March 2024 Newsletter
RSE Conference 2024 Newcastle, UK, 3-5 September
https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/calls/
The eighth annual Research Software Engineering Conference (RSECon24) will take place 3rd – 5th September 2024 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and the Conference Committee had several exciting updates to share in the past few weeks:
Call for Submissions Open
The call for submissions is open! The Programme Committee invites you to submit your ideas for presentations, interactive sessions, posters, and panels before the end of 1 May 2024. Learn more about the call at https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/calls/
Calling Volunteers
The Committee is also calling for volunteers to review submissions to the conference, to help build an exciting and inclusive programme reflecting the full diversity of the RSE community. This is a fantastic way to make a small but valuable contribution to the success of the conference.
More at https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/calls/reviewers/
Platinum Sponsor
CloudKubed (https://www.cloudkubed.com) are our Platinum Sponsor for RSECon24! The Oxfordshire-based Digital Transformation and Cloud Experts will join us at the conference, to build their relationships within the RSE community and present the work they do to democratise technology for research through Trusted Research Environments.
Satellite Events
Finally, the Conference Committee is also calling for expressions of interest in running Satellite Events to RSECon24. These self-organised events would take place on Monday, 2 September or Friday, 6 September, either side of the main conference, last a half- or full-day, and could include a maximum of 80 people. If you are interested in organising a Satellite Event, please contact the conference Steering Group ([email protected]) before the end of 12 April 2024.
Society RSE
Membership
We currently have 673 paid-up members of the Society. Not yet a member? Why not join us today? Read about all the benefits of being a member on our website. We welcome people to become members who are not employed as RSEs but do support our mission. We are looking for a sentence, or one paragraph, contributions from such people to highlight the fact that we are about research software engineering and not just research software engineers. Several professors are active members of the Society, for example. Contact us at [email protected]. We are now on HMRC’s approved list, so you can claim Income Tax relief as an employment expense if you pay for your membership yourself. We come up under Society of Research Software Engineering.
Migration
We have completed our membership platform transition. You can now manage your membership here: membership.society-rse.org through our new partner, Wild Apricot. You should have received an email with instructions on how to reset your password and access your account. If you have any problems, please contact [email protected]. The Society would like to thank all the trustees involved for their hard work in making this transition possible.
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.
Social Media Accounts
We are on Mastodon @[email protected] , Twitter/X @ResearchSoftEng and on LinkedIn .
We are on Zenodo
Zenodo is a popular publishing platform and our community is there with two Zenodo groups
Monthly Communications Forum of the Society
We started a public and monthly communications forum on 29 February 2024 at 3pm. This will be a recurring monthly event, usually on the last Thursday of the month. The event is public and will be announced on our Slack channel so you can sign up.
The Forum is an opportunity to discuss ideas on how we should communicate with our members and the wider public and share news and events about what’s happening.
Mentoring Scheme
Sign-up for the new round of the mentoring scheme ended on Sunday 24 March 2024. Many thanks to everyone who signed up and is supporting this great initiative.
Supporting Technical Research Professionals, UKRI Funds
The UKRI has made a fund available to support initiatives that focus on community driven projects to drive professional and career support for technical professionals in research, be that technicians, RSEs, data stewarts and others.
https://www.ukri.org/news/new-funding-to-support-research-technical-professionals/
One of the funded projects is STEP-UP aimed at developing digital research technical professionals (RTP). The project is led by Jeremy Cohen from Imperial College, London. And there will be an inaugural meeting on 15 April 2024 in London.
Events and Media
RSE Community Weekly Seminars, Cambridge, UK
The RSE community at the University of Cambridge runs a weekly RSE seminar during term times hosting speakers on a variety of topics. Talks are on Thursdays at 1pm UK time, hybrid via zoom, and open to anyone who wishes to join. Further information and upcoming talks can be found at the associated link: https://rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars
Collaborations Workshop 2024, 30 Apr – 2 May, Warwick, UK
Just a few days left to register to join the SSI in person for CW24 at the University of Warwick. The agenda is now available including keynotes from Arfon Smith (GitHub), the Natural History Museum and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, plenty of interesting mini-workshops and an amazing lineup of lightning talks: https://www.software.ac.uk/cw24
RSE Workshop at ISC 2024, 16 May, Hamburg, Germany
The annual supercomputing conference in Hamburg between 12-16 May will also host a workshop on all things RSE on Thursday 16 May. Early Bird registrations for the conference are closed now. But you can purchase a pass for the workshop day only. https://www.isc-hpc.com/
This event also holds other noteworthy workshops, e.g. from Women in HPC https://womeninhpc.org/events/isc-2024
Nordic RSE Conference, 30-31 May, Aalto, Finland
The first ever Nordic RSE conference will be held at the University of Aalto in Finland between 30-31 May 2024. Registration for the event is open and you can submit your contribution until 5 April 2024.
https://nordic-rse.org/events/2024-in-person-conference/
US RSE Conference, 15-17 Oct, Albuquerque, USA
The second US-RSE Conference will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on October 15-17, 2024. The theme of this year’s conference is “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A celebration of all that RSEs have done for computing in the past, present, and future.” It is a great opportunity to network and communicate the skills and practices needed to create more robust, manageable, and sustainable research software.
Submissions for workshops, tutorials and BoF sessions closed on 1 April 2024.
Don’t miss out on the next deadline for papers and notebooks (yes, you can submit electronic “papers”), which is coming up on 20 May 2024.Check out the details on https://us-rse.org/usrse24/participate/
European Carpentry Connect Event, 12-14 Nov, Heidelberg, Germany
The second European CarpentryConnect event (https://biont-training.eu/event-details/CarpentryConnect2024) will be held in Heidelberg (Germany) on 12-14 November 2024 under the theme “Community-led training beyond academia” with the aim to bring the Carpentries and BioNT communities together to explore and discuss community-led software and data skills training as well as capacity building initiatives. The deadline for proposals is Friday 19th April. Learn more about the event and the types of sessions that can be proposed in the announcement blog post: https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/02/cchd24-call-for-proposals/
Podcasts
We’re in Season 7 of Code for Thought and a number of episodes went live during February and March:
- 2 ByteSized RSE sessions on User Experience (Meag Doherty) in February and on the Citation File Format (Jason Maassen from the NL eScience Center) in March
- 2 German language versions, with the last one a report on the deRSE conference in Würzburg
- And a range of other episodes covering a range of topics from 2i2c, the Open Source company to reproducible science and more.
Code for Thought is available on all major podcast directories and – since February also on YouTube podcast. You can also listen to it directly on the hosting site https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com/
