Welcome to the Society’s newsletter for December 2024, where we will be looking back at the last 12 months and bringing you some exciting updates from the RSE Community.

A Statement from the President

David Beavan, the president of the Society would like to say a few words:

“As incoming President, I want to thank Matt Williams for his incredible dedication, including three years as President, which has left the Society of Research Software Engineering in such a strong position. I’m lucky to take the reins of such a healthy organisation, but it’s really the amazing energy and dedication of the Trustees who keep everything moving. Looking ahead, we should be focused on maturing and diversifying, after all we’re ten years old. We’re seeing more Special Interest Groups forming and more international collaborations that help other RSE groups across the world develop. I hope we can make the Society more welcoming to those outside academia, as the profession grows, making the most of mentorship, our events and initiatives funding, the slack community and of course the amazing annual conference. To do this, we’ll also take steps to secure our long-term future, building the funding and support we need to keep growing. We can’t do this without you, the wider community, so please do seek opportunities to help us on this journey.”

Reflections on 2024

It’s been a busy year for the Society. We’ve compiled a list of some of our highlights:

• In September, we hosted RSECon24 – our biggest conference yet – at Newcastle University. Huge thanks to Dave Horsfall and all the committee members, speakers, organisers and volunteers who helped make the conference such a success!
• Four trustees stood down at the AGM in September, including Matt Williams, who had been our president for three years and was presented with a “lousy mug” at RSECon24.
• Five new fresh faces stepped up to join the trustee board (you can read about them on our Governance Page).
• We officially launched two new Special Interest Groups:
  • Reasonable Performance Computing SIG
  • HPC RSE SIG (it is so new, we don’t have a webpage for it yet!)
• Over £7,500 was awarded from the Events and Initiatives fund to support 7 events and initiatives during the 2023/24 academic year.

And a huge thank you to all my fellow trustees, special interest group & working group members and all the other volunteers who have helped the Society with its mission in 2024. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Headlines

Not much to report in this festive update! We look forward to seeing you in Warwick in September 2025 for RSECon25, but we’re also starting to make plans for 2026.

Call for Programme Chairs – RSECon26

We are looking for someone to take the lead in organising RSECon26 – the tenth annual conference for Research Software Engineering – due to take place in September 2026.

• More information and application instructions are in the Call for Programme Chairs.

Community News & Events

This month, we have updates from a number of communities and working groups that you may want to get involved with.

Do you think the FAIR principles for Research Software #FAIR4RS are working?

The FAIR Principles for Research Software were published in March 2022 and described in a paper in October 2022. Now, two years later, a small group of core contributors to the FAIR4RS principles are seeking to understand if the principles have been useful and usable, or difficult to understand or implement, with the idea that this may lead to a new version of the principles, if needed.

We are doing this initial review through two webinars and a survey, to help us understand if a full review is necessary to make changes. The results will be shared in March 2025 via multiple channels, including the RDA FAIR4RS working group website, the RDA Software Source Code interest group website, and the channels from the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and FORCE11.

We’ve now published the recording of our first #FAIR principles for research software (#FAIR4RS) 2-year review webinar: https://youtu.be/Ex691O5Koe0.

• The survey may be found at: https://forms.gle/sRhRQD4gWBQWzcGS7

RSE Asia Australia 2024 Summary Report

The third online Research Software Engineer (RSE) Asia Australia Unconference was from the 10th to the 13th of September 2024. This was a joint partnership between the RSE Asia Association and the RSE Association of Australia and New Zealand.

The theme for this year was “Sharing tech architectures”, we created an extra day for a Leaders Forum on the 10th based on the action items from last year, we had a live polling session to gather community feedback, and we created two Accessibility Fellowship positions as well.

• This report is a summary of the proceedings.
• This event was supported by the Events and Initiatives fund.

Green RSE Launch!

The new Green RSE special interest group aims to work across the RSE community to reduce the environmental impact of research software. Our launch event will be on Thursday 16th January 2-3.30 pm. All welcome!

We are looking for lightning talks (2 minutes) from across the RSE community, if you have something from this area you’d like to present, please complete this form: https://forms.office.com/e/BZRSDMv7An.

The EDIA and Role Diversity Working Group is looking for volunteers!

The EDIA and Role Diversity working group is looking for volunteers to help us improve equality, diversity, inclusivity and accessibility in the society and wider RSE community. We meet every 2 weeks to discuss plans and progress, though there is no need to attend every meeting, many of us drop in as and when we can.

We are particularly looking for help verifying and editing transcriptions of interviews conducted over the past year of various RSEs sharing their varied journeys to where they are today: https://society-rse.org/careers/rse-stories/ Help us publicise the huge diversity of roles and journeys to those roles. We would also happily welcome further submissions here (which are in the form of a semi-structured interview). Our experience tells us that if you think “eh, I don’t have a particularly interesting journey”, then you almost certainly do!

Please get in touch via [email protected] or joining the edia-and-role-diversity-wg slack channel if you are interested in any of this. Personally, I never know what to say in first messages like these, so a simple “hi” is totally fine! More info on the EDIA and Role DIversity working group can be found at https://society-rse.org/get-involved/edia-working-group/.

Health Data Science Black Internship 2025

HDR UK are the national health data institute. We are currently delivering the fifth year of our holistic Black Internship programme and we are looking for partner organisations who could host an intern for summer 2025. We welcome any type of organisation or team that works with health data – our current hosts include those from academia, businesses, civil service, medical research charities and NHS.

• More information is available on the HDR UK Website.

Society Updates

Events and Initiatives Fund

The Society has funding to provide support for events and initiatives which support our mission statement and charitable objectives?

• Learn more or apply via the Events and Initiatives Grant page.   

Membership

Not yet a member? Why not join us today? Read about all the benefits of being a member on our website. We welcome anyone who supports our mission, whether or not they are employed as RSEs. 

Jobs

A reminder that if you are looking for RSE-related jobs, you can join the #jobs channel on the RSE Slack workspace or visit our vacancies page.

Zenodo

Zenodo is a popular publishing platform, and our community has two Zenodo groups.

• The Community Account is for RSEs in the community to share publications about RSE: https://zenodo.org/communities/rse/
• The Society Account is for Society publications, such as our annual report: https://zenodo.org/communities/socrse/

Podcasts

Code for Thought is back and now in its eighth season, with episodes now in English, German and French. It is available on all major podcast directories, including YouTube.

Follow Us

A reminder that we have two relatively new social media accounts:

• Mastodon @[email protected]
• Bluesky @society-rse.org.

You can always find all our sites and social media links on our Linktree page.

And remember, if you have any news or announcements you would like us to include in the newsletter, please let us know using this form.