Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran

Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran

Computer & Data Scientist working on data standards and software tools to enable data sharing and research reproducibility

The #RSE18 Times

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This is blog post was published on the Software Sustainability Institute’s website

This year I attended for the first time the third edition of the RSE conference thanks to the support of the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship. The conference brings together Research Software Engineers (or RSEs) from across the UK and the world.

Image of RSE18 Image courtesy of Cristin Merritt, WHPC Social Media Volunteer

But what is an RSE? In brief, an RSE is someone with a research background, skilled in software development and who cares about applying best practices for software sustainability when producing software needed for research. If you want to know more, check out the blog posts at the Software Sustainability Institute, some of which deal with the Research Software community, the reasons for being an RSE, what is not part of the role, and how the role has actually a lot in common with that of a data scientist.

At the conference, we were reminded about the history of the RSE term and the community around it. The term was coined in 2012 during a meeting of like-minded people in Oxford. The meeting was organised to highlight the importance of both research software and the people that make it possible, whose role and career paths weren’t clearly recognised. A lot has happened since, and it was exciting to hear Christopher Woods announcing the creation of the Society of Research Software Engineering. If you want to know more about it, sign up at the website.

The conference spanned over two packed days of activities. A welcoming environment was set from the start with a code of conduct and diversity statement on the website, plus a reminder about it on the initial session. The importance of this to establish a positive atmosphere cannot be overstated.

Behind the conference there is a growing and bubbling community, as it is evident from Neil Che Hong’s tweet:

and also all the tweets with the #RSE18 hashtag.

Each morning included two keynote speakers with varying and interesting topics:

  • Prof Eleanor Robson(webtwitter from UCL gave an inspiring talk about the role that research software played in post-conflict Middle Eastern countries, in reducing researchers isolation and increasing the accessibility to reliable information and research and teaching materials.
  • Dr Andrew Fitzgibbon(web, twitter) from Microsoft Research works on computer vision systems and showed us several applications of computer graphics, including his work on making movie magic, and was around to let us use the mixed reality smart glasses HoloLens.
  • Prof James Howison(web, twitter) from the Information School of the University of Texas at Austin, United States, presented a framework for the discussion of Software Sustainability. The framework provides useful concepts to discuss about software development vs maintenance, the cycle of software/use/impact/resources and how it varies in commercial, open source and research software settings. His slides are here.
  • Dr Andreas Fidjeland(linkedin) is the Head of Research Engineering at Google DeepMind and mentioned that he moved from Academia to Research Software Engineering in Industry and talked about the importance of RSEs to help scientific discoveries and in particular, the work they are doing at Google Deep Mind.

In the afternoon there were very interesting parallel sessions, which made it very difficult to choose what to attend. The sessions included tracks covering different themes, panels and hands-on workshops.

I found the session on ‘Funder’s perspectives’ very encouraging for those of us who care about research software (and data!). The presentations were by Susan Morell from EPSRC/UKRI and David Carr from the Wellcome Trust.

Susan Morrell mentioned that she wants to be remembered as the person who funded the EPSRC RSE fellowships and showed us the UKRI strategy for Software Infrastructure.

David Carr mentioned Wellcome Trust’s commitment to open research, including research data sharing where their main efforts have been up until now, but also research software. He reminded us of the Survey they did on Researchers’ attitudes about open research (Towards Open Research) that they published a couple of years ago.

For information on the rest of the conference, visit the website, where you should be able to find links to presentations and materials from all the sessions in the near future.

To sum it up, if you are interested in research software, the RSE conferences is a place you will want to be, because as Alys Brett put it, it will top you up of ‘ambitious-yet-practical community spirit for the rest of the year’!

The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Community Landscape

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(This post is cross-posted on the UK Software Sustainability Institute blog, the Netherlands eScience Center blog and the US Research Software Sustainability Institute blog.) ReSA’s mission is to bring research software communities together to collaborate on the advancement of research software. Its vision is to have research software recognized and valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. Given our mission, there are multiple reasons that it’s important for us to understand the landscape of communities that are involved with software, in aspects such as preservation, citation, career paths, productivity, and sustainability. One of these reasons is that ReSA seeks to be a link between these communities, which requires identifying and understanding them. We want to be sure that there aren’t significant community organizations that we don’t know about to involve in our work. Also, identifying where there are gaps will help us create the opportunities and communities of practices as required. When thinking about these communities, it’s clear that in addition to those that focus on software, there are others for which software is just a small part of their interest. Some examples are communities that focus on open science, reproducibility, roles and careers for people who are less visible in research, publishing and review, and other types of scholarly products and digital objects. ReSA also wants to define how we fit and interact with that broader scholarly landscape.

How was this work undertaken?

In September 2019, a ReSA taskforce came together to map the software community landscape, consisting of the authors of this blog. This group distributed a survey to ReSA google group members to identify other groups interested in software. Other useful sources included:The taskforce then met to consider the results and how to analyze them. The ReSA list of research software communities is now publicly available as a living community resource, with the version of this list used by the ReSA taskforce in February 2020 and a copy of this post archived in Zenodo. Suggested additions or corrections are welcome by making comments in the list. Some of the issues we’ve had in assembling this list are:
  • How much interest in software does an organization need to have to be listed?
  • When is an organization sufficiently research focused to be included?
  • What momentum/scale does an organization need to have so that we consider it relevant in the global picture?
On the other hand, once we started adding entries to the list, for many we found that we immediately thought of other similar organizations that should be added. For example, some organizations have a geographic aspect, and this led us to think of other similar organizations with different geographic aspects, such as all the national and regional RSE associations.

What did we learn?

There were a range of interesting outcomes of the analysis:
  • There are many, many communities that support research software, emphasizing the need for a coordinating organization such as ReSA. The importance of community development is captured in articles such as Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software is Developed and Sustained by Daniel S. Katz et al., which provides an overview of key groups and discusses opportunities to leverage their synergistic activities.
  • There is an increasing (and wide) range of community initiatives. For example, the Open Science Grassroots Community Networks list has evolved into the Community of Open Scholarship Grassroots Networks (COSGN), whose networks communicate and coordinate on topics of common interest. COSGN has submitted an NSF proposal to formalize governance and coordination of the networks to maximize impact and establish standard practices for sustainability.
  • The increasing focus on open software makes it hard to separate research and non-research initiatives. As per the points above, it is very hard to define which initiatives are part of the research software community, and which aren’t.
  • Some organizations that were originally data-centric now include a software focus. For example, the Research Data Alliance now includes the Software Source Code Interest Group, which provides a forum to discuss issues on management, sharing, discovery, archiving, and provenance of software source code.

What are the next steps?

We invite readers to continue to add or make corrections to the ReSA list of research software communities by making comments in the list, which will continue to be curated by ReSA. We are also interested to hear from community members who would like to engage with us in writing a landscape paper based on further analysis and work. This could address questions such as what are the axes that create the space, where do the currently-known organizations fit in the space, and are there gaps where no organization is currently working? We also invite readers to consider involvement in other ReSA activities, including Taskforces.

Conclusion

The ever-growing number of constituents of the research software community both reflects and demonstrates the increasing recognition of research software. The research software community is now a complex ecosystem comprised of a wide variety of organizations and initiatives, some of which are community networks themselves. Collaboration and coordination across these initiatives is important, to enable the broader community to work together to achieve bigger goals. ReSA aims to coordinate across these efforts to leverage investments, to achieve the shared long-term goal of research software valued as a fundamental and vital component of research worldwide. Join the ReSA google group to stay up-to-date on our activities. Read more