June 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. The call for submissions has now closed. Applicants should have received notifications about the success of their submission, and the full programme will be announced in the coming weeks.

Call for Volunteers

The Committee is calling for volunteers to participate in a wide range of tasks which will help us deliver a successful conference. Primarily, you’ll act as a first point of contact should any delegates need assistance during the conference, making sure everyone feels welcome and valued.

More information: https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/calls/volunteers/

Call for Mentors

We are also seeking mentors to advise early-career RSEs and newcomers to the profession in the preparation of their talkspostersworkshopshackathonswalkthroughspanels, and BoFs for RSECon24.

More information: https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/calls/mentors/

Society RSE

Membership

We currently have 678 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. These benefits include a discount on conference tickets and there may be a special prize if we reach our 700th member before the conference!

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 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. This will be a recurring monthly event, usually on the last Thursday of the month. 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. The event is public and will be announced on our Slack channel so you can sign up. 

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 stewards 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.

Showcase your Outreach

We’re looking to showcase outreach events that our members have been involved in, share materials and make it easier for others to set up their own outreach events. So, if you like to share your links (or other resources) email [email protected].

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

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”). Check out the details on https://us-rse.org/usrse24/participate/

CORSA

The US DOE-funded CORSA project has been collecting guidance, documents, examples, templates for open-source software projects, such as on governance, roadmaps, contributing, code of conduct, DEI, licences, etc.: https://github.com/corsa-center/oss-documents/blob/main/README.md  Please feel free to add additional items, as PRs or new issues.

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/

RSE community activities launched in Switzerland

RSEs from ETH Zurich started community building in December 2023 and there has been an inaugural event first in Zurich in February 2024, followed by Lausanne in April 2024. We had the pleasure of being invited and share our work in the UK.

A new meet-up has been arranged for 4 June. https://rse.ethz.ch/events/2024_06_04_meetup_pasc/

HPC-SIG meeting in Sheffield, UK Tuesday 18th June

There is a HPC meet-up in Sheffield. Please visit https://hpc-sig.org.uk/index.php/event/hpc-sig-meeting-university-of-sheffield/ for talks and session details.

The deadlines are:

In person registration: Tuesday, 11 June

Online registration: Monday, 17 June

RSLondonSouthEast event 16 July 2024, London, UK

The annual workshop of the Research Software London community will take place, again, at Imperial College in London on 16 July 2024.

By the time you get this newsletter, registrations will have opened or will be soon. And you can contact the organisers on  [email protected] .

Moreover, the organisers are widening their event to include other digital Research Technical Professionals. So spread the word amongst your data wrangler, technician and librarian colleagues.

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 Property Based Testing (Duncan McGregor) in April and on the FAIR research software (Jamie Quinn) in May
  • 2 German language versions, with the last on citizen science with Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
  • And a range of other episodes covering a range of topics including an interview with one of the founders of the Carpentries, Greg Wilson. 

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/

About the author: Peter Schmidt