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title: Nordic RSE board meetings
tags: [Nordic RSE board]

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tags: Nordic RSE board

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# Nordic RSE board meetings

:::danger
**General info**
- **Video connection details:** s
  - Zoom ID: 618 3487 2052
  - Zoom invite link: https://gu-se.zoom.us/my/matteotomasini
- **This page:** https://hackmd.io/@Nordic-RSE-board/meetings
- **If you cannot edit this document**: send your HackMD username to Jarno and ask to be added
:::

## 16th October 2025 at 10:00 CEST (11:00 EEST)
Called: Matteo Tomasini, Ruslan Zhuravchak, Radovan Bast, Rainer Bohm, Samantha Wittke, Luca Ferranti, Jarno Rantaharju
Present: Matteo, Radovan, Jarno, Rainer, Samantha, Ruslan
Excused: (Luca Ferranti)

- Welcome!
    - Quorum ok
- **Secrets:** how do we share our passwords, tokens, etc? We have quite a lot at this point (Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, Youtube) and it is always a hassle to share those data.
    - Options: 
        - I thought we had a private github repo, but cannot find it so maybe not.
            - There is this: https://github.com/nordic-rse/accounts-overview (but no passwords)
    - Two things: 
        - One overview page
            - Google Sheet : We will use this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Y0gRnOc_N6IHaEvBMjbe-Eo1fnpZaJZMI9YLaUloCM/edit?usp=sharing
                - All board members have access to this sheet and keep it updated
            - GitHub : Will be removed
        - One way to share passwords would be good. But not needed at this moment. We use column H "Who can give admin access" to know who to contact when new people join 
            - Passwords can be shared in whatever way feels convenient
        - When someone leaves, we should keep them in the list (who has and had access)
    - Decided on Google Sheets
- **Decisional burden:** we often note that it can be difficult to make decisions during our biweekly meetings because we feel there is a lack of board involvement (especially decision that come with some responsibility). We would like to discuss some protocol to delegate decisional powers from the board to biweekly meetings.
    - Proposal: If 2 board members present in biweekly meeting, they can make decisions (that are good for Nordic-RSE). 
        - What type of decisions that can be taken by bi-weekly meeting? 
            - Using money (with a maximum, no/low risk)
            - Where to put Nordic-RSE name (co-organized by NRSE members)
        - Remaining decisions for the board:
            - General accepting money
            - Spending high amount of money (that we do not have -> Risk)
            - Where to put NRSE name (for larger event with time/money engagements, events not organized by NRSE members)
        - Board selected roles: 
            - Conference
            - Website
            - > Are delegated roles and able to make decisions for that "thing".
    - Board decisions: 
        - via e-mail or meeting or Zulip?
            - E-mail ok
    - Proposal accepted (as written above).

- **We need a serious discussion about memberships benefits**
    - We have more paying members now: what to do with the money?
    - Ideas:
        - Travel grants to our conference/other related events
        - Conference fee reduction
            - Force to be member?
            - This can also make NRSE association more visible to conference registrants
        - Member only event at conferences
            - mixed feelings
        - Member only Zulip
            - mixed feelings
        - Support for personal development as RSE training
        - Curated list of job ads/newsletters
            - mixed feelings
        - Access to mentorship / buddy program
        - Funding of community management work
        - Goodies: t-shirts or stickers
        - Some members may just be happy to support without benefit
        - Two tier system:
            - Full membership
            - Supporting membership
        - Task force to come to own organization to talk about RSE
    - Delegation to bi-weekly meeting to come up with strategy and budget: accepted
- **How to advance Nordic-RSE goals:** I am writing an opinion paper for a small Swedish conference, arguing for institutional support to associations like Nordic-RSE, that can provide improvements to RSEs careers, as well as spaces dedicated to RSEs. This will feed neatly in our ongoing conversations about what we want for Nordic-RSE in the future.


## 14th March 2025
Presents: Matteo Tomasini, Ruslan Zhuravchak, Radovan Bast, Rainer Bohm, Samantha Wittke, Luca Ferranti, Jarno Rantaharju (in corpore, quorum is 4)

- Welcome! 
- Roles:
    - vice-chair: Samantha
    - tresurer: Jarno
    - secretery: not elected
- the board will now be listed officially in the Finland registry
- Budget: we have money in the bank form memberships and sponsorship for the conference. We are doing OK financially, we can start thinking of what to offer to our community
- Conference and next board meeting: Luca, Jarno, Samantha and Matteo will be there for sure. Ruslan, Radovan and Rainer will try. We propose regular board meetings about every 2 months
- should Nordic RSE and CodeRefinery chat be more separate?
against: right now they work together and overlap a lot, so there is not an urgent need. Many questions are in common and member from both communities interact well for: Nordic RSE also needs its own identity, and there is a risk of confusion at least on the Zulip chat e.g. CodeRefinery events can drown out some information in Nordic RSE
- what is the best way of communicating within the board?
e-mails are the safest way to get hold of everyone at the moment
- what does the board do? By statutes, the board is important for fiscal reasons Nordic RSE needs to be more visible, also at the international level
- Radovan would like to write up on the website what is the board doing in Nordic RSE
- Important thing to deal with: what are the processes to deal with harassment? 
banning the offending member is the first step
how to deal with the "investigation"?
what juridic steps can we undertake?
what support are we giving?
from Julia community: https://julialang.org/community/stewards/

## 18th November 2022 at 13:00 CET (14:00 EET)
  - Present: Jarno, Matteo, Stephan, Maria, Johan, Luca

  - Introductions: New members on the board
  - Roles:
      - Chair: Jarno Rantaharju
      - Vice chair: Matteo Tomasini
      - Secretary: Johan Hellsvik
      - Treasurer: Luca Ferranti

  - It would be a good idea to save the notes after each meeting
      - Send to everyone by email
      - commit to github
      - or make a pdf and save to google drive
      - Unanimous decision: Will do this over email 

  - Discussion: For what situations and events would use of the N-RSE bank account be of relevance?
      - Decision: Make decisions on the use, or not use, of the bank account for each tentative occassion.

  - Next meeting: Coordinate on the date on Zulip. Tentatively in February 2023.

::: danger
   Do not edit below this line.
:::

---------------------------


## Tasks
  * [Jarno] Start an email HackMD and share it on Zulip
  * [Jarno] Make a private repository and add the ledger to it
  * [Radovan] How do we get the results of the International RSE survey


## 14th February 2022 at 08:00 CEST (09:00 EEST)
 - Present: Jarno, Luca, Radovan, Samantha, Thomas, Anne
  
 - Use Wise.com account
 - How to handle the fee
   - Transfer on wise.com
       - Need to input the IBAN and "Nordic Research Software Engineers ry"
       - Message should be "Membership fee: Lastname Firstname"
   - Direct SEPA transfer.
       - We have an IBAN.
       - The member would pay the currency exchange fee to their bank.
       - (JR) This should be an option in any case.
 - ~~Membership is from June to May~~
   - ~~paying now makes you a member until 31. May 2023~~
 - Membership period is from 1. November to 31st October. +1 +1 +1+1 +1
     - Fee is the one decided in the previous annual meeting
     - So paying now makes you a member until 31.10.2022
 - 


## Tasks
 * [Jarno] Write to Rohit about the question.


## 26th November 2021 at 13:00 CEST (14 EEST)
 - Present: Jarno, Anne, Thomas, Luca

 - The process for setting up the bank account
   - Documents and information required
   - How to notarize documents
       - In Finland, see [public notary](https://dvv.fi/julkisen-notaarin-palvelut-org)
           - Not sure this works with electronic copies
   - Timeline
   - For the form:
       - Description of the activities of the legal entity:
       
         The association is to support research software engineering by organizing courses and similar events and maintaining communication channels.
         
 - Registration process, how does one become a member
 - Ideas for collecting membership fees
 - Nordic-RSE / Nordic-RSE board (google) account
 - I was also thinking, when we store member information that is personal data. Does that put any limitations on where we can store it, GDPR-wise?


### Things to ask the bank

- do we need official translation of registration document?
- annual financial statement?




## 8th September 2021 at 14:00 CEST (15 EEST)

 - Introductions
   - Who are you?
   - What brings you to Nordic RSE?
   - One interesting/great thing that happened this year

Jarno:
 * Heard about RSE as a profession on 2017 in a job ad and fell in love
 * Now in a new central RSE group in Aalto university
 * Some experience with small associations in Finland
 * Also interested in pedagogy, teaching and course design
   * Writing an Introduction to Julia course
 * This year:
   * First child born in May :baby: Still not sleeping well...

Thomas:
* Data science and research IT consultant at CLAAUDIA at Aalborg University
* Background in engineering within signal processing and wireless comms.
* Formerly researcher at Aalborg University
* Instructor in software development courses at Aalborg University
* Very interested in the RSE role and the evolution and definition of this. Interested in helping define and raise awareness of the role to create better working conditions and opportunities for colleagues in Denmark and the Nordics
* An exciting thing that happened this year: I just moved house last week and am currently busy getting unpacked :smile: 

Samantha:
* Geoinformatics specialist at CSC in Espoo Finland
* part time PhD student at Aalto University and Finnish Geospatial Research Institute
* from Germany but settled in Finland
* started RSE journey by helping out with CodeRefinery workshops and becoming Carpentries instructor
    * hopefully more in future as part of work
* super interested in general in RSE work and planning and organizing events
* this year: my parents finally could visit me in Finland after not seeing them since Christmas 2019 :tada:

Luca:
 * PhD student at the University of Vaasa 
 * Julia enthusiast
 * open source and open science enthusiast
 * Interested in Nordic-RSE as I believe good open source practices are fundamental for open and reproducible science. Excited about promoting and learning new things
 * One interesting thing happened to me this year: joined Nordic-RSE

Anne: 
* RSE at University of Oslo, department of Geosciences, Norway
* Interest: Open science, Reproducible research, Fair software, Fair data
* Interested by Nordic-RSE to develop career path, apply for funding on behalf on Nordic-RSE?
* One interesting/great thing that happened this year: Nordic-RSE finally registered (soon!!!) as an association!!! 

Radovan:
- University of Tromso
- got into RSE via RSE conferences and also CodeRefinery work
- when not doing CR work, trying to improve usability and documentation and contribute to training offerings at Sigma2 clusters
- working on computational geometry within oceanography
- also some text analysis programming

Rohit:
- Doctoral researcher at the University of Iceland
- Been doing FOSS for over 10 years now
- Worked on HPC workflows in IITK and then Sysadmin stuff at UI
- Luckily work in computational chemistry and machine learning
- Also spend part time thinking about moderinizing languages and Application binary interfaces

## Talking points

 - What are these roles:
   - Chair: Jarno Rantaharju (FI)
     - Organize and chair the meetings
   - Vice chair: Anne Fouilloux (NO)
     - Chair if Jarno cannot make it
   - Treasurer: Luca Ferranti (FI)
     - Nothing for now?
   - Secretary: Rohit Goswami (IS)
     - Makes sure all decisions are in the notes

 - How much should the board do? What is left to the community?
 - What required permission from the board?
   - Anything done by the Nordic RSE is endorsed by the board and we should know about it
       - This is to ensure that we have a modicum of standards for events
       - We don't need to micromanage -> No need to vet individual speakers
       - No implicit approval of events
   - So new things need approval in some way
- The board should make it attractive to interact with us
    - We have templates :)

- Do we need to have divisions?
    - Or general divisions?
        - Like e.g. Online meeting coordinator, other

- Issue resolution
    - We need to have a mechanism to address grievances
- What about a coc committee?
    - As a first approximation we have the board (since they're the only present members)
        - Once more people join we can have a separate committee
    - This can be dealt with once we have members

  - For now Jarno will make a PR to update the CoC
    - jarno.rantaharju@aalto.fi
    - luca.ferranti@uwasa.fi
    - tari@its.aau.dk
    - rog32@hi.is
    - samantha.wittke@csc.fi
    - annefou@uio.no
    - holmvall@physics.uu.se

- Registration: do we keep the registration form as is?
    - can ask at any time to become part of Nordic-RSE but accepted only when Nordic-RSE received payment.
    - will send notification to all registered members when we have payment in place.

- Can we hold / distribute / support funding?
    - At the moment this is not planned, we might have some travel funding
    - We could also provide lateral support of sorts
    - We, as the RSE itself would apply for funding


- What about the dates of the membership? How long is a session? What about the payment increase?
  - We discussed this for a while with several models on the table:
    - Let the membership year be from annual meeting to annual meeting?  
      Maybe the annual meeting is not on a fixed date. This means the membership year would be of varying length.
    - Let the membership year be between a fixed date of consecutive years - e.g. 1st of January.
    - Let each member be member for 1 year at a time from the date they sign up.  
      This probably entails difficulties in managing payments, because members pay on individual dates.
  - If membership is fixed and for the current (fixed) membership year, the sooner you sign up, the more you get for your membership fee in that year.  
    This seems like a sensible approach.

- Organisation registration
    - https://www.prh.fi/en/yhdistysrekisteri/perustaminen.html

- Requirements for the bank account (finnish association)
    - Pay to Nordic countries
    - Recieve payments

- Options:
    

Old notes go here