formally meet to ensure cohesion between associations and to provide a platform for open discussion around international issues and affairs. This enables collective decision making, collaboration among national associations as well as peer support.

Each member association has agreed to send two representatives (members of the association’s leadership group, well versed in current RSE events and capable of speaking on behalf of the association) to the Council, which meets virtually at least two times per year, and likely more as we start up.

The initial goals of the International Council of RSE Associations are:

1. Communication and Coordination

This includes coordination of participation in other interest groups, such as the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Research Data Alliance (RDA); coordination of advocacy, developing a common argument for advocating for the implementation of Research Software Engineering for institutions, policy makers, funders, etc.; event coordination, to minimize the likelihood that associations schedule conflicting events; international RSE event branding, that the Council can approve of the use of the term “International RSE” for events; and international conference planning, such as potentially an international conference rotated around societies/associations.

2. Discussion Forum

The member associations can raise questions and set the agenda for discussion on topics pertaining to the organization and operation of a national association, to create a general forum to share knowledge, experiences, and best practices surrounding the formation and growth of national RSE associations, and to make this knowledge available to both established and new associations.

3. Avoiding and resolving conflicts between Associations

Regular Council meetings provide a formal and public opportunity to ask questions to other associations, particularly where other associations are interested in the answers. And should a substantive conflict between associations arise, the Council will provide a formal path to conflict resolution. Member associations can bring the issue to the Council meeting and request the Council work together to resolve the issue.

4. Development of new national associations

The Council will help and to encourage initiatives to develop new national RSE associations. The new establishing associations can attend the council as observing participants, and at the end of Council meetings, these observing participants can ask questions to the Council or offer items for discussion. This is intended to give the leaders of burgeoning communities an opportunity to listen and learn from Council associations to further support the growth of their communities. Once matured, the new associations can become full members of the Council. While the addition of future association members will be voted on by the existing Council membership, the Council currently thinks that important criteria for membership are:

  • Creating an identifiable and branded web presence
  • Agreeing to participate in the International RSE survey
  • Creating a unique and branded forum (persistent chat (channel), mailing list, etc) consisting of 20 or more individuals with active participation from members
  • Uniquely representing the RSE community in one or more countries
  • Having had at least one (documented) group activity in the 12 months before joining the Council, such as a community event, community call, annual general meeting, or similar

Contact

The Council's first meeting was 25 January 2021 and it plans to meet on a regular basis throughout the year. The Council can be contacted at [email protected].

]]>How do RSE groups work?2020-11-19T00:00:00+00:002020-11-19T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2020/11/19/how-do-RSE-groups-workPhoto by form on PxHere (CC-0).

Authors

A blog post from the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop 2020.

The Challenge: New Roles in Old Institutions

Research Software Engineers (RSEs) are popping up everywhere across the research landscape. They may manage research data, administer High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, or develop scientific software, to name a few of their activities. RSEs have the background and skills to deal with the unique challenges that arise from the technical side of science. As demand for their services booms, a single RSE may quickly find themself managing a whole RSE group. However, their roles are rather novel, so it can be difficult to structure such a group or find a place in relatively rigid academic structures. How should a fledgling group leader organize their group? What are the pitfalls of different structures/models?

Our Approach: Learn What Works (And What Doesn’t)

A lot can be learned from existing groups and what has led them to adopt a particular group structure. We plan to examine how existing groups work, collate existing information, and offer a kind of ‘recipe book’ for founding new ones. However, it is clear that this is not a “one-size-fits all” problem, and that groups differ along a number of crucial dimensions. At the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop, held remotely on September 2020, we developed the following strategy:

  • Identify existing knowledge, and knowledge gaps about RSE groups
  • Define the dimensions along which groups differ to provide guidance on the organisation of new groups
  • Develop a method to address knowledge gaps by surveying existing RSE groups
  • Organise the compiled information into a “recipe book” with guidance for existing and newly created RSE groups

How RSE Groups Work

There is a wide variety of team structures and processes within RSE groups, which of course depend on the group’s size, amongst other things. For example, teams can be structured based on projects, based on cross-role teams (e.g., scrum teams), or based on skills (e.g., web interfaces, HPC).

How specific projects are assigned to teams often follows this structure and what’s possible is often constrained by the details of how funding and collaboration works within each organisation. Similarly, the more institutional support/core funding a group has, the easier it is for a group to operate as a unified team assigning members to projects and activities flexibly according to skills and experience. This in turn makes it easier to have technical specialisms, agile team approaches or multiple levels of seniority than if the group has to be more rigid about which people are hired to work on which grants, for instance. Another aspect of this mapping is the use of agile principles, which can be very appealing to RSE groups, but hard to apply in practice in many cases, as many specific methodologies developed within commercial teams (such as scrum) don't fit a typical RSE group context for various reasons. For example, it's rare to have multiple developers able to focus 100% on one project, and in fact, some groups don't allow developers to do this to avoid potential "project capture" and single points-of-failure.

In addition, an overall RSE group includes people with different roles (e.g. team line managers, technical project managers, lead developers, architects, programmers, scrum masters, QA testers) and these roles need to be considered in both developing a group structure and making effective assignments of projects to groups. Another aspect is how these roles fit into the organisation's formal titles and human resources structure, and specifically, for each of those more formal roles, what are the titles, salaries, requirements, etc. One of a group’s activities should be to mentor the staff to advance in these roles, and to get the training, education, and on-the-job experience needed for them to do so.

A group also needs to attract (or choose) projects to work on, hopefully based on some strategy and not just doing whatever work is available to keep the group members employed. This is tied to the financial model of the group, which could include full or partial institution (core) support for some or all of the team members, support based on the group or its members writing proposals to a funding body, either for group-developed projects or those done jointly with users, and support based on “customers” approaching the group with work to be done.

A last aspect to groups is where they fit into their organizational structure, such as reporting to the research part of the organization and being responsible for all disciplines, reporting to the IT part of the organization and being responsible for all disciplines, or reporting to a smaller unit (a department, a school, a faculty) and being focused on work within that unit’s discipline.

One example is the Netherlands eScience Center, which currently uses a mixed model where some RSEs are working as part of a team while others are working in one or several more loosely formed project-related teams. The formal teams follow the agile methodology of their choice, whether it’s Scrum or Kanban. The teams work on a set of related projects, either from the same domain or using similar technology. The teams often focus on a specific project in each sprint or iteration, while the other projects are on hold. Within teams, each project that is worked on by the team has a product/project owner, who directly communicates with the stakeholders of the project and defines the stories/issues for the team to work on. The RSEs who are not in a formal team work on a more individual basis usually on multiple projects simultaneously, having more control themselves on how they divide their time over projects and other activities. Projects typically span multiple years, so the engineer-project assignments do not change that often.

Dimensions of RSE Groups

The description above illustrates that there are many different operational models for RSE groups and that groups differ across a number of dimensions. If we are to better inform new groups, a system of categorisation would help organise the content of our recipe book so that it is relevant. The categories could provide a way to arrange information that new groups could easily find documents that relate to their situation, or to find other groups in a similar environment to compare their solutions for common problems. For example, information about possible management approaches may depend on the size of the group: management approaches for a group of 50 RSEs may not be appropriate for a new group of 5 RSEs. As a first proposal, we list some key categories of RSE groups:

  • Business/financial model - Through full or partial core institutional funding? A “customer” approach? Active participation in grant proposals?
  • Management structure - What roles do the RSEs take on within the group? How is the group organized on a day-to-day basis? How do members' careers progress? Who has leadership and makes the strategy?
  • Demographics of the individual RSEs - What is their professional background? Do they come from academia? Do they have a PhD?
  • Working culture - Do they promote open-source? Do they seek to exploit commercial opportunities? How flexible are the working hours and work environment?
  • Institutional context - How does the group fit within its housing institution? What is their origin/history? Who are they accountable to? How large are they?
  • Technical focus - What kind of services do they provide? (HPC, Web-Platforms, Databases, etc.)
  • Subject focus - What fields of science are they active in? How specialized are they?

Knowledge Base

We already have a reasonable amount of knowledge about the methods and dimensions of existing groups from previous activities, including surveys, publications, and materials banks.

The surveys include:

In addition, we know of two relevant papers and one dataset. "Research Software Development & Management in Universities: Case Studies from Manchester's RSDS Group, Illinois' NCSA, and Notre Dame's CRC" (preprint) by Katz et al. reviews three exemplar RSE groups (two in the US and one in the UK.) It covers group/governance structure, financing, career path within groups, as well as advantages of having RSE groups. "The Industrial Ecology Digital Lab" by Stadler et al. describes the setup of the Industrial Ecology Digital Laboratory, focusing on the tasks and infrastructure.

Finally, there are several resources containing information on how different RSE groups work. The material banks below are a good starting point for finding further information:

Repositories of RSE Groups

There are a set of existing lists that include groups identifying themselves as RSE groups, Existing groups can add themselves to the appropriate list.

However, large parts of the academic infrastructure is managed by organizational structures which are basically RSE groups but currently do not self identify as such (HPC groups, IT support groups, and so on). If you do establish an RSE group, please make sure to be added to one of these repositories.

Surveying Existing RSE Groups

While RSEs are a relatively new concept, there is already a considerable knowledge base available. To gather more data, we could collect unstructured data through interviews, with topics based on the existing knowledge base. To collect structured data, we could create a short on-line survey. In either case, to begin this work, we would need to:

  • Formulate questions for leaders of existing groups
  • Decide whether to use interviews or a survey, and if there we will use a survey, will it be new or included in an existing survey
  • Obtain human subjects (IRB, ethics) permission for our study

We could also aim at collaboratively writing a report or paper with multiple RSE group leaders, either after a survey/interviews or independently.

Next Steps

A lot can be learned from existing RSE groups. However, this knowledge is dispersed across groups, diverse and context specific and often not well documented. Sharing and collecting this knowledge will require a large community effort. Members of existing groups will need to share their knowledge by contributing to surveys. And volunteers in the community, such as the authors of this blog post, will need to work together to collate and synthesise this information. The proposed ‘recipe book’ will help collect and organise this knowledge to assist in the foundation of new RSE groups.

]]>Working Group: Single Entry Point and Marketplace for the RSE Community & RSE Profile Map2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:002020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2020/11/03/single-entry-point-and-marketplace-for-the-RSE-community-RSE-profile-mapPhoto by delfi de la Rua on Unsplash.

Authors: Julia Damerow, Martin Thomas Horsch, Stephan Janosch

At the RSE Leadership Workshop in September 2020, this working group came together to discuss two main objectives. Part of the time, we talked about plans to provide a single entry point to the international RSE community. This discussion was based on previous work by which the website https://researchsoftware.org/ was established. The main goals were to make all relevant information on RSE communities around the world findable and accessible both to insiders and outsiders, and to explore the idea of a digital marketplace. Such a marketplace was envisioned to be a place where people and institutions could find the RSE support that they require and that would let individual RSEs and RSE groups acquire new projects. The other topic, we discussed was the idea of creating an RSE “profile map” that could serve as a tool for RSEs and non-RSEs alike to describe the different tasks and skill sets of an RSE. Since such a profile map would need a home, we considered this being part of the single entry point discussion.

Single Entry Point and Marketplace for the RSE Community

Previous work has already created a website at https://researchsoftware.org/ that serves as an umbrella for the different RSE communities around the world. However, the general opinion seems to be that this website could be more than what it currently is. It could (and possibly should) become the single entry point for the RSE community. The website could serve as a gateway for anyone interested in RSE work or the RSE job profile to find geographically or intellectually relevant RSE communities. It could also map out how the different communities relate to each other, and to communicate communities-spanning activities (such as the RSE Leadership workshop or the RSE conference).

We explored several possible changes and additions to the existing website and categorized them as either realizable immediately, realizable in the medium- to long-term, or as needing decisions/discussion from other groups. Below is the list of items we discussed and crowd-sourced with the rest of the workshop participants.

Realizable immediately

  • The list of associations should be checked and updated as necessary.
  • A list of domain-specific RSE communities should be added.
  • An event section that lists past events (RSE Leadership workshops, conferences) and future events should be added.
  • A resource section could be added that would link to other relevant RSE sources (e.g. journals where RSEs can submit their work).
  • Recommendations of a standardized description for RSE use cases (draft) could be provided.

Realizable in the medium- to long-term

  • The website could aggregate other RSE blogs, or at least pull blog posts that are of interest to the wider RSE community.
  • The website could host a crowd-sourced map of RSEs and RSE groups around the world.
  • Similar to the aggregated blog, the website could aggregate the Twitter feeds and event calendars from the different RSE communities.
  • The resource section could also contain information on ongoing (large) projects, open source initiatives that seek contributions, relevant funding agencies, etc.

Needing discussion/decisions from other groups

  • It would be useful if the website had some concrete ways to get in touch with someone, e.g. through an email address. This however raises the question of who will be responsible for the website and its maintenance (in which “who” might refer to an organization/association and not necessarily to a person).
  • Another question is the implementation of the website. Jekyll, while easy to use, does put certain limitations on the functionality. If, for example, the community would like to add a forum to the site, another solution might be better suited. For this though, questions about who will ultimately be responsible for the site and its maintenance need to be decided.
  • Some social aspects might be nice to have. If users could create searchable profiles and add projects they would like to collaborate on, the community could use such a “marketplace” to connect across countries and disciplines.

RSE Profile Map

The profession of an RSE, as rapidly growing as it is, is still not as widely known as we might like it to be. There are probably many people out there that do RSE work but do not realize that there is a whole community for them. Similarly, the message of the importance of RSEs in science has still not reached every corner of the world. One possible reason (even if it is a minor one) is that RSEs do many different tasks, have many different responsibilities, and have very different skill sets. This makes it on the one hand hard to find the community in the first place (just recently someone told me: “Thank you! I didn’t know what to call the job I want to do until you said Research Software Engineer!”), and on the other hand, it makes it difficult for people who are not RSEs but who would like to work with one to define and communicate the expertise they are looking for.

To help with these issues, we discussed creating a map (which might be a list at first) that would try to give a broad overview of all the different skills and competencies an RSE might have. Such a map would allow people doing RSE work to identify with the community, but also give “outsiders” an idea of all the different skills an RSE might have or require. From our experiences, we agreed that it does seem like most RSEs have a wide range of responsibilities from programming over operations to project and people management often paired with research tasks, while many (or even most?) software engineers in the industry only have to focus on one or maybe two of these areas.

As a first step towards our end goal of an RSE Profile map, we compiled a list of tasks and competencies that we gathered from other categorizations and by going through job postings. The resulting list is meant as a starting point for a discussion. It needs the input from the community to make it as comprehensive and useful as possible. We are obviously not all-knowing, so this list is bound to be incomplete and there are most likely categorizations that should be discussed. Over the next couple of weeks, we would like the community to engage in a discussion that will lead to a more complete list that can then be published on the RSE website and hopefully be turned into some kind of map. We left out many things and specific technologies in order to keep the list manageable but we are open to making this list more specific if the community finds this useful.

If you have any suggestions on how to change this list, please join the Slack channel #rse-profile-map for any in-depth discussion or leave a comment in this Google Doc.

RSE Tasks and Competencies

  • Software Development (in the 2018 survey called “developing software”)
    • Requirements gathering/analysis/formulation
    • Technology evaluation
    • Programming/implementation
      • Software Architecture
      • Cross-platform development
      • Maintenance
        • Bug fixing
        • Version upgrades
    • Testing
    • Distributed systems
      • Cloud computing
      • Grid computing
    • Client-server architectures/web applications
      • Frontend
        • Frameworks
        • UX
        • Testing
      • Backend
      • Web services (API development)
    • Desktop applications
    • Embedded systems/software
    • Real-time systems software
  • User interface
    • UX design
    • Graphic design
  • Areas of CS
    • Algorithm
      • development
      • evaluation
    • Framework development
    • Formal languages and automata theory
    • Logic
    • Randomness, geometry and discrete structures
    • Semantics and reasoning
    • Agent-based modelling
    • Artificial intelligence
      • Machine Learning (Deep learning, neural nets, etc.)
    • Computer vision
    • Information retrieval
    • Data mining
    • High performance computing
    • Signal detection/processing
    • Cryptography
      • Blockchain
    • Compiler construction/design
    • GPU programming
    • Scientific computing
    • Computer networking
    • Operating systems
  • Domain-specific topics
    • GIS
    • Bioinformatics
    • Industrial control systems
    • Simulation
  • Around Software
    • Project management
    • Software aspects
      • Interoperability
      • Quality
      • Performance
      • Reliability
      • Fault tolerance
      • Safety
      • Usability
    • Operating
      • System administration
      • Incident response
      • Continuous Integration/Deployment
      • DevOps
      • Containerization
    • Process development (best practices, software quality, etc.)
    • Support
      • End-user support
      • Maintenance of support systems
    • Documentation
      • Developer documentation
      • End-user documentation
      • Reports (stats, progress reports, etc.)
  • Data management systems/information storage systems
    • Database design and models
      • Relational
      • NoSQL
      • Document Repositories
    • Data structures
    • Query languages
    • Database administration
  • Data
    • Data visualization
    • Data management
    • Data analysis
  • People-related
    • People management (2018 survey: Management?)(2018 survey: Management)
    • Technical leadership (2018 survey: Management)
    • Software advertising
    • Software feedback gathering
    • Training (2018 survey: Teaching)
      • Teaching
      • Consulting
      • Mentoring
    • Funding/Grants
      • Communication
      • Reporting
      • Grant writing
    • Networking/communication
      • Stakeholders
      • Collaborators
      • Users
      • General public
  • Research output (2018 survey: Research)
    • Presentation of results (e.g. meetings, workshops, conferences, …)
    • Scientific writing
  • Community (2018 survey: other activities)
    • Lobbying
    • Open source development
  • Other (2018 survey: other activities)
    • Domain-specific knowledge
      • Domains according to DFG.de
        • Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften
        • Lebenswissenschaften
        • Naturwissenschaften
        • Ingenieurwissenschaften
      • Domains according to nature
    • Statistical methods
    • Use of analysis software
  • Other tasks as assigned
]]>The Research Software Engineer’s Toolkit: Information and tools to support the RSE community2020-10-26T00:00:00+00:002020-10-26T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2020/10/26/research-software-engineers-toolkitPhoto by cottonbro from Pexels.

Authors: Jeremy Cohen (Imperial College London), Alex Botzki (VIB), Jonathan Frawley (Durham University), Nick May (RMIT University), David Pérez-Suárez (University College London)

As the profile of Research Software Engineering (RSE) continues to grow, increasing numbers of researchers are discovering RSE. Being able to find technical and domain-specific information is of vital importance in supporting RSEs in growing their knowledge and skills and undertaking their work. However, despite the wealth of technical material and information available, it can often be difficult to know where to find that piece of information that you need to solve a pressing technical issue, or just learn about a new topic or domain.

The Research Software Engineer’s Toolkit is here to help! The toolkit will be an open community resource that is intended to provide “A set of documentation, tools and guidance to support Research Software Engineers in developing reliable, sustainable and robust code”. This wide-ranging remit makes the project challenging but also something that we hope will, ultimately, become a valuable community resource.

The authors of this post came together as a team as part of the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop 2020 to look at the initial shell of the RSE Toolkit and decide how it can be taken forward to form an open community resource. This blog post highlights the team’s work.

A clearer view

RSE Toolkit logo, designed by Jeremy Cohen
RSE Toolkit logo, designed by Jeremy Cohen.

The RSE Toolkit is intended to provide a “lens” over the huge array of existing material out there, offering a clearer view on the information that is useful to RSEs in different technical areas and research domains. This highlights a major question – what information is important, why do RSEs need to know it and why can’t they currently obtain it straightforwardly without this resource.

The working group set out to address these questions with some core tasks:

  • Clarify the purpose of the RSE Toolkit
  • Understand the key areas of information the resource will provide and develop an associated structure
  • Develop the process and an initial framework for contributions
  • Provide some initial sample content

Supporting multidisciplinary work

One of the key aspects of building research software is that RSEs often have to work in different domains. It can often be the case that each new project an RSE undertakes involves a different research field to the one before. Gaining detailed knowledge about a new research field may not be practical but understanding the basics can be hugely valuable in being able to communicate effectively with domain researchers, understand their requirements, and develop a successful collaboration. It was decided that a particularly valuable and important element of the toolkit would be providing domain primers targeted at RSEs and written by RSEs who have had the experience of working in a given domain.

Vision, contributions and supporting diversity

One of the first tasks we set out to address was to develop a statement of vision for the resource. This led us to identify the following three key points:

The RSE Toolkit:

  • is an open resource for sharing best practices in Research Software Engineering
  • is a community maintained and moderated guide covering general software engineering and domain-specific practices
  • provides a platform for knowledge sharing by RSEs of any experience, from novice to expert, working in any research domain

We also assigned tasks for identifying contribution guidelines and approaches, and developing some initial example content with a particular focus on domain guidance for RSEs beginning work on a project in a domain that is new to them.

As set out by Chue Hong et al. in “Does Research Software Engineering have a diversity crisis?”, the RSE domain suffers from a lack of diversity. The RSEToolkit presents opportunities to help support improvements in diversity and inclusivity within RSE and we see some specific areas where it can help. The “domain primers” highlighted in the previous section will provide information that will help to lower the barriers between domains. This should help to provide opportunities for mobility between domains and, in turn, help to support improvements in diversity across different domains. Material provided by the resource will also enable RSEs, researchers and anyone else interested in the RSE field to develop their skills in their own time, at their own pace by reading through the content and taking advantage of links to existing training material. A clear Code of Conduct is also important, making it clear that diversity is valued and highlighting acceptable approaches to collaborating and developing/contributing content. This makes it clear to contributors what is and is not acceptable in terms of any material they provide and any interactions they have with others as part of developing or contributing material for the RSE Toolkit.

Progress and Plans

The workshop provided us with the opportunity to begin developing the resource based on the core tasks highlighted above. In addition to developing the vision, time was spent working as a group to identify key topics and domains that would be useful to populate the resource with and preparing a draft structure to support this. Issue templates were produced to support the reporting of errors and the addition (or request for addition) of new content. A contributors guide is also in development. The Code of Conduct is currently being prepared based on existing open source resources/content. Finally, a member of our team began the process of developing an example domain-specific resource for a domain in which they work. We hope this will provide an example for the development of such material covering other domains.

The work undertaken as part of the International RSE Leaders Workshop 2020 has enabled initial development of the RSE Toolkit, addressing a number of key aspects to enable us to begin advertising for and accepting contributions of content from the RSE community and beyond. We hope this can be taken forward to become a valuable and sustainable community resource.

Find out more, get involved

The RSEToolkit is avialable at https://rsetoolkit.github.io. We welcome contributions to the resource via our GitHub repository. See our contributing guidelines. We’re also happy to receive suggestions of things you’d like to see included in the toolkit - let us know by creating an issue. Finally, if you’re a member of the UK RSE Slack workspace, you can join the discussion about the RSE Toolkit on the #rsetoolkit channel.

]]>The 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop 20202020-10-09T00:00:00+00:002020-10-09T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2020/10/09/2nd-international-rse-leaders-workshopPictured: A COVID-19-compatible “group photo” of most of the workshop participants.

Organizers: Stephan Druskat (de-RSE), Radovan Bast (Nordic RSE), Ian A. Cosden (US-RSE), Anne Claire Fouilloux (Nordic RSE), Simon J. Hettrick (Society of Research Software Engineering, UK), Daniel S. Katz (US-RSE), Johan Philips (beRSE), Peter van Heusden (African RSSE), Ben van Werkhoven (NL-RSE), Claire Wyatt (Society of Research Software Engineering, UK)*

In 2018, the first International RSE Leaders Workshop took place in London/UK. Amongst other successes, it saw the foundation of the Nordic RSE community and helped improve access to software expertise in research. Since then, the international RSE community has seen a lot of progress, with new associations being formed, new national and international RSE conferences (RSEConUK 2019, deRSE19, NL-RSE19, Nordic RSE conference, beRSE Research Software Developers Day) being run, and informal international collaboration strongly increasing. These developments led to an internationally run online replacement for the RSE conferences that had to be cancelled due to COVID-19: SORSE - the international Series of Online Research Software Events.

To provide a discussion and knowledge exchange forum for the new generation of RSE associations and foster further collaboration between them, and to help new RSE communities form and establish themselves, we organized and ran the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop in September 2020. It was originally planned as an in-person event to take place in Oslo, Norway, but was moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This move to an online event meant that informal networking and social sessions were harder to achieve or run, we had to take time zones into account, and had to shorten workshop days to avoid “video conference fatigue”. On the other hand, it also meant that we didn't have to draw up a budget and involve sponsors for catering, travel bursaries, etc. Additionally, it allowed us to introduce a two-week break between workshop days that was dedicated to asynchronous collaboration in working groups.

The workshop was run over three days on 15, 16 and 30 September.

After some discussion, we decided to run synchronous workshop days that start around midday in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This allowed participants from Europe, Africa, and the Americas to take part at more or less humane times of the day, but it also impeded participation from Asia, Australia, and western parts of the Americas.1

All in all, the workshop had 39 participants from 13 counties on five continents, and included delegates from eight national or multinational RSE associations: de-RSE, Society of RSE (UK), NL-RSE, US-RSE, Nordic RSE, African RSSE, beRSE, and AUS/NZ RSE. Even though they do not have formal RSE associations, individuals from Argentina, Colombia, France, Canada and Spain also joined the workshop. All participants agreed to follow the workshop Code of Conduct.

As we wanted the workshop to focus on the needs of the participants, we asked them to prepare and share a video in which they introduced themselves, and named ideas or questions they had around the establishment or operation of national or multinational RSE initiatives, or collaboration between them, or a concrete issue they wanted to solve during the workshop. These videos were discussed in an icebreaker session at the start of the first workshop day, presented in summary in the plenary, and then transformed into pitches for groups that would form to work on the realization of ideas or solutions to issues. After those pitches were presented we took some time to discuss overlaps and merge ideas and groups so that no effort would be duplicated.

Before group work commenced on the second workshop day, Neil Chue Hong, director of the Software Sustainability Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the EPCC, gave an invited talk entitled “Does Research Software Engineering have a diversity crisis, and what can we do?“ which was well-suited to stop us in our tracks and reconsider the work ahead. The numbers Neil presented in his talk clearly suggest that, yes, RSE does have a diversity crisis. At least, thanks to Neil’s work together with Caroline Jay and Jeremy Cohen on a diversity-focused analysis of RSE survey data (paper forthcoming), we can measure it. But more importantly, there are impediments not only to diversity, but also to inclusivity and equity, that cannot be measured quantitatively: the demographic data does not speak to, for example, microbarriers that diminish access and equity. Throughout the talk, participants had the opportunity to explore these through sharing their respective experiences. And there is no easy fix for the diversity, inclusivity, and equity crises in RSE: it’s not a checklist task, and it’s easy to get wrong. Instead of focusing on “areas of concern” (essentially framing diversity/inclusivity/equity as a problem to be solved, rather than a goal to be achieved), or using people as proxies for some “category” of “other”, we are encouraged to value lived experiences and “champion exceptional people from all walks of life”, for example in hiring, but also as communities. In order to avert continuation of the crises, we should embed diversity, inclusivity and equity as goals within our communities and projects, continue to listen and learn, and take action where we can. In this spirit, the working groups were asked to reflect where these values can be embedded in their work. And a discussion at the end of the third workshop day seemed to suggest that there is agreement within the international RSE community as represented at the workshop that action should be taken to ensure that these values are an integral part of RSE communities. To dive deeper into the issues and the things we each can do that were presented in the talk, have a look at the slides (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12955094.v4), and watch the recorded launch event of SORSE - the Series of Online Research Software Events with related talks from Drs. Kari Jordan and Mariann Hardey (https://sorse.github.io/programme/kickoff/).

The working groups focused on continued organization of international collaboration between associations and the creation of a common platform and entry point, gathering data on RSEs and RSE groups, and the creation of common resources for Research Software Engineering in general, and individual RSEs, (institutional) RSE groups and new RSE communities in particular. During the last day of the workshop, all groups presented their work. A brief summary of the work of each group follows, and the groups will also publish more detailed blog posts over the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

Summary of the working groups

Regular meetings of international RSE leaders

This group worked on a proposal for more organized and continuous collaboration between established RSE associations. As mentioned above, new national and multinational associations have formed over the last few years, and there is great value in these organizations talking to each other regularly, exchanging ideas and knowledge, discussing issues, solving conflicts, and bringing together efforts. To further foster the creation of new associations, these meetings will also be open to champions of nascent RSE communities.

A home for the international RSE community

The website researchsoftware.org is a product of the first International RSE Leaders Workshop in 2018, and it should become the home for the international RSE community as such. This group worked on ideas to enrich the content of the website with structured information on Research Software Engineers and to make it generally more useful to worldwide RSE communities.

→ Read the detailed blog post!

Find out and learn what it takes to be an RSE

There is no one job description for RSEs; we come in at least as many flavours as chili sauce or research questions. This makes it hard for people who are new to Research Software Engineering to get started. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a structured resource to help them achieve that? There are, in fact, a few general strata along which information can be organized: technology that RSEs can employ, skills that are useful to have as RSE, and research-related questions that RSEs should be able to consider. There already are a vast number of resources pertaining to this or that aspect out there, so instead of creating yet another resource for RSEs, this group has worked to provide entry points and a structure to the available information.

→ Read the detailed blog post!

Who are we ...

You may have come across the international RSE survey, which provides our communities with necessary data to better understand who/where/what we are and do, which in turn allows us to model our associations and communities around the needs (and wants) of the RSEs we bring together, represent, and advocate for. The invited talk by Neil Chue Hong (see above) is a clear example of how having these data can help to build even better communities for the future. This group has issued a call to all interested parties to help set up the next edition of the survey.

… and what do we know about our places of work?

Now that (at least in some places) institutions are (getting) hip to the necessity of RSEs’ work, RSE groups grow larger, offer more career options, or are being newly formed. Because this is often pioneering work, there may not be an easily accessible role model for running an RSE group successfully. Yet this knowledge exists, but it is spread over existing RSE groups. So in a somewhat similar fashion to the group working on structured information for individual RSEs, this group set out to gather and provide existing knowledge, and plans to enrich it through means of a set of interviews and/or a survey.

→ Read the detailed blog post!

Communities at the centre of Research Software Engineering

Some workshop groups have focused on individual RSEs, some on RSE groups, and some on RSE associations, but we know that the primordial soup where all of these were born, and the glue that keeps them together, is the RSE community. RSEs come together in communities of all kinds and sizes already, but there are still far too many places where RSE communities simply don’t exist. To change this, we need to know where to start, how to continue, and who our members may be. Communities often don’t just exist, they are set up and fostered through activism. At some point, they may need a structure, or governance, and may benefit from formalization. And they should help people identify as RSEs and give them a home. Similar to RSE groups, the knowledge needed to do all that may already be there, but it needs to be found, enriched, structured and presented.

“So I’ve had this idea …”

If you couldn’t make it to the workshop, there are still ways to contribute to the international projects that are under way, or start new ones: The forthcoming blog posts from the working groups will name an option to get in touch with the group, and if you have an idea you want to work on, please join the channel #international on the UK RSE community’s Slack chat! Details on how to join the chat can be found on the website of the Society for Research Software Engineering.

What has the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop 2020 achieved?

We think: quite a lot. Most obviously, there are the results, preliminary results, and the ongoing work in the working groups. If all groups finish their work and produce the intended outcomes, the international RSE community will have won fantastic new resources, communication channels, and a platform to facilitate both.

Less visibly, the workshop has facilitated growing and consolidating the international community as such. At an in-person event, this would probably have happened during lunch breaks, in the coffee queue, and during a workshop dinner or similar. The solutions we have tried to simulate those online don’t seem to have made much of a difference, sometimes due to technical difficulties in Gather.town, sometimes because meeting someone in a video call is just not the same as chatting to them over a hot (or cold) drink. Instead, we think that a lot of networking has happened in the working groups, both during the workshop days and the asynchronous work phase.

As Peter van Heusden mentioned in the concluding discussion on the last day of the workshop, the workshop has also implicitly drawn a “state of the RSE world”. This is still very much incomplete, due to both the small size of the workshop and the fact that some parts of the world were excluded due to the choices we had to make when moving online. But the composition of participants and their experiences and interests show that things have changed since the first workshop. And it will be interesting to see the changes that will happen before the next workshop.

And ast but not least, it is especially exciting that participants from Argentina, Colombia, France, Canada and Spain want to start new RSE communities or associations in their respective regions! This has led, for example, to the creation of a dedicated Slack channel (in the Society for RSE's Slack team) for the community in Latin America: #rse_latam. If you are an RSE from this region, or interested in how Research Software Engineering works in this part of the world, feel free to join it!

Stay tuned for the forthcoming blog posts from the working groups, and perhaps see you at the next International RSE Leaders Workshop!

  1. Nicholas May, Secretary of the Steering Committee for RSE Australia / New Zealand, is a notable exception, and we would like to thank him for his nightly participation. ↩

]]>Tools for managing RSE projects2018-05-04T00:00:00+00:002018-05-04T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2018/05/04/rse-project-management-toolsManaging an RSE team can involve carrying out a broad range of tasks relating to the management of people and projects. The exact nature of these tasks will depend on the size of team, and the how the leadership role is defined within any particular institution, but they typically include scheduling, resource allocation, reporting, communication, task management and record keeping. Our discussion at the RSE Leaders Workshop in January 2018 focused on sharing knowledge about effective tools for managing these processes.

Authors: Mark Woodbridge (Imperial College London), James Meakin (Radboud University Medical Center), Jim Procter (University of Dundee), Jeffrey Salmond (University of Cambridge), Daniel Smith (The Molecular Sciences Software Institute)

Many of these management and co-ordination tasks are common to software development in an industrial setting, but some issues specific to RSE teams were identified:

  • RSE groups often adopt or collaborate on projects that have been developed in relatively decentralised organisations. Adopting projects may mean adopting their tools for issue management or communication. This can lead to a fragmented toolset.
  • RSE teams typically don’t have the resources to employ full-time staff to deploy and customise services that aren’t core to their operation
  • RSE groups are often embedded in larger groups or organisations with existing infrastructure and processes for (e.g.) project management. These may be fully featured and well supported, but focused on business- rather than research-related projects. RSE leaders must decide whether to pragmatically embrace and/or integrate these products/services, even if they aren’t objectively the more appropriate solutions.

We continued to identify some tools that those leading RSE teams have found useful for specific purposes (open source tools are annotated with asterisks):

  • Lead tracking. In industry tools for this purpose would typically be related to managing sales pipelines. In an RSE context this relates to keeping track of proposed projects, and following up on opportunities for collaboration. This work is typically carried out by one or two individuals and the tools cited are therefore not typically used by the whole team:
  • Project management, resource allocation, effort estimation. Again, these tools are typically used by those leading the team:
  • Time tracking
  • Progress tracking, task assignment, issue management
  • Documentation, knowledge base

Our discussion included the following observations about tooling:

  • Some of these overlap in functionality and many can be used in a very flexible manner (viz Trello, GitHub). It is just as important to clearly define how they should be used as deciding which should be used, ideally by consensus.
  • Excel can (and is) used to fulfill almost all of these function. It clearly has many disadvantages, particularly around collaboration, but can provide a level of customisation lacking from less flexible tools.
  • There are numerous home-grown systems and processes in use but the existence and purpose of these is not widely shared

Several criteria were cited as priorities when it came to selecting tools:

  • Cost. Free tools, or those with a suitable free tier, are popular amongst RSE groups. This reflects the fact that even where there is funding available for buying software licences it can still be hard to procure SaaS (i.e. subscription) products, which often require recurring payment, and typically via a credit card.
  • Scalability. Most RSE groups start small with ambitions to grow. Leaders recognise the need to use tools that can scale to at least 10 or 20 users, whilst not being unwieldy for smaller teams.
  • Usability and familiarity. It shouldn’t be necessary to become an expert to unlock the value of appropriate tools. Small teams normally don’t have the resources to employ full-time admins.
  • Functionality. Using a limited number of full-featured tools was deemed preferable to using numerous more specific ones, even if they were individually better designed. There can be a significant cost in managing and integrating tools.
  • Existing systems. RSE teams are often embedded within departments or organisations that have systems in place for some of the required functions, even if these systems are deployed for slightly different purposes or targeted at different users. It may be preferable to re-use this infrastructure if it’s already paid for and maintained.

It’s clear that there isn’t a standard toolkit for project management - and this shouldn’t be a surprise considering the diverse environments in which RSE teams have developed, and the huge number and variety of tools available. However, in the course of our discussion we did form some conclusions, and note a couple of opportunities:

  • There will never be a one-size-fits-all toolset that suits all groups, but the productivity of RSE teams can be materially influenced by tool selection and little knowledge is currently shared about which are useful, and how they can be used. This could be addressed by the provision of a space for documentation.
  • Where mature bespoke solutions have been developed specifically to support RSE activities we should investigate the possibility of sharing them, whether they are software, Excel sheets or system connectors
  • The role of Research Software Project Manager will become more important as RSE teams grow - providing scope for specialisation and efficiency. It should be appreciated, and promoted more widely.

If you have experiences or recommendations to share regarding tools for managing people or projects then please join us on Slack!

]]>International RSE Leaders Workshop2018-04-23T00:00:00+00:002018-04-23T00:00:00+00:00http://researchsoftware.org/2018/04/23/int-rsel-workshopBy Alys Brett, UK Atomic Energy Authority / UK RSE

In January 2018, leaders of Research Software Engineering groups, networks and initiatives from around the world gathered in London for the first ever International RSE Leaders workshop, organised by UK RSE. The event generated huge enthusiasm and progress towards the goal of improving access to software expertise in research by pooling knowledge, coordinating efforts and establishing collaboration.

International momentum

The last couple of years have seen fast-growing international interest in the RSE concept and the growth of RSE recognition and organisation in the the UK. Strong international representation at the first UK RSE conference led to the creation of the German and Dutch RSE associations. RSE leaders have been invited to speak on the subject at international conferences including in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and USA. RSE surveys have been run in several countries leading to valuable comparative data and providing an early focus for emerging communities.

At RSE17 a well-attended international discussion session was held. It demonstrated that a lot of enthusiasm for international collaboration and support exists amongst the people trying to build RSE capacity in their countries. Lots of useful information and ideas emerged in that 90 minutes of discussion and I felt that a lot could be achieved at a dedicated workshop.

The RSE leaders networking group in the UK has been providing mutual support to people running or trying to set up RSE groups or networks since 2015 and its members value the chance to share knowledge and collaborate with others in similar positions. Perhaps this could be even more powerful if it became an international network?

Getting the right people together

When the call for the EPSRC UK-USA RSE travel fund was published this seemed like an opportunity to kick-start the international workshop plans. We put out an email asking for interest from USA and had more than 20 responses within a few days. The award we won enabled five US RSE leaders to take part in the workshop. Further travel funding allowed two African attendees from Namibia and Sudan to make the trip.

The workshop was hosted at the Alan Turing Institute and places filled up quickly. 41 people from 11 countries took part, including two who gave talks remotely from New Zealand and Brazil, making it a truly international event (though next time we need to work on finding contacts from Asia).

The participants were people running or setting up research software groups, national networks or initiatives to improve access to software skills in research. What they all had in common was a determination to improve things and an enthusiasm to work together and get things done.

We asked all participants what they wanted from the workshop and the big themes that came up were making new connections, comparing notes with people working on similar things elsewhere and getting information, advice and evidence to influence the future of research software engineering.

An event shaped by the participants

Every participant spoke on the first day. The US travel fund recipients all gave a short talk about the groups or initiatives they are involved in leading, sharing the successes, challenges and open questions. Representatives of eight other countries gave an overview of the research software engineering landscape in their country or region. Everyone else gave a two minute lightning talk introducing themselves and raising a point, question or suggestion relating to the themes of the workshop. There were so many fascinating insights but I’ll mention just a couple of my personal highlights.

Samar Elsheikh told the story of the challenges and fantastic success of the first ever Software Carpentry workshop in Sudan - trading places for routers to ensure internet access and 551 applications for 40 places with women making up over 50% of participants!

Ian Cosden from Princeton spoke about the rapid growth of his new group which he is renaming the Research Software Engineering Group after interaction with the UK RSE community. Responses to his job adverts doubled when the posts were titled Research Software Engineer rather than Computational Research Applications Analyist. His description of the unique way the projects are funded and organised prompted a discussion about operating models and some envy from those with less institutional support.

The day ended with a session to decide on goals for the breakouts the following day. From some initial topics and suggestions, participants added ideas and indicated which they would like to work on. With plans in place, everyone headed to a nearby pub for the conference dinner.

Realising plans

The second day was devoted to getting things done with breakout sessions in “speed blogging” style - discussion followed by drafting of concrete outputs.

There was a focus on improving RSE international web presence and communication. This international RSE website was created as well as one for the fledgling Nordic RSE association. Plans were made for future collaboration between RSE leaders with further meetings or sessions planned at relevant upcoming conferences. A Wikipedia entry for Research Software Engineering was written and participants contributed to the effort to establish a research computing Q&A site on Stack Exchange - both of these efforts are seeking further contributors. The UK RSE Slack has been dropped the “UK” branding to serve as an international discussion platform.

One group tackled the desire to share resources to help make the case for the value of RSEs by designing and setting up a repository for an international RSE “evidence bank” (watch this space). Several discussion groups drafted blog posts and the first of these is now published: How to set up a national RSE association. A survey on RSE group operating models is currently open to gather information that can be shared to help people start and grow RSE groups.

Inspiration for the future

It was an intense two days and the atmosphere was friendly, ambitious and practical. The feedback from emails and tweets (see #intrse) indicates that many participants got a lot out of the experience:

“I got home last night and almost couldn’t sleep because I was still so excited about the whole event. I feel that I learned so much and got great ideas on how to tackle certain issues we have within our center. It was for me one of the most inspiring events I’ve attended.”

There is continued collaboration between many of the RSE leaders who took part in the workshop and a definite sense that the momentum behind the international RSE movement is building. I’m excited to see where the enthusiasm and talent of this community takes us in the coming years.

The organisers were: Alys Brett (UKAEA), Robert Haines (University of Manchester), James Hetherington (The Alan Turing Institute), Simon Hettrick (Software Sustainability Institute), Mark Turner (Newcastle University), Chris Woods (University of Bristol), Claire Wyatt (University of Southampton)

The outputs of the workshop were presented in a talk and poster for the EPSRC / SSI workshop on the impact of international research software collaboration.

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