Welcome to our March 2025 Newsletter! We’re excited to bring you some updates on RSECon25 and a selection of announcements and blog posts from the UK and International RSE Communities.

Headlines

Our main updates this month include a big update on this years RSE Conference.

RSECon25

It’s Spring, and just as the seasons roll around, so too do the Society’s annual conference and planning for RSECon25 is well underway. This year, RSECon25 will be held at the University of Warwick in Coventry (UK) from 9-11 September 2025. If you’ve never been to an RSE Conference before, you may be curious about what to expect. The conference spans three days, with satellite events flanking it on either side. The conference itself involves a wide array of talks from a diverse group of researchers, guest speakers and sponsors who fall under the broad umbrella of Research Software Engineering.

Testimonials

Don’t take our word for it, though; here are a few testimonials from people who have attended in the past.

“Attending RSECon for the first time in 2023 had a deep impact on my work and career. Not only did I receive valuable feedback on my fellowship project, but I also had the opportunity to engage in discussions about community building.” – Aman Goel (2024)

“RSECon has given me direction and resources to help me navigate some of the complex problems I encounter in my day-to-day work” – Rachel Alcraft (2025)

Get Involved

RSECon is a great opportunity to meet your peers from around the country, and there are a number of ways you can get involved beyond just attending the conference.

• Submissions – If you’ve something you want to share,e consider submitting a poster, talk, presentation or interactive session (tutorials, hackathons). Submissions are already open, and you can submit right up to 2025-04-25 23:59 BST.
• Emerging Voices – Do you know someone who is just starting out on the RSE pathway who could share their story and vision and give a fresh perspective? Emerging voices nominations open in May.
• Reviewing The submissions don’t review themselves, and we use humans rather than computers to sift through and decide what to include in the programme.
• Mentoring – It can be nerve-wracking presenting at the best of times; we like to help guide people through the process to help them succeed with their presentations. If you have experience presenting at conferences and would like to share it, please consider volunteering to mentor others.
• Volunteer – The success of RSECon is in large part thanks to the excellent volunteers we have each year who welcome attendees and help with any questions or problems that arise. If you’d like to help with the running of the event (and get a reduction in your attendance fee), consider volunteering.
• Chair a Session – play a vital role in ensuring the smooth running of the conference by volunteering to chair a session, introducing speakers, managing the time and facilitating discussions.

Key dates for the above and other events can be found on the Important Dates page. You can also keep abreast of announcements and deadlines by following us on social media using the hashtag #rsecon25.

Celebrate Amazing Contributions to Research Software Engineering!

Nominations are also open for the RSE Society’s annual recognition of outstanding Research Software Engineering colleagues with an awards ceremony at RSECon25. You can nominate your colleagues in one of the following categories:

• Rising Star
• Training & Education
• Impact

For more information and to nominate someone, please visit the Awards Page on the RSECon25 website.

Community News & Events

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

Nordic-RSE Conference 2025

Our friends at Nordic RSE are holding their annual conference. Unfortunately, the call for submissions has closed, but if you are interested in Research Software Engineering and want to connect with the community in the Nordics, you are warmly encouraged to join.

For more info and registration, please visit the Nordic RSE Conference website.

Report on RSEs in the Netherlands published

The Dutch coordination point for Research Data Management and NL-RSE published a report on professionalizing the role of RSEs in the Netherlands.

Ally Skills Workshop by OLS

What does being a true ally look like in practice? Many of us want to support others, but we don’t always know how. Join OLS for an interactive workshop where you’ll explore your own privileges and learn concrete ways to step up for others in professional and personal spaces in a meaningful and effective way.

• April 2, 2025 – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1272211411579
• July 2, 2025 – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1283972780149
• October 1, 2025 – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1283976260559

RSE Midlands 2025

Tickets for RSE Midlands 2025 are now available! The event will take place on Monday 7th April at The Exchange in Birmingham. We have an exciting, varied agenda with ample time set aside for catching up with colleagues and meeting new members of our growing Midlands community.

Full details can be found on the event page, and you can secure your free ticket.

CCP-AHC: A new collaborative computational community for arts, humanities, and culture research

We are pleased to announce Toward a new CCP for Arts, Humanities, and Culture research (CCP-AHC), a new research software community-building exercise, funded by UKRI and STFC for 24 months from January 2025. The goal of CCP-AHC is to support the sustainable and efficient development of software, pipelines, and workflows used by arts, humanities, and culture researchers who make use of UK-based digital research infrastructure (DRI), including high-performance computing (HPC) and advanced computing infrastructures supported by UKRI.

The first CCP-AHC Town Hall will take place on 22 May 2025 in Durham (UK). The purpose of the CCP-AHC Town Hall 2025 is to bring together key stakeholders in the area, including RSEs and other dRTPs supporting computationally intensive research in the arts, humanities, and culture space. We welcome expressions of interest from the community to attend the first Town Hall at our project website, and encourage readers to sign up to the project’s JiscMail lists to stay up-to-date.

Looking for Green RSE Case Studies

The new Green RSE Special Interest Group (https://socrse.github.io/green-sig/) is collecting case studies from across the community to highlight and promote efforts to understand and reduce the environmental impact of research software.

Do you know someone making strides in this area? Or are you involved in such work yourself? We’d love to hear about it! Nominate a colleague – or yourself – using this form.

Participants sought for Inclusive RSE project

Do you write software for research purposes? Are you from an underrepresented group as defined by you? We are running a study exploring the barriers and enablers to developing research software for underrepresented groups. If you are interested in taking part, please check out this blog post.

Research Software: A Key (Neglected) Component of the Digital Research Infrastructure Ecosystem

This preprint describes the importance of research software across the research lifecycle and as part of digital research infrastructure. Numerous significant research software projects across disciplines such as astronomy, bioinformatics, public health, and more exist in South Africa. Here, we highlight the lack of support for research software and the people who develop it in policies governing research, open science and research infrastructure in South Africa. We also advocate for more deliberate engagement with the international research software movement.

Community Blog Posts

Intro to Docker: an interactive training event

The Research IT team at Manchester have developed an Intro to Docker course for researchers. You can read more about it and find out how it went in this blog post.

Spotlight on MRSC Community Lead

In another update from Manchester Research IT, read this interview with Aman Goel, who runs the Manchester Research Software Community. This article may be interesting to anyone looking to set up a similar community at their local institution.

Towards a Cloud Native SIG

In this blog post, Laura Shemilt discussed how – as part of her SSI fellowship – she wants to start a Cloud Native SIG to give us an opportunity to share a community of practice amongst RSEs who are adopting this technology. As part of the efforts to start this SIG I want to create a blogpost series for people to learn about Kubernetes.

Supporting Mental Health in the RSE Community

Mike Simpson has also written a blog post about his plans for his SSI Fellowship. Mike will be collaborating with Dave Horsfall and others to continue the important conversation around mental health in our community and what we can do to look after ourselves and each other. Please contact him, or join the #mental-health channel on the Society Slack workspace if you want to get involved or for news and announcements relating to this work.

Society Updates

Remember, the Society has a number of events, initiatives and resources that you might want to check out. These are linked below.

Follow Us

You can always find links to our site, key resources and social media 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.