Jeremy Cohen, EPSRC RSE Fellow, Department of Computing
Building Research Software Communities: Running a workshop on community building and sustainability for the research software community
Michelle Barker, Jeremy Cohen, Daniel Nüst, Toby Hodges, Serah Njambi Rono, Lou Woodley
On Wednesday 17th March 2021, around 50 individuals from a wide range of different countries and time zones came together for the first of two 2-hour sessions that formed our “Building Research Software Communities: How to increase engagement in your community” workshop.
Run as part of the SORSE Series of Online Research Software Events, this workshop brought together an organising team consisting of 3 members of the international research software community and a group of speakers including experts in community engagement and sustainability. In this blog post we provide an overview of the workshop and some of the key messages and outcomes.
Jeremy Cohen, EPSRC RSE Fellow, Department of Computing
This post was compiled by Mark Woodbridge, Jeremy Cohen and Tony Yang of Imperial College’s Research Software Community.
As COVID-19 drives us into uncharted territory, many of us at Imperial will be having our first ever experience of working off-campus for an extended period of time. It, of course, depends on our role, but many members of the College community will be no stranger to mobile working – pitching up at one of the many campus cafes, breakout spaces or a coffee shop, getting out our laptop or mobile device and switching very quickly into a state of focused work. Maybe finishing those next couple of paragraphs of a paper or report, fixing that annoying bug in our scientific code that someone just reported, or responding to an urgent technical query from a collaborator. Sometimes a change of space or environment provides just that little shift in perspective that you need to help solve that challenging technical problem, or get the right wording for that difficult section of the paper, much more quickly than if you’d sat in your office staring at your screen for hours!
September 2019 saw the 4th Conference of Research Software Engineering (RSEConUK 2019) take place in Birmingham, UK. From the 17th-19th September over 350 RSEs, software engineers, researchers and people with a wide range of related roles came to the University of Birmingham to participate in the largest Research Software Engineering conference yet.
RSE19 conference photograph courtesy @RSEConUK
While the majority of the attendees were from the UK and Europe, the conference attracted people from around the world.
The conference has been growing each year and this time there was a packed schedule including two keynotes, a series of parallel sessions with talks and panels, a day of workshops and some additional special sessions such as RSE Worldwide.
Imperial was well represented with 11 members of the College attending the conference at various times during the week and getting involved by volunteering, giving talks, joining panels, running workshops and presenting posters:
Jeremy Cohen, Department of Computing and Mark Woodbridge, RSE Team Lead, supported by Stefano Galvan, Department of Mechanical Engineering, presented a poster on Supporting research software at Imperial College London which included a number of authors involved in the RSE Team, community, and training activities from accross the College.
Marko Krznaric, Department of Surgery and Cancer, was one of the many volunteers helping to make the conference run smoothly, assisting attendees and supporting the session chairs amongst a range of other tasks.
It was fantastic to see so much participation from Imperial and representatives from many different departments across the College. This provides a great example of how Research Software Engineering at Imperial is such a vital element of the College’s research output and we look forward to seeing an even greater presence from Imperial at next year’s conference.
On the 9th and 10th July 2019 the Research Software London community ran its first regional Software Carpentry workshop. The event was jointly organised by Imperial, UCL and Queen Mary with Queen Mary hosting the workshop at their Mile End Campus. Several Imperial software carpentry volunteers and members of the Imperial research software community were involved in organising and running the event along with organisers, instructors and helpers from UCL and Queen Mary. The workshop covered a standard Software Carpentry syllabus with the attendees being taught the basics of the Unix shell and git on the first day of the workshop with an introduction to Python on the second day.
The majority of attendees were from Queen Mary, UCL and Imperial but spaces were also made available to the wider RSLondon community. This provided a great opportunity for newcomers to the research software field from institutions that don’t currently run carpentry workshops to attend and learn some core computing and software development skills. More than 30 people registered for the workshop and we received significant positive feedback as well as helpful suggestions on possible enhancements for future workshops.
Building on the success of this event, RSLondon are planning to run further such workshops and are looking at other areas covered by The Carpentries for future sessions, in addition to Software Carpentry. If you have contacts at other institutions in London and the South East region who you think would be interested in hosting or attending an RSLondon Carpentry workshop later in 2019, get in touch with Jeremy Cohen
Imperial College RSE Team members Chris Cave-Ayland (instructor) and Mayeul d’Avezac (helper) assisted at this workshop.
