On 10th March, we held an online feedback event, where members of the community could get updates from the trustees on Society activities, and get involved in conversations about the future of the research software community. In this blog post, we are going to summarise the key updates and discussions from that meeting.

Updates

Our main updates were on our CoARA Action plan and the results of the recent vote on the Society’s Ethical Sponsorship Policy.

CoARA Action Plan

In case you missed it, we have published our CoARA Action plan. CoARA is the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, which aims to reform the ways that research is evaluated. Our planned activities this year include creating specific pages on our website for our CoARA activities, running an RSECon workshop and collating examples of current practices and case studies.

Please read the action plan, and contact us if you have any questions or comments. Also, join the mailing list or follow us on social media to stay in the loop about future events or consultations.

Ethical Sponsorship Policy Vote

The Society has been working to develop an Ethical Sponsorship Policy. This is intended to define how we interact with certain sectors and organisations, particularly when it comes to conference sponsorship and corporate partnerships. Over the last six months, we have been engaging with the community to help inform that policy. After several rounds of consultation, we held an online vote. We had quorate participation from 21% (166/764) of our members during this final stage of the consultation.

62.7% voted “Yes” to only include legally required areas of exclusion. Empowering the trustees to make decisions on a case-by-case basis, without having a pre-defined list. None of the subsequent votes for each suggested area reached the 50% threshold.

Proposed trustee actions:

• Create an ethical sponsorship policy that includes smoking and political parties as avoidance criteria, as these are required by law. As a charity, we are bound by the rules of the Charities Commission, and are only allowed to act within our charitable goals.
• Update our terms of reference for conference organisation to take into account the ethical sponsorship policy and the membership consultation. The main change is that future conference sponsorships will need approval from the board of trustees.
• Internally document our decision-making processes where trustee consultation has been required for sponsorship. We also now have a record of which areas are considered controversial among the membership, which will inform future decisions.

We hope our members and the wider community can trust us to make appropriate decisions about the future of the Society on their behalf. The trustees also want to reiterate that we have complete faith in the relevant teams and committees to run the various activities of the Society in the best interests of our members. We hope these changes will help address any concerns and help us mature as a Society as our membership and activities continue to expand.

Call to action for members:

• Support or join other charities and organisations if you are passionate about a particular area.
• Apply to be a trustee in this year’s election (details coming soon).
• Apply to be the sponsorship chair in 2027 (call opening soon), or for other roles in the RSECon organising committee (call opening after RSECon26).
• Send suggestions for sponsors you’d like to see at the conference to the RSECon sponsorship chair.

Breakout Sessions

Next, we split into different breakout rooms to discuss a number of topics about the future of the Society and the community.

What should the Society be spending its money on?

Mike Simpson chaired this breakout session, which discussed different ways that the Society might spend some of its surplus funds. We’ve been fortunate that the RSE Conference has made a profit over the last few years, and as a charity, we aren’t allowed to hoard money.

For reference, 88% of the Society’s income comes from conference ticket sales and sponsorship. 11% comes from membership fees, and 1% comes from donations and merchandise sales. A lot of that money gets spent on RSECon, and we already support various activities such as the Events and Initiatives Fund and the Mentoring Scheme.

But what else can we do? Various suggestions were discussed, including:

• Expanding the Participation and Inclusion Fund to allow people to attend other events, not just RSECon.
• Supporting regional groups with funding for regular events and activities.
• Paying for administrative support, or offering to buy out some trustee time (to improve inclusion and recruit trustees who would otherwise be unable to give their time to the Society).
• Financially supporting open source projects through donations via the Society.
• RSE Fellowships, in partnership with the SSI and OLS.
• Sponsoring other events and communities, like IRSC and The Hidden REF.

We will consider all of these suggestions in future trustee meetings, as we decide how best to spend our surplus to support the RSE Community.

What’s the society’s role in a maturing community?

David Beavan chaired this breakout session, which first discussed whether the Society is primarily a professional body, an advocacy organisation, or a community hub, and if trying to be all three dilutes its effectiveness. Attendees thought the RSE movement, as well as the society were an advocacy movement and not a professional body, as they don’t accredit anything. The society runs the conference, funding schemes, etc., but there are still lots of communities within it. The current model works well, and there is no need to force a monolithic community; we are an umbrella.

The next question was: what are we doing well, and what could benefit from improvement? The question was raised of how well the society is doing at spending its money. The society has been increasing its spending on the community, but not fast enough to completely counter-balance its increased income. As a charity, we must ensure that any incoming money will be put back into our membership. We also want to fund a diverse set of activities, not just the same initiatives or people. One option might be an individual-level bursary. It was suggested to encourage individuals to ask for some creative uses of grants, while also enabling travel money and conference attendance. On the other hand, concerns were raised about the incentives of covering travel, because it might set a precedent, as cash-cut universities might become over-reliant on the Society.

In order to encourage different kinds of proposals:

• The society could make it a more appealing call and change the rules.
• The society could not accept ‘the usual’ kind of applications.
• The society might not want to trial an additional scheme, excluding all traditional training/workshops, but instead offer lightning talks with nothing work-or technical- related, such as science communication, science education in primary schools, etc.

The third topic covered the target member profile and the inclusivity of the term “RSE”.  We estimated that 80% of the Society’s members are from academic institutions. In the past, some events were explicitly for academics, and we might want to check the language and terms used.

Professional identity appears to be important. Some noted a possibly increasing fragmentation in the field: there are new roles emerging like Digital Research Technical Professionals, more research infrastructure roles (cloud, K8s) coming up, and how computer science and software engineering distinguish themselves. Does the Society want to embody all these roles? We seem to have been vague/very open about the definition of our target members in the past. There seems to be a need to clarify within the Society, if our focus is too broad. If we do refine our aims, we should be willing to let people go.

We do want to attract people from industry, though. It might be more challenging to reach people working in industry if they do not come originally from academia, since they might not be aware of the ‘typical’ RSE career, including the issues with temporary contracts, nor the society itself or the RSECon. On the other hand, we seem to have more visibility to this kind of audience than 10-15 years ago. Industry is possibly less supportive in letting staff go to RSEcon and the like (time and money issue). We should work with members from those areas to improve this. The RSECon could be sponsored by one of the attendees’ companies, which would allow them to check out what talent there is. Attracting more industry sponsors would also open up future communication pathways and let the society, e.g. visit their organisation and give a presentation.

Next, we discussed that there is one communication barrier within SLACK: any ac.uk -address holders are automatically allowed in, creating a barrier to those without, and unconsciously signalling a bias. It might be low-hanging fruit to harmonise this. If people can join with their personal email addresses, no institution addresses or possible changes thereof would be needed.

Ethical Sponsorship Policy

Stef Piatek chaired this breakout session to gather feedback from the proposed actions outlined earlier in the meeting and the process overall.

The overall feedback was measured and ranged from the process feeling reasonable, through to the process being ad-hoc and could have been finessed. In hindsight, there are certainly aspects that could have been clearer, but it was useful to have a steer from members and their views.

Individuals raised feelings that the arguments against the vote may have guided people to voting against that specific area, as many of them could be lumped into “the conference would be inviable” or “they are unlikely to sponsor the conference, so excluding them is virtue signalling”. Though it was noted that the overall vote to only include legally required areas passed the majority, so that may not have been affected by the individual arguments against.

A final discussion was around releasing votes. A member felt that it was strange not to release the outcome of the votes for each proposed area of the exclusion criteria. The argument against the transparency was that it may not be helpful for healing the community for someone working in one of the proposed areas to know what percentage of the membership would want their employers to be excluded. As we didn’t come to a firm conclusion, this was taken to the next trustee meeting, where the trustees decided not to release the vote outcome for each individual proposed area.

Future Events

We hope to hold at least one of these events every year, and are considering organising something similar as part of the RSE Conference in Sheffield in September. This is your Society, and we want to engage with our members as much as possible as we continue to grow, and the landscape of the sector continues to evolve. We have also heard your feedback, and promise to do a better job of promoting the event and sharing the agenda ahead of time!

Please get in touch if you have any questions, feedback or suggestions. And finally, a huge thank you to those who attended the session and who have engaged with us during our various surveys and consultations over the last year.

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