o### CW21 - 2021-03-30
Macavity - CI13-CW21
Participants
Louise Chisholm
Malin Sandstrom (chair?)
Florian Mannseicher
Emma Karoune (scribe)
Andrew Brown (scribe)
This document should be used to capture the information for a Collaborative Session / Hack Day Idea. (The total amount of text should ideally be between 100-300 words and you can include a diagram or two). The document should be no larger than two pages of A4. Don’t delete the details at the top of the document but you should delete all of this hint text (Arial, italic, grey, size 11) once you no longer need it.
IDEAS:
Skills Wheel for RSEs
Ideas:
Community management
How to be an RSE: define the professional identity, especially for young people starting out
_Training materials portal: practices, tools, languages etc. _
Carpentries address skills, this portal could address the (professional?) framework
Skills wheel
Different ways into RSE: direct training, researchers who incorporate RSE practices etc. how to merge these?
How to start with diversity
Overview of skills, followed by specialisation
_Encourage long term thinking: documenting workflow (e.g) _
_Explaining why best practice is important _
_Soft skills: empowering research, communication etc. _
Resources in The Turing Way - https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/welcome
Context / Research Domain
Researchers developing software skills
Problem
It can be difficult for researchers new to software development to orient themselves in the professional RSE landscape, and find out how to develop the skills needed. Some researchers develop their skills in an ad hoc way based on specific research project needs, while others are trained as software engineers specifically. This will impact the development of the community, especially the ‘onboarding’ of new members. Researchers who do not have programming background need a level of understanding of research software, while those with a technical or research background may need more training in the professional or soft skills. While many resources are available for each specific area, the intersection of required skills and knowledge for RSE may make the community seem inaccessible.
Solution
Explanation of the solution to the problem you have identified
_Provide a ‘front-end’ for RSE-skills resources, resolved into Professional, Technical and Soft skills, to allow people coming from different backgrounds and communities better to find the information they need. _
“Enabling tool development in research” portal
- Professional skills for RSE
- _ data management and governance, FAIR, research reproducibility, licensing, project design, costing projects, managing a team, Continuous Professional Development, mentoring, recognition/authorship for contributions, _
- _Technical skills for research software engineering _
- programming languages, research reproducibility tools, engineering thinking, version control, file formats, testing, pedagogy
- _Soft skills _
- communication, awareness of accessibility, digital collaboration, user forum, community building
- Community mgmt 101
- https://www.software.ac.uk/top-tips-managing-your-open-source-project-community-effectively
_In the portal develop a skills wheel/venn diagram and link to professional requirements and resources i _
Creating a course for researchers who do not code or data to understand engineering thinking and concepts that are important in research software engineering and data analysis.
Diagrams / Illustrations
We suggest adapting/using the idea of the wheel from CSCCE developed for Community managers and reuse idea for RSE skills and to make it interactive, so people can explore the different skills. Each skill will be linked to training resources/courses so that each skill can be explored and developed by the reader.
Licence
These materials (unless otherwise specified) are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence. Please see the human-readable summary of the CC BY 4.0 and the full legal text for further information.