It’s been a busy month for the Society. We’ve had a very successful RSECon26 in Sheffield, celebrating 10 years of the RSE Conference in the UK. We’re also in the process of welcoming a new batch of trustees to the board. Thank you for your patience during this handover period.

So, just a few updates from the Society this month, but we’ve got loads of updates from the community, so let’s dive in!

Society News Updates

First, here are the biggest updates and announcements from the conference.

RSECon26

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Sheffield for RSECon26. It was a very successful conference, and it was great to see all our colleagues again, including those who joined us for the collocated inaugural International Research Software Conference.

Special thanks to the organising committee and all the volunteers. Without all their hard work and dedication, we simply could not pull off such a large event for the RSE Community.

• All of the slides and other material from the conference should now be on Zenodo, with recordings of all the talks due to be shared on the Society’s YouTube Channel over the coming year.

RSECon27

We are delighted to announce that the 11th UK Conference for Research Software Engineering will be taking place in Edinburgh on the 6-9th September 2027, hosted by our co-chairs: Kirsty Pringle and Marion Weinzierl. More details to follow in the coming months

• The call for committee members is open now. Get involved and help us finally bring the conference north of the border!
• We’re running a webinar on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at 11:00 am for anyone who is interested but wants to know more. More details in this document.

Trustee Elections and Constitution Updates

At our AGM, held at RSECon26, a vote was passed to increase the number of trustees from 14 to 15, which meant (after dealing with some paperwork and red tape!) we were able to welcome all of our new nominees to the board of trustees this year.

A blog post with more information will be shared in the coming months, once the trustees have settled into their new roles, but in summary:

• We said goodbye to David Beavan, who has been president for the last two years, along with Stef Piatek, Lyndsey Ballantyne and Twim Karmakharm, who have all completed their terms.
• Mike Simpson was re-elected to a second term, joining new trustees Ryan Pepper, Christine Stawitz, Laura Crawford, Stephen Thompson and Isabel Fenton.
• They will be working with continuing trustees Elena Breitmoser, Mark Basham, William Haese-Hill, Iain Barrass, Adrian Mircea Nenu, James Tyrrell, Gillian Sinclair and Samantha Ahern.

Community News & Events

We’ve had a lot of updates and announcements from our special interest groups and other members of the community this month, including some celebrations to get involved with and surveys that need your input.

COMPASS: Guiding the Future of Digital Research Leadership

Phil Bradbury, Research Software Engineer, and Adrian Harwood, Head of Research Software Engineering at the University of Manchester, introduce COMPASS. A community supporting digital research technical leaders to share operational best practice across institutions.

Using Agile to Aid International Communication

Collaborating with groups internationally can be challenging due to time zones and distances. Discover how the Research Software Engineering team at the University of Manchester used agile methods to successfully collaborate with the Center for Open Science (USA), why it worked and learn some techniques for using Agile in your own projects.

RSEEE International RSE Day Meetup: Thu 8 Oct 2026

RSEEE is inviting everyone in the East of England who is interested in Research Software for a meetup event at 11:00-12:00 on International RSE Day. Our topic will be “Collaboration and Community in the East of England”, and the event will be an opportunity to meet, network and discuss. Come along and meet other people in research software in the region!

Sowing the seed for a Research Software Engineering Society in Spain

We’ve won two football World Cups, we’re the world’s second most visited tourist destination, and we lead the way in high-speed rail and solar energy. So what about RSE in Spain? There’s already a Spanish-speaking community sharing knowledge through the charlas RSE en español (RSE talks in Spanish). What’s still missing is a clear, organised movement in Spain.

DisCouRSE funding round 3 open

The DisCouRSE Network+ project aims to encourage and support the development of leaders across RSE and related roles. We have a twin focus on leadership training and career pathways – preparing the next generation of leaders and ensuring roles exist for them to lead within. Submit your ideas for pilot or growth projects to our latest call. Applications close Friday 11th December.

With pilot projects, we are looking for novel ideas, especially from new individuals, organisations, or communities. Growth projects can be larger and longer, particularly in one of our priority areas: working to implement career pathways and building up an evidence bank for others to leverage; community building among leaders in under-represented (within the DisCouRSE Network) professions; environmental leadership; expanding the use and broader uptake of the DIRECT web app; or developing or delivering dRTP leadership training.

EVERSE Stakeholder Engagement Event: Improving Research Software Quality in Europe

Registrations are open for the EVERSE Stakeholder Engagement Event, taking place 24 November 2026 in Brussels. This full-day event brings together researchers, RSEs, infrastructure providers, funders and policymakers to discuss how scientific software is developed, maintained and valued within the research ecosystem.

Places are limited to approximately 40 attendees, allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with a waiting list once capacity is reached. Early registration is recommended.

Blog post: Recognizing Research Software – DataCite Journey of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Software is a fundamental research output, and it is vital to ensure its visibility, reuse, and recognition. A blog post by Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf highlights how DataCite DOIs, rich metadata, and trusted infrastructure support the publication of research software, enable version tracking, and facilitate connections between software and related research outputs.

Celebrating 70 years of Fortran

On 1st December this year, the Institute of Computing for Climate Change (ICCS) will be hosting a 70th birthday party for Fortran at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK. The event will include a keynote address from Damian Rouson, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, lightning talks on exciting developments and community initiatives, and an open discussion in which attendees will be able to share their perspective on the next 70 years. There will also be small community meetings in the morning and a drinks reception in the evening.

The event is free to attend, thanks to our platinum sponsors, AMD and Dell Technologies, as well as our bronze sponsors, CAKE, OpenMP, and ICCS. Registration is open until 9th November. You can also submit lightning talks and posters through the form until 6th November. I’d be grateful if you could share this with any colleagues who work with and/or have an interest in Fortran.

Have Your Say: Understanding EDI in the UK DRI+ Community

The CAKE-CoSeC EDI Working Group is inviting members of the UK DRI+ community to take part in a short survey about equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). We want to understand what is working well, where gaps and challenges remain, and what information, resources and support would be most helpful to the community. Your responses will help shape the priorities and activities of the CAKE-CoSeC EDI Working Group, ensuring that its work reflects the experiences and needs of the community it supports.

The survey takes approximately 15–20 minutes to complete and will close at 23:45 BST on Wednesday 7 October.
Whether you have lots of experience with EDI or are just starting to think about these issues, we want to hear from you.

Please forward this to colleagues and networks who may be interested in taking part.

Survey on environmentally sustainable computing – training needs

The SusTRAIN project (NetDRIVE) is conducting a survey on green computing within a project, to create training materials. This survey is to collect information on awareness and understanding of environmentally sustainable computing. We would like to identify existing training needs and practices: types of training exist in the field of green computing and what training needs to be created to fill the gaps.

It will take about 5-15 minutes to complete and the data collected will be used to build a map of currently available training in sustainable computing and inform the development of future training materials.

• The survey closes on 30 November 2026.

The survey is being conducted with ethics approval from the University of Sheffield (Ethics application number: 074369). If you’d like to discuss the survey further or have any questions, please get in touch: [email protected]

New publication: dRTP Training Landscape Survey 2026 Report

The Teaching and Training SIG are excited to announce the publication of the dRTP Training Landscape Survey 2026 Report. Thank you to all members of the training community who completed our survey earlier this year. We hope to use this data to enable collaborations between teams developing materials and work with the community on addressing barriers identified.

Society Updates

And finally, our regular reminder that we have a number of events, initiatives and resources that you might want to check out. These are linked below.

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