The Software Sustainability Institute Community and Events
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FOSDEM 2023326 / 542
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00:00
Scalable Coherent InterfaceElectronic meeting systemSingle sign-onSoftwareBuildingDigital rights managementEvent horizonUniverse (mathematics)Social classEncryptionComputer animation
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Data structureService (economics)SoftwareStaff (military)Digital rights managementConfiguration spaceSoftware engineeringEvent horizonProgrammer (hardware)Zeno of EleaSingle sign-onEmailGoogolNewsletterContent (media)TwitterGroup actionWebsiteCodeArchaeological field surveySocial softwareComputing platformBlogInformationPublic domainWave packetEvent horizonService (economics)Software engineeringSoftwareInformation technology consultingSoftware developerHypermediaDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Computer programOrder (biology)Musical ensembleWebsiteInformationCollaborationismBlogGroup actionPublic domainAreaElectronic program guideSingle sign-onComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Hi, my name is Rachel Ainsworth, and I'm the Research Software Community Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute, and I'm based at the University of Manchester in the UK. Today I'm going to talk to you about how the Software Sustainability Institute supports research software through community building and events.
00:23
The Software Sustainability Institute, or SSI for short, is a national facility in the UK, promoting the advancement of software and research since 2010 by cultivating better, more sustainable research software to enable world class research.
00:40
And this is more succinctly stated in our motto, better software, better research. The Institute is a collaboration between the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford, and Southampton, and we are very proudly supported by all seven UK research councils. Research software, which encompasses code, processes, and community, reaches boundaries in its development cycle that prevent improvement,
01:05
growth, and adoption, and the Institute provides the expertise and services needed to negotiate to the next stage. We advocate for all things research software through programs, events, policy, and tools to support the community developing and using research software.
01:23
The Institute is comprised of five teams. There's a software team, which helps the community to develop software that meets the needs of reliable, reproducible, and reusable research. There's a policy and research team, which collects evidence on and promotes the place of software and research and shares this information with stakeholders.
01:41
There's a training team, which delivers essential software skills to researchers and partners with institutions, doctoral schools, and the community. There's a community team, which develops communities of practice by supporting the right people to understand and address topical issues. And finally, we have a communications and outreach team, which exploits our platform to enable engagement, delivery, and uptake.
02:04
The teams are involved in many different activities, some of which are listed here on this slide. I don't have time to go through all of these today, and my talk will focus on the community events, activities, and resources, and how you can benefit from them and get involved. From the community angle, in order to facilitate the advancement of software and research, the Institute
02:24
has engaged researchers, research software engineers and developers, instructors and trainers that deliver research software training, research policymakers, and groups that provide services that support research software development. We have a dedicated community team, but we collaborate closely with all teams
02:42
within the Institute in order to more effectively engage the research software community. Our programming ranges from blog posts, news items, guides, and social media that you can consume, to workshops and events where we facilitate collaboration and co-creation amongst our community. We also run a fellowship program, which engages across all of our activities. SSI
03:06
fellows champion the Institute's mission through organizing events and growing their own communities of practice. The fellowship program engages with natural ambassadors of better software practice from the research community, empowering those working to improve software practices in their domains and areas of work, with
03:25
funding and visibility to run their own workshops, training, events, and other activities, and nurture their communities. In return, fellows help the Institute discover important information about software in different research domains and guide training, policies, community work, and consultancy engagements.
03:46
Here are some examples of our fellows' activities that we have supported. At the top of this list is Carpentries Offline, which was started by a number of our fellows at our annual event, which I'll talk about in a few more slides. The project is all about supporting Software Carpentries' training in areas with unreliable internet usage through the use of Raspberry Pis.
04:11
There are also a number of coding workshops, such as our workshops for archaeologists, our packages for ornithologists, so we have those research domains who are covered by the specific training and topics.
04:28
There are activities related to mental health within research software, and then some of our fellows have also piloted training developed by the SSI, such as the Intercommediate Research Software Development in Python.
04:41
And these are just a few of the activities. You can read a lot more about the various activities that our fellows get up to on the Software Sustainability Institute website and blog. Collaborations Workshop is the institute's premier annual unconference, and it brings together stakeholders across
05:02
the entire research software community, such as researchers, software developers, managers, funders, policymakers, and more, to explore important ideas in software and research and to plant the seeds of interdisciplinary collaborations. Collaborations Workshop 2023 will take place as a hybrid event in Manchester, UK from the 2nd to the 4th of May, 2023.
05:26
And the theme of this year's workshop is Sustainable Career Development for those in the research software community, looking after your software, your career, and yourself. The theme encompasses technical development, which can include topics such as software sustainability,
05:42
software products and digital tools, infrastructure and documentation, software development skills, and training. It encompasses career development, which includes topics such as career pathways related to research software, how to get credit for your work, mentorship, and inclusive leadership to support teamwork. And it also encompasses personal development, which includes topics such as sustaining your mental health, well-being, and finding community.
06:08
Registration is open, and so is the call for submissions. Collaborations Workshop is an unconference, which means that it is not only comprised of presentations, but it also involves a lot of interactive sessions led by participants.
06:24
The keynotes and lightning talks inform and inspire. Lightning talks also provide the perfect opportunity for participants and sponsors to introduce themselves and their work at the workshop. Panels are informative, but also allow discussion and exploration of a topic or theme to showcase different perspectives.
06:42
Mini workshops and demo sessions are contributed by participants, and they demonstrate a particular research software product, digital tool, project, approach or standard, deliver specific training, interactive tutorials, conduct information gathering, or explore a topic.
07:01
And each of these session types feed into the more interactive sessions that follow. For example, the discussion session allows groups of people to discuss a topic that interests them in a way that furthers our knowledge of that topic. The groups also co-author blog posts, summarizing their discussion, which are then published on the SSI website to disseminate to the wider research software community.
07:23
The collaborative ideas session follows this, and it's used to get people talking about their work. Groups identify problems within research software and work together to come up with a solution, and this facilitates more focused creation. And the final day of the workshop is the Hack Day, where teams form to work on projects generated during the collaborative ideas session and other ideas pitched during the course of the event.
07:47
And this facilitates co-creation among participants and establishes collaborations that last beyond the workshop. Throughout the workshop, we also facilitate opportunities for networking amongst participants to support collaboration.
08:03
Outcomes of collaborations workshop include the blog posts from the discussion groups and the collaborative ideas proposed which feed into the Hack Day projects. Participants often start one or two collaborations on average based on their discussions at the workshop, and often carry on working on the Hack Day project after the event ends.
08:22
Carpentries offline is one of the projects that was born out of the collaborations workshop Hack Day, which has been sustained by our SSI fellows, as I've mentioned before. And Coding Confessions is another example project which aims to normalize failure in research software to create an inclusive space for sharing and learning from experiences.
08:44
The Institute has published an event organization guide based on how we organize and project manage events, with collaborations workshop being the main example throughout. The guide takes an experiential approach where it matches what we have actually done and our lessons learned, and we provide templates that we use for the event roadmap, venue requirements, managing the event budget, a duties roster, event roles and risk management.
09:08
There is an in practice section, which includes detailed write ups of how we organized the most recent collaborations workshops from feasibility to closing. The guide has lots of tips for online and interactive workshops from technical setup to
09:22
the program, and our next steps are looking at hybrid considerations for collaborations workshop 2023. If you use any aspects of the guide, you can contribute an in practice chapter based on your experience or suggest updates to the text. And the final activity that I want to mention is the research software camps, which are led by
09:45
our communications and outreach team. They are free online events which take place over two weeks twice a year. And each camp focuses on introducing and exploring a topic around research software and starting discussions among various research communities. The camps that we have had so far have been themed around supporting
10:03
mental health, next steps in coding, research software beyond the spreadsheet, and research accessibility. Sessions include panels, training, workshops, guides, blog posts and social media discussions, and there are many opportunities to get involved, either via the organizing committee, as presenters, mentors and experts.
10:25
To give more context into how connected and embedded the Institute is in the better software landscape, you can view some of our collaborators and partners here. We are very practiced and fruitful collaborations, and we are always interested in hearing about new initiatives, projects, activities and events from community members, so please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.
10:45
Here are some of our contact details. Please sign up to our mailing list and you can follow us on social media, and I look forward to answering any of your questions. Thank you so much for having me.
11:06
Thank you Rachel for that fantastic talk. We've had a few questions come in, but if anyone else has questions that they'd like to ask either in the open research room or in the Q&A for the specific room for this please do ask these questions.
11:21
So the first one I think I might ask is, Rachel, a lot of these, this was really really interesting and very UK oriented, but I understand that there are also international fellows, maybe since this is quite an international audience you could tell us just a little bit about how that works and what you look for. Yeah, great, thanks for that question, Jo. Last year in, well I guess it's not last
11:43
year anymore, but for the 2022 Fellows we started piloting an international fellowship program, and this is because we want to explore how best to scale up this program internationally for the future. So we've started out with, I think we had four fellows in 2022 who are international
12:04
and so we were exploring with them kind of the bottlenecks and administration and particularly, you know, issues surrounding finance and things like that, because we, the research software community is quite global. We collaborate with a lot of folks internationally, just as an institute and so we wanted to begin reflecting that within our fellowship program. And
12:28
so we had four international fellows in 2022, and this year for 2023 we have six international fellows and we are collaborating of course with Open Life Science of which you're a director of and we're very, very grateful that Open Life Science are
12:44
helping us to pilot this program and to help us scale it a bit more in the future as well. Super, we don't have long left, but we have a question from Celia asking whether you're raising awareness and training about open source and licenses as part of the SSI's work.
13:02
So yeah, so the SSI does a lot of training. We are heavily, we collaborate heavily with the Carpentries community. So we teach a lot of software carpentry and data carpentry and we also do instructor training. There have been workshops in the past led by SSI around licensing, in particular, I believe, and we have guides on the website.
13:24
But I do believe licensing is potentially also covered in software carpentry. Actually, that's a really good question. But we do have guides on our website as well around that. Yes. Well timed, I think we're about to hop over to the next session. So I'm mentally sending a fantastic round of applause. Thank you so much.
13:55
Yeah, it's, I think it, yep, it's just finished.
14:03
Thank you. By having it pre recorded, it's just stress beforehand rather than now. Yeah, I was thinking that I was just like pre recording a talk is, it always takes longer than you think it's going to take but then like today I'm just like, Oh, I'm really glad I don't have to give a talk today.
14:23
I would love to hang in chat. I need to go and prep for the next one. Thanks so much. All right. Bye.