IMPORTANT! The ‘old’ mailing list ([email protected]) will be closed on the 17th December. We don’t want to lose you so please make your way to our membership platform where you can sign up for membership to the Society and/or the mailing list. We’re aiming to improve our membership benefits and are launching our public strategy soon detailing our activity over the next 12-24 months. Joining the Society is £20/year and you can use a credit card, debit card or direct debit. Joining just the mailing list is free.  If you are a member already, you can opt in to receive the newsletter by email by checking the respective box under “Communication” in your RSE Society account. Any queries about membership or your account on the membership platform contact [email protected] and one of the trustees in the membership subgroup will get back to you.

Welcome to the November newsletter from The Society of Research Software Engineering! Our monthly newsletter will announce new Society initiatives, gather RSE news, events, blogs, papers and anything else interesting and relevant together in one place. If you would like to add an item or suggest a new section to the next newsletter, submit it via this short form or get in touch with Claire Wyatt, RSE Community Manager.

Newsletter Contents:
>Society Update
>Announcements
>Events
>Podcasts
>Papers
>Blog posts
>Top Tips
>Community info
>RSE Worldwide

Society Update

The Trustees met on the morning of Friday 27th November for their regular monthly (Zoom) meeting. A long agenda and AOB list meant that some items had to be deferred until December. The following sub-groups had all met previously and gave brief updates: Conference and Events; Governance, Policy and Planning; Membership and Finance; and Web and Communications. Similarly, we heard from working groups on Mentoring; Elections and Innovations and Events Policy. The president and vice president have prepared a draft Strategy document, and three other trustees will now review it before being made public to the community. A subset of the trustees will discuss submitting to CW21 (Collaborations Workshop 2021). The old mailing list will be closed at the end of 17/12/2020. Emails will be sent out, regularly between now and then, asking people to move to the new list and consider joining the Society if not already a member. Another working group will develop a survey to check the Society is providing what its members want and need so keep an eye out for this survey later in December. Paul Richmond, the newly elected President, represented the Society this week giving a talk ‘RSEs: collaboration between researchers and software experts’ at the Plan-E 12th Plenary. 

We’d like to introduce you to three of the new trustees so please meet Marion Weinzierl, Fouzhan Hosseini and Kirsty Pringle.

Marion is a Research Software Engineer in the Advanced Research Computing unit at Durham University and the RSE Theme Leader of the N8 Centre of Excellence for Computationally Intensive Research (CIR). She is also a member of the SORSE programme team. She has a degree in Media Informatics and a PhD in Scientific Computing. Previously she worked both in industry and in academia in computational physics (in a variety of forms). In her current job she provides computational support for projects in application areas ranging from arts and humanities over geography and earth science to classic STEM subjects, and teaches software and HPC training courses for researchers. Marion is interested in creating new connections on all levels, making sure that all “versions” of RSEs know about and feel welcome to join the RSE community, and enhancing communication between RSEs, (other) researchers, and the public. She is also committed to improving career prospects and professional development for RSEs.

Dr Fouzhan Hosseini is a technical consultant and a member of NAG’s Research and Development management team.  Her team contributes to the EU funded Performance Optimization and Productivity Centre of Excellence in High Performance Computing.  

She has over 10 years of experience in building parallel applications on various platforms from multi- and many-core hardware to computer clusters exploiting low- to high-level programming technologies where performance always appears as a key part of the work.  With a strong background in computer science, she is passionate about promoting best practices in parallel programming and supporting HPC users to improve the performance of their codes.  

Before joining NAG, she had various research and teaching positions at the University of Leeds, UK, the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy, and the University of Tehran, Iran. She is Chair of the NAG Women in HPC (WHPC) Chapter and advocates for diversity and inclusion at work. 

Kirsty holds two part-time roles, one at the University of Edinburgh where she is Project Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute and the other at the University of Leeds where she is an atmospheric scientist and embedded RSE in the Centre for Environmental Modelling and Computation (CEMAC).   She has over 10 years of experience of developing and evaluating software for academic research, she is passionate about open research and is interested in using citizen science and public engagement to “open up” the research process.  Kirsty is an active member of the Research Software Engineering community and from 2018 to 2020 she was RSE Theme Lead for the N8 CIR where she worked to develop a community of research software engineers across the universities in the N8 partnership. She became a trustee of the Society in 2020 and is now the vice-treasurer.

SORSE going strong!

The international Series of Research Software Events (SORSE) is now finishing its third month, and still running strong! We’ve had presenters from many disciplines, countries and time zones, giving the community the opportunity to meet new people and broaden their horizon. From diversity in tech, over software management, high performance computing, software engineering, digital humanities to RSE politics — the range of topics is amazing, and we are looking forward to more amazing talks, workshops, software demos and discussions in the coming months. SORSE is also inviting blog posts – be it about a session you ran, opinion pieces, or anything else you want to share with the international RSE community. We hope to see you at one of our next SORSE events! If you could not attend the past events at the scheduled time you can watch the recordings on our YouTube channel.

Society Feedback and Discussion Session from Ania Brown

Thank you to all who attended the first RSE Society Feedback and Discussion Session in October! Your contributions led to lively discussions across four topics – working groups and special interest groups, mentoring and peer support, membership, and engaging outside of academia. It is important to us that the Society and any initiatives we run are strongly guided by the needs of the RSE community, and your feedback has helped us to better understand your priorities in those areas. Following the success of this trial session, we plan to make the feedback session a regular (annual or six monthly) event. In the meantime, and as always, we welcome any suggestions about the topics above or any other feedback at [email protected]. Minutes from the recent session are available.

Membership to the Society

We currently have 353 members with several thousand people forming the online community on the RSE Slack space.  Sign up for membership! There are three options for payment:- credit card, debit card or direct debit.

Currently the members benefits are:

• Support the work of the Society to further research software engineering
• Eligible to apply for any future opportunities for Society funding
• Opportunity for early registration to the Society annual conference
• Opportunity for early registration to any future Society’s professional and networking events
• Eligible to vote in Society decisions such as electing trustees or changing the constitution
• Eligible to stand for election as a trustee
• Eligible to be volunteer or be nominated for working groups or committees that the trustees may establish

RSE Slack space and channels

There are 120 public slack channels in the RSE space that you can join so feel free to explore by clicking on the +  on the left hand side, next to ‘Channels’ and then ‘Browse Channels’. If you joined the slack space recently, you were automatically added to these channels:- #general, #random, #introductions– where we can all get to know each other more and hear about you and your work,  #jobs – where you can post and see new vacancies and #events– to read and post about any relevant interesting events, and the #training channel.  If you’ve been here a while you might not be in those channels so use the + to join them and browse all the other channels available. We’d like to encourage everyone to introduce themselves in the #introductions channel…Connect to the RSE Community by joining the RSE Slack https://society-rse.org/about/contact/

RSE Group Leaders Meetings – going online

A successful group leaders meeting took place on the 19th June online. If you’d like to host/chair the next meeting in the Spring, get in touch with Claire.  The Society supports meetings for RSE Leaders, which are normally in person twice a year but now that we are all online, we are trialling a move to having more frequent meetings. Both the private slack channel and the meetings are for leaders to share and discuss best practice confidentially.  No matter how small or large the group, the challenges are usually quite similar so this leaders network discusses on slack and meets in person (now online) the solutions that work, present interesting projects, share best practice etc. The meetings are informal with no note taking and all conversations are strictly confidential.  If you’d like to join the leaders slack channel and/or attend the next meeting, please get in touch with Claire Wyatt. There is also a mailing list but this is mostly used to fix the meetings. Discussions are held on slack so as not to clutter inboxes.

Keep up to date – You can keep up to date with trustee meetings as we have shared a summary of Society monthly trustee meetings including the decision log.

RSE Vacancies – You can post an RSE role or a role supporting RSEs to the vacancy page on the Society website via a form.

Announcements

Lightning Talk event 20th January – 3pm UTC/GMT – SORSE
We are seeking submissions for a dedicated lightning session. Participants will be given the opportunity to present a 1-2 minute lightning talk followed by informal discussions. Each talk should be supported by either a poster or a blog post. Submit your lightning talk idea here under the “Lightning Talk with Poster/Blog Post” contribution type and more information here. Deadline for abstract submissions is 9am UTC/GMT on the 11th January.

The Data Standards Authority wants your feedback on whether government should add Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to the data and documents it publishes. You can give feedback directly on their Open Standards GitHub page until the end of December 2020. They will use your feedback to decide whether to develop a formal proposal to take before the Open Standards Board for consideration.

REF 2021 Software Output Guidance – The Software Sustainability Institute has published ‘Good Practice in Submitting Software Outputs for REF 2021‘. This was developed in consultation with the Research Excellence Framework (REF) sub-panel 11 and has been approved by all other panels, so it can be used by the whole research community.

A “journal” club about Data Science and Ethics is being launched in the new year by Natalie Thurlby, a Data Scientist based at Bristol. The first meeting will be Wednesday 20th January 2021 (1-2pm GMT). Sign up to the mailing list and check out the reading list (and make suggestions for it) and other bits and bobs here. 

Collaborations Workshop 2021 (CW21) will take place online from Tuesday, 30 March to Thursday, 1 April 2021 and registration is now open!  The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop series brings together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, policy makers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software. The themes of the CW21 keynote presentations, discussion groups, mini-workshops, collaborative ideas, and hack day will be around the following areas of research software: FAIR Research Software, Diversity & Inclusion and Software Sustainability.  To find out more information, see the agenda and view the call for submissions, please visit the CW21 website.

New interdisciplinary research community brought together to improve research practice – Jisc has announced the launch of a digital research community which will explore how technology and innovation can help improve current research practices.   The new support for leading research will have global impact, by cutting across disciplines, mission groups and geography and is a direct result of Jisc’s new research strategy which aims to increase wider engagement with research and alignment with the needs of the sector. Researchers, research leaders, research managers and other professionals in the field, such as developers, software engineers, library and IT staff can all join the community. Victoria Moody, Jisc’s research strategy lead at Jisc says: “We are excited to launch this digital research community group which will support the sector to respond to new policies that affect research such as the recent UK Government’s Research and Development Roadmap, National Data Strategy, UKRI’s Corporate Plan and the announcement of a new research funding agency. The community will provide a safe space for professionals active within the research process to assess technology solutions that can enhance research excellence and efficiency, as well as the culture, skills and processes to achieve these objectives.” The group will meet for the first time online in December, and will meet quarterly, led by a community council of 18 research experts.  The collective wisdom of the community will be shared with the wider world through various forms of communication. The first output from the group is a webinar, which will present priorities and potential activities for the community.  For more information about the digital community group for research, join the webinar – ‘Shaping future research environments: digital challenges and opportunities‘ on Tuesday 15 December. The event is free, but booking is required.  

N8 CIR launched their Research Data Management Network on November 25. Full details of the talks can be found here.

In November 2020, Marion Weinzierl  took over the RSE Theme Leader role in the N8 CIR from Kirsty Pringle, who fulfilled this role from 2018 to 2020. Marion will work on developing the N8 RSE community, and lead the Bede RSE group that will support researchers on the new N8 CIR supercomputer Bede.

Participants are invited for this survey by the Software and Model Development Focus Areas (FA) of the EMMC ASBL. Your input, assessment and feedback on the themes, issues and open questions within the survey are valuable.  They will be used to target and support specific themes and topics of importance to you by organising FA task forces and webinars as well as provide updates to the EMMC Roadmap (produced for EC Research and Innovation). The survey will close on 10 January 2021.  The main results will be published online by the end of January 2021 and presented at FAs web-meetings soon after. To learn more about EMMC and browse their Focus Areas and white papers, please visit https://emmc.eu/ .  Membership (associate is free) with EMMC ASBL will enable invites to series of webinars within their FAs as well as on relevant EC funded projects.

A Series of Online Research Software Events – pronounced ‘source’ is an international answer to the COVID-19-induced cancellation of many national RSE conferences. An international committee has provided an opportunity for RSEs to develop and grow their skills, build new collaborations and engage with RSEs worldwide. This is an open call to all RSEs and anyone involved with research software worldwide, to propose a talk, a workshop, a software demo, a panel or discussion, blog post or poster. After each event, SORSE will provide an opportunity for networking and informal discussion with other participants in small groups. Our programme is looking great with all sorts of events filling December and January already. The Call for Contributions form will remain open continuously and there will be a rolling deadline at the end of the last day (UTC) of each month following which all contributions received over the previous month will be sent for review by the Programme Committee.

Building a diverse and inclusive research environment. The UK’s engineering and physical sciences community is being encouraged to take part in a series of surveys to inform plans to foster a diverse and inclusive research environment. The community engagement activities have been launched by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), as a report published today highlights gender disparity across EPSRC’s portfolio. Understanding our portfolio – a gender perspectivefocuses on applications and grants awarded by gender in EPSRC’s portfolio, particularly highlighting large grants. The detailed investigation shows that women are underrepresented in EPSRC’s principal investigator applicant pool, and the council receives consistently low numbers of applications from women, with applicant numbers for large grants particularly low. Members of the community are encouraged to take part in a ‘have your say’ survey on the findings of the report to provide personal experiences of applying for large grants as well as views on potential causal factors for the trends seen. These views will increase understanding of the aspects that influence the inclusion of researchers in our grant portfolio and across the landscape. The Understanding our portfolio: a gender perspective survey is now available. The deadline for participation is 3 December.

The Software Sustainbility Institute’s Fellowship Programme provides funding for researchers who want to improve how research software is used in their domains and/or area of work. Each Fellow is given £3,000 to spend over fifteen months. This funding can be used for any activities that meet both the Fellow’s and the Institute’s goals, such as travel to workshops, running training events such as software carpentry, data carpentry or library carpentry, nurturing or contributing to communities of practice, collaborating with other Fellows, or for any other activities that relate to computational practice or policy. In light of the ongoing situation around COVID-19, we encourage applicants to consider that travel and in-person events may not always be feasible, and we particularly welcome plans with online-based activities. The main goals of the programme are to improve computational practice and to promote this improvement across all disciplines. We encourage our Fellows to use software sustainability practices themselves and to be ambassadors of good practice in their own domains. Our Fellows have come from a wide variety of backgrounds, experience and career stages. What they have in common is a passion for their area, the ability to communicate their ideas effectively, and a real interest in the role of software in research. Applications will open for the Fellowship Programme 2021 on Monday, 7 December 2020. Sign up here to be notified when registration opens.

Events

December

Nordic RSE online get-together — open to all!
Starting on the 30th November, the Nordic RSE initiative will be hosting an online get-together in lieu of our first in person meeting. All folks are welcome to attend and there are spots for giving talks and demos.

Slack Sessions: How the CTO is Reimagining the World of Work – A conversation with CTOs of Slack and DMGT – Slack and DMGT CTOs share their insights on the role of the CTO in reimagining the world of work in this virtual panel on Wednesday, December 2 2020 at 4:00pm GMT

Research Software Developers Day – 3rd December 2020
Join the Be-RSE group at their first online event. They are still accepting talks or workshops and registration is now open.

Opportunity to learn ally skills to make your workplace more inclusive with workshops on the 4th December delivered by Malvika Sharan, Emmy Tsang and Yo Yehudi. An important part of collaborative research, and indeed of open science, is compassion. We, as members of different research communities, are too-often inclined to act with an assumption that science, which is supposed to be evidence-based or data-driven, is somehow pure, objective, and above implicit biases. In reality, science is produced by humans, and falls prey to the same biases, societal inequalities and (dis)advantages that humans have. This is reflected in the science we do, and the communities or workplaces we conduct our research in. An Ally Skills Workshop allows its participants to understand various concepts, explore social scenarios and practise simple everyday techniques they can use to make their workplace and communities more inclusive.  More info here.

BristolRSE are running a “Christmas in the Cloud” free online workshop on the 10th and 11th December. It is a hands-on workshop where you will learn how to port and optimise applications for the cloud, and how to use portable technologies (such as terraform) to write infrastructure-as-code applications. There are talks plus hackathons, with lots of free cloud credits and time with experienced RSEs and Cloud Architects. We want to help you gain the skills to bridge the gap between software and hardware, and to co-design modern applications that match hardware to software needs. Free for RSEs and researchers working in academia or the public sector. This workshop is being delivered in partnership between the Bristol RSE group and AWS. More info and sign-up links here.

Update on RSE HPC monthly meeting and the HPC Champions session – Update from Andy Turner
With the HPC Champions sessions moving online and due to the large overlap between groups we are planning to merge these two events going forward. The tentative plan is to run half day, online HPC Champions events every two months or so and (once we are all allowed to meet in person again) adding 1 or 2 in-person HPC Champions events a year. The next HPC Champions event will be 1300-1700 GMT, 15 December 2020. More information and details on registration. Call for contributions: As you will see, there is time scheduled for both discussion and presentations. If you want to present on something or host a discussion topic then please let Andy know in Slack or via email. Presentations are generally expected to be 10mins with 5mins for questions but if you have a case for a longer presentation then they may be able to accommodate this. Based on feedback from previous sessions, we would be particularly interested in presentations covering HPC software development. If you cannot make this meeting or we are oversubscribed with presentations/discussions then the next one will likely be in Feb 2021 so hopefully not long to wait if you miss this one.

January

Lightning Talk event 20th January – 3pm UTC/GMT – SORSE
We are seeking submissions for a dedicated lightning session. Participants will be given the opportunity to present a 1-2 minute lightning talk followed by informal discussions. Each talk should be supported by either a poster or a blog post. Submit your lightning talk idea here under the “Lightning Talk with Poster/Blog Post” contribution type and more information here. Deadline for abstract submissions is 9am UTC/GMT on the 11th January.

2021 Code Performance Series: From analysis to insight – 21st January
Performance analysis is at the core of the development of exascale software – to understand why software performs (or not) is the basis of any informed improvement of the code. This is an ExCALIBUR Knowledge Integration Activity in collaboration with the VI-HPS, Durham University’s Department of Computer Science, DiRAC and the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR).  The workshop will consist of seven days, spread over the first seven months of 2021. The first half of each day will be a tutorial session, followed by a hands-on session in the afternoon. Participants can choose to only take part in the morning sessions.  Registration, dates and more information can be found at this website.  Contact: [email protected]

Podcasts

Top 10 podcasts on software and Open Research by SSI Fellows Patricia Herterich and Sarah Gibson

Four new episodes on the RSE Stories podcast series – 

• The Interview – Join Leo and Vanessa for the ultimate tech interview. 
• ‘Open Science is Critical’ – As director of the research software alliance Michelle Barker takes us through the necessary changes we need to cope with the scientific challenges of the future. This includes digital skill sets as well as providing for reliable and safe handling of digital data and assets. In all these endeavours, open science is critical, says Michelle.
• Key is your value set – Meet Brian Hills, Deputy CEO and Head of Service Design at the Data Lab in Scotland. After years in the private sector Brian joined Datalab to help bridge the gap in data science between universities and the private sector. Ethics in data plays an important part and success strongly depends on your value set, says Brian.
• Give me Security, Give me Hope – A journey of discovering a desire to be a research software engineer, finding a niche, and then fighting to keep it.

Papers

‘Ten simple rules for writing Dockerfiles for reproducible data science’ from Daniel Nüst (corresponding author of the paper). A new article in the “Ten Simple Rules” series in the journal PLOS Computational Biology features guidelines for researchers and research software engineers on using Dockerfiles for reproducible computational workflows. The authors hope this paper is useful for RSEs both for their own work as well as in supporting and educating others on using containerisation for better research.

Blog Posts

• Dr Paul Richmond appointed President of the Society of Research Software Engineering 

• Bede – N8 CIR supercomputer – Bede, a new Tier 2 supercomputer based upon IBM Power 9 CPU and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, started its service in the N8.

• No Fortran? No data science in R and Python! – Mike Croucher recently discussed the importance of Fortran for the new Apple Silicon Macs on his highly popular Walking Randomly blog.

• PyDev of the Week: Mary Chester-Kadwell. You will probably recognise her name because Mary is very active on our RSE slack space. In this blog post she tells us about her role and what she’s up to at the moment with python.

• Yo Yehudi, Malvika Sharan and Bérénice Batut write about the Open Life Science project and community report in this three-part series on the SSI blog:
• Where we are
• How far we’ve come
• Where we want to go

• Towards a better understanding of RSEs, a working group at the 2nd International RSE Leaders Workshop (took place online in September) has worked on an RSE Profile Map. The respective blog post is available, also talking about a single entry point to the international RSE community and the fourth blog post from the same workshop is now available. It disses what we know about RSE Groups, and what we would like to learn ‘How do RSE Groups work?’

• Embedding EDI in EPSRC policy, partners and practice: a Strategic Advisory Group perspective from Professor Sarah Sharples, the Pro-Vice Chancellor in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and People and a Professor of Human Factors at the University of Nottingham and Chair of the EPSRC EDI Strategic Advisory Group.

Top tips

Here are some top tips and opinion pieces by RSEs from The University of Manchester (and published on their blog and newsletter). We all use Git and GitHub, so the first two are indeed highly useful top tips. In both cases, thanks go to Robin Long and Douglas Lowe.

• GitHub: creating template repositories

• Git: linking code repositories using SubModules

These last two are both from Ian Cottam, who is now a Society trustee, and retired from Manchester. The first was written back in April, during lockdown 1.0, and discusses how your home desktop provision may not be quite as good as your main office one. It may well be applicable in lockdown 2.0 and subsequent tiered living. A couple of updates to the text: it mentions AirParrot2 – AirParrot3 is now available; and the mention of macOS Catalina could now also include macOS Big Sur.

• Working From Home (with multiple, virtual desktops

Finally more of an opinion piece. Windows Subsystem Linux 2 (WSL2) is now generally available to Windows 10 (64-bit) users, and not just on the Insider Preview. Given hindsight and the impact of Covid, one might like to change the title from “2020” to “2021”.

• 2020 – the year of Linux on the desktop

Community info

Reminding you about..

RSEs in the UK now have the opportunity to apply for the new Open Plus Fellowships that are funded by EPSRC. The Open refers to the fellowship being open to all who work in academia e.g. RSE and technicians while the Plus refers to being able to use some of your time for community activities. The RSE Fellowships will still continue but in time will migrate to these.

UKRI are building a new funding service that will eventually replace the existing Je-S system. If you have any experience of applying for funding, or are likely to apply for or assess funding in the future you can join the effort to help design the service in a way that will meet your needs. If you would like to input into the design of the new service please provide your details here. 

UKRI is running a survey (that closes on the 3rd of December) on Gender Diversity in our large grant portfolio. This is a follow on from the report Understanding our portfolio A gender perspective and is part of UKRI’s EDI work.

The DiversIT Charter is CEPIS’ flagship initiative aimed at reducing gender disparity in IT roles. It is a roadmap which moves through three levels of attainment: Bronze, Silver and Gold. Each level has a focus on attraction and retention, asking applicants to showcase their initiatives and policies for increasing gender diversity in ICT professions.

REF Real Time Review: Survey to assess views of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) among researchers – UKRI has commissioned RAND Europe to conduct a real-time evaluation of REF 2021 on behalf of the four UK funding bodies. The study aims to assess attitudes, perspectives and behaviours towards the REF 2021 across the sector, and explore how REF policies and changes are embedded in the way submissions are prepared and delivered. As part of this study, they are conducting a survey of research staff across UK higher education institutions. They hope you will be happy to support the study, and contribute to the evidence base that will help assess REF policy and inform its development in the future.

A new ‘Resources‘ database has been set up on the Society website which will hold the links to all the static useful items that have featured here under Community info. Help us to fill the resources database by submitting an item to the database.

Research Software Hour…Hosted by members of the Nordic-RSE community, this continues weekly on Twitch. Research Software Hour is an online stream/show about scientific computing and research software. It is designed to provide the skills typically picked up via informal networks: each week, they do some combination of exploring new tools, analyzing and improving someone’s research code, and discussion. Watchers can take part and contribute code to us which they analyze and discuss on stream. They broadcast on Twitch Thursdays at 20:30 Oslo time / 21:30 Helsinki time.

Imperial College Newsletter…The Imperial College RSE Team have been producing a newsletter for a while now to their institute community. They include a ‘Research Software of the month’, links to blog posts and dates for your diary.

Better Scientific Software – a blog with relevant articles.

Hidden REF…Hidden REF is a year-long competition to highlight the research staff that publications overlook. The way in which the (usual) REF exercise is conducted overlooks many of the people who are vital to the success of research. The Hidden REF will celebrate all research outputs and recognise everyone who contributes to their creation. Anyone who works in a UK research institution can submit to the hidden REF. Read more detail here in this Research Professional news article.

RSE Worldwide

Awareness of the RSE role and the RSE community is growing around the worldwide with new national groups are being created all the time. In this section, we introduce these groups and raise awareness of their success. The Society supports new groups and collaborates with representatives from these groups on various initiatives (papers, international workshops). (In alphabetial order).

AU/NZ RSE Group

Belgium Research Software Engineers Community

It’s great news to see that another RSE chapter has formed! Check out their new website (link above) and they are planning their first conference in December 2020.

CANARIE

CANARIE is the organising body for the RSE movement in Canada.

de RSE

de-RSE Elections
They had their AGM on 27 August online and have elected a new board, which is 5/6 the old board: Chair: Frank Löffler (Friedrich Schiller University Jena); Deputy Chair: Daniel Nüst (Münster University); Secretary: Bernadette Fritzsch (Alfred Wegener Institute); Deputy Secretary: Stephan Druskat (German Aerospace Center (DLR); Treasurer: Stephan Janosch (MPI Dresden); new Deputy Treasurer is Florian Thiery (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (RGZM)).

NL RSE

The Netherlands RSE Group (NL RSE) had their first conference in November 2019. From that conference, here is the presentation ‘Five Recommendations for Fair Software‘ and a recap on the ‘Fair Software‘ Session. The NL-RSE meets on regular basis, every two months on average. Netherlands eScience Center, DTL and SURF frequently organise NL-RSE meetups to encourage collaboration and communication between Research Software Engineers in the Netherlands.

Nordic RSE

The first Nordic-RSE conference has been postponed to May 2021. Initially they had planned their first conference for October and then moved it to December but due to uncertainties they have now postponed to the 27-28th May 2021, in Stockholm. In its place, they are hosting an online meetup on the 30th November – December 2 to introduce Nordic-RSE and have some RSE related talks and workshops. Registration and the Abstract submission form are open now.

US RSE

The group recently released their governance document. Also, don’t miss this – the US RSE group have released a summary ‘A year of Progress for US-RSE‘ and it’s a great read! Read about the US RSE group in their newsletter here.

Collect your gold star here if you’ve read all the way to the end!