---
tags: meeting
---

Biweekly Community Meeting
==========================

:::danger
**General info**
- **Location:** Zoom room 624 2684 5282
- **Zoom connection details:**
- invite link: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/62426845282
- room ID: 624 2684 5282
- **Contact:** Jarno <[e-mail]>
- **Date and time**: biweekly, when needed (Thu), 9 CET/10 EET
- **Old agendas:** https://github.com/nordic-rse/biweekly_agenda
:::

:::info
**For every meeting:**
* Before meeting
* Chair reminds people about meeting and to add to agenda in Zulip
* Intro for new people :sunflower:
* Action points followup
* Choose a chair for the next meeting
- chair tasks: send reminder about meeting in zulip, prepare agenda (+ remind others to add topics), keep the meeting on topic and under 60 minutes
* List of participants
* Mark actions, to be done by whom and until when
* Update news on the nordic-rse.org
* Note discussions made
:::

# 2024-02-8

- Conference planning

# 2023-12-14

:::info
- **Chair**: Jarno
- **Participants**: Matteo, Samantha
:::

- Conference
- https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/2024_conference/edit

# 2023-11-30

:::info
- **Chair**: Jarno
- **Participants**: Jarno, Stephan, Hossein, Richard
:::

- Introductions
- Advent of code coming up
- Conference
- https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/2024_conference/edit

# 2023-11-30

:::info
- **Chair**: Jarno
- **Participants**: Jarno, Aurelie, Richard, Stephan, Luca, Jonas
:::

- Introductions
- Advent of code starting tomorrow!
- https://adventofcode.com/
- Conference
- https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/2024_conference/edit

# 2023-11-02

:::info
- **Chair**: Matteo
- **Participants**: Jarno, Aurelie, Richard, Luca (half), Thomas
:::

- Introductions
- Start planning the in person unconference / conference / meeting
- https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/2024_conference/edit
-

# 2023-10-05

:::info
- **Chair**:
- **Participants**: Jarno, Radovan, Aurelie, Stephan, Matteo
:::

## Actions

- [MT] Find "presenter" for next biweekly meeting
- [MT] Write to Johan to ask if it's possible to make ad for Unconference on NAIS channels

## Minutes

- Introductions
- Clarifying or redefining the purpose of this meeting
- Upcoming unconference planning meetings
- https://hackmd.io/lBU2hOHfQM2_2hG_IedrJA
- 16 registrations
- Keep advertising
- using: https://nordic-rse.org/events/2023-online-unconference/share/ ?
- Project funding idea
- https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/Hy0_EeNbc
- nordic-rse.org domain
- we decide to start the new format of biweekly meetings, with little presentations in the beginning, on the first biweekly meeting after the Unconference. Matteo takes care of finding who presents.

# 2023-09-21

:::info
- **Chair**: Stephan
- **Participants**: Richard, Radovan, Luca, Samantha, Jarno
:::

- Introductions
- Clarifying or redefining the purpose of this meeting
- Upcoming unconference planning meetings

# 2023-08-24

:::info
- **Chair**: Jarno
- **Participants**: Richarch, Radovan, Stephan
:::

- Introductions
- Unconference planning meeting next week (31st) at 14 CET, 15 CEST
- Bi-weekly on Sep 7 will be skipped since we now focus on Unconference (meeting one week earlier) and because of RSEcon overlap
- Jarno will chair on 21st September
- Biggest considerations for the RSE
- Technical skill
- Ability to solve complex problems across domains
- Computational tools applicable in any academic discipline
- Emphasis on collaboration
- Communication between disciplines i.e. talk to to historian and computer science
- Engagement with current state of the art
- Domains in which they are located
- Current best practices
- Seminar topics:
- RD: Kubernetes for deploying small web services
- cross disciplinary solutions (review or specific tools)
- how do we help people and how can we do it better?
- Moderator (Jarno)
- panelists (Radovan, Richard?, Simo?)
- invite (Jörn from LUMI?)

Short summary of the biweekly:
We talked about what general topics are most RSEs interested in and came up with a couple of Seminar topics for the next year. (Post any suggested topics to @jarno)

# 2023-08-10
:::info
- **Chair**: Jarno
- **Participants**: Richard, Radovan, Stephan
:::

- Introductions
- Catching up after summer
- Unconference planning/announcements
- Regional RSEs versus (National RSEs?) versus Nordic RSEs
- Danish RSE on local communities page with what we are doing
- When someone joins, they inform their local community
- Do we want to grow? (Yes)
- We want to have a in person meeting once a year.
- In-person conferences give us the opportunity to network face-to-face and work on interesting problems.

# 2023-07-27
:::info
- **Chair**: Stephan (SS)
- **Participants**: Richard (RD)
:::
(RSE + RSE-affiliated people) make up (local Nordic RSEs) make up (Nordic RSE).
TODO:
- SS: start writing a post about the RSE and where all our commonalities lie, so that we can find a fundamental unifying point of the organization.

* Meta-discussion about what we are
* Original blog post from a NeIC all-hands meeting that proposed the idea: https://neic.no/news/2018/05/04/building-a-community/
* informal group talking until ~2021 when it was registered as an association
* Now it's also a nonprofit and has a board... but in practice the peolpe at this meeting decide what happens day-to-day.

- Ideas from this meeting:
- What are we actually in intereted in doing during the biweekly meetings:
- RD: promoting scientific computing (SciComp) skills and RSE as a career path. And connection between RSE groups. RSE career path would be someone who has studied in a domain, but wants to focus on software development, so they become a link between that domain and the current software best practices and up-to-date ways of doing things.
- SS: similar to what RD said, but my focus would be on people who are in the humanities and social sciences who need to use software in their research.
- Random thoughts:
- An RSE can help you do your work better and faster.
- An RSE knows the state-of-the-art technologies for specific problems.
- An RSE can offer best practice alternatives.
- An RSE can be a network for easy access to a wealth of knowledge from other RSEs accross the Nordics.
- The message for researchers is different than for those who might want to be RSE.
- An RSE, roughly defined, is someone who wants to apply software solutions to their domain of study, support the people in their domain of study with software solutions and be actively part of a network of similar-thinking individuals.

# 2023-07-13
:::info
- **Chair**: Stephan
- **Participants**: Johan, Stephan, Aurélie, Richard, Radovan
:::

- Discussing the definition of who is an RSE
- RD: A RE ""...
- https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lF-2QtVa6obI_ceSYJ8wq0PhaiQVCf2Jmb_KUo6H-rQ/edit#slide=id.g1e4b57fb5c6_0_64
- Researchers much like architects (who are also "bad engineers") are interested in coming up with the ideas which may or may not be practical. The RSE is like an engineer which brings that idea into practice. In theory they should be the same person, but the skills are different and a single person doesn't always have the skills to do that. We are always hamstrung by our skills and/or time constraints. The problem with the current academic landscape is that most of the time people are trying to get papers published which is similar to the architect who builds a mediocre version of their design and it isn't optimal for the area i.e. society. Usually the focus of skills development are based on the final goal of publishing papers and not on the framework through which the paper is published.
- What is a RSE organization?
- To individuals, a way to talk with people with similar interests and maybe get informal help sometimes.
- To organizations, a way to expand the REs available to your own staff with the knowledge available around.

Discussion for next time:
- Nordic RSE all hands meeting potentially.
- RD: I didn't mean exactly like sub-group meetings, but the atmosphere of coming together somewhat informally and learning / co-wroking / having fun.

# 2023-06-29
:::info
- **Chair**: Matteo
- **Participants**: Matteo, Samantha, Stephan, Aurélie, Jarno, Luca
:::
(RSE + RSE-affiliated people) make up (local Nordic RSEs) make up (Nordic RSE).

Concrete goals for the next 12 months:
- **JR**, **MT**, **AV**: Organize an in-person workshop in summer 2024
- **JR**, **AV**: Have regular public facing events every 2 months (seminar, RSH or workshop).
- **SW** (also agrees with all others, in addition): Share more of what we do (small (visiting other conferecnes, TIL, interesting help cases) and big (seminar series, (un)conference) things) on SOME/website (blog) to get people interested in "what we do", maybe we share some personal stories of "us" about why we joined NordicRSE?
- **LF**: get JOSS promoted to JUFO 1
- **LF**: organize talk/workshop about the role of open-source in academia (strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities, role of software and software-papers in academia, where we stand, where we are going. Could have short talks and panel discussion etc.). :+1: nice idea!
- **MT**, **AV**: writing (and submitting) a paper about the necessity of RSE/support groups at university/national levels in the Nordics, whwere people are hired permanently who tackle problems :+1: from SW, I'm in!
- **MT**: when one looks up "RSE" in Google, nothing appears for us until down the page. There is a disambiguation page on Wiki but we're not on it. We could write Wikipedia entries for "RSE" in different languages (Eng, Swe, Fin)

List of things to do from last strategy meeting:
1) one big overarching goal of Nordic RSE, our driving force
2) two or three smaller goals, or subgoals, related to the big overarching goal. These should be "small" in the sense that by reading them one should be able to naturally think of ways to achieve them
3) actionables and deliverables, the actual strategy. How do we achieve this goals?

Our current goals from the [website](https://nordic-rse.org/)
- being a networking platform for specialized research supporters,
- provide a community and professional development network for RSEs (in particular supporting career development),
- organizing events to bring RSEs and related people together, and
- support whose who want to bring RSE services and skills to their community (in other words, provide a RSE service).

From our panel members, what do we take out of Nordic RSE personally, and what would we like to see?
- Aurélie: people that are in similar positions to my own (similar jobs, similar tasks, similar activities), to whom I can ask and learn from. I used to be in a postdoc position where my main tasks were software and I felt alone, and everything was on myself to learn alone.
- Events to learn from each other, know each other, meeting other people in similar positions
- Matteo: similarly to Aurélie, I was alone in my position as I was told often that nobody cared about my topics and my interests (shortly: technical problems). I love coding as part of research, and research can be secondary to me, I love being support to other researchers.
- know each other, meeting other people in similar positions
- Luca: similar story
- Interested in open source communities, anything related to open source
- Seminar series
- promote role of open source and open science in academia
- bridge gap between researchers and open-source developer
- I like hanging in the coderefinery zulip, I feel at home there <3
-
- Stephan: no good reason. CodeRefinery was affiliated. I'm not a researcher, I work with helping other people using computational methods. I find it important that people need to have a networking tool. Researcher are modular, too often they don't know what their colleagues are doing.
- Create a "working" network. A network where it's easy to find people that work on other things and ideas, or with whom talking and creating stuff.
- Samantha: Nordic RSE were the right kind of nerds, I stumbled on it at random through CodeRefinery. RSEs are a bit undefined.
- Community is a big part. I want to let people know that we exist and I think a lot of others would be very happy to know that we exist and we do stuff.
- Jarno: similar story. I stumbled upon UK RSE and asked whether there was anyone from the Nordics and found they existed.
- The main that I want is to know more people who are interested in similar things (since I cannot talk with my wife about it!). I enjoy having a community of people who enjoy the same topics.

General feeling:
- we feel isolated in our positions. Either as PhDs, postdocs or research engineers, we feel that we rarely have someone to turn to.

Elevator pitch?

# 2023-06-15

:::info
- **Chair**:
- **Participants**:
:::

# 2023-06-01 - Strategy meeting

:::info
- **Chair**: Matteo
- **Participants**: Matteo, Stephan, Richard, Jarno, Aurélie, Radovan
:::

## Scope of the meeting
- Discuss goals for Nordic-RSE
- How do we achieve these goals?

### Discussion minutes

Stephan's ideas:
- general idea: on one hand, answer "what is an RSE?", on the other "what are RSE in Nordic RSE doing?" and find overlaps
- Richard: and add: "why would you join Nordic RSE?"
- if one explains what Nordic RSE is, it's difficult to explain to people what exactly is that we do.
- we then need concrete actions, things that *we do*
- come up with success stories from RSEs in the Nordics, write them down, and then give some general ideas
- it's also about understanding the network of RSEs, so that we can better support our users.
- _e.g._ most of us don't really know what others do
- on the website, we find among the goals "the advancement of science"
- This implies a link to STEM, while not all of us are in STEM.
- It has to be clear that this is for everyone who develops software to advance research and innovation
- community: many people struggle to find their place in academia, but want to stay in the "technical/support side"
- how do we become available to RSEs who are in need of support?
- Zulip, forums, are complicated because of sign-in
- garage hour? Use one of the already existing meetings to allow people to join in
- in specific terms: how are we a "network"?
- in specific terms: how do we provide professional development?
- in specific terms: professionally, what do a member gets out of organizing activities in Nordic RSE?

### Possible actionables from discussion
1) what are the specific things that we can say that we have been doing? -> THE ELEVATOR PITCH of the RSEs in the Nordics
2) "newsletter" introducing new members when they join, to create a sense of community
3) create workshops to bridge the gap between technically oriented people and targets of communication (stakeholders, public)
4) introduce "garage hour" where RSEs can look for support
5) having some "quota" of activities from the RSE that are nodes

### Goals
Stephan has raised the description on the website "Who we are":

(from the [website](https://nordic-rse.org/))
- being a networking platform for specialized research supporters,
- provide a community and professional development network for RSEs (in particular supporting career development),
- organizing events to bring RSEs and related people together, and
- support whose who want to bring RSE services and skills to their community (in other words, provide a RSE service).

### Summary
We had a long conversation into what we feel we are missing as an association, which provided an interesting insight into different views and feelings. We did not have the time to get our hands dirty with the "nitty-gritty". We will dedicate the biweekly meeting of June 29th to come up with the actual GOALS and ACTIONABLES that will drive Nordic RSE for the years to come.

So, on the biweekly meeting of **June 29th** we will actually come up with:
1) one big overarching goal of Nordic RSE, our driving force
2) two or three smaller goals, or subgoals, related to the big overarching goal. These should be "small" in the sense that by reading them one should be able to naturally think of ways to achieve them
3) actionables and deliverables, the actual strategy. How do we achieve this goals?
4)

# 2023-05-04 (May the force)

:::info
- **Chair**: Richard
- **Participants**:
:::

### Actions
- [SS] what can be modified / improved on nordic-rse webpage?
- ~~[MT] set dates for Unconference kick-off~~
- ~~[MT] write on Zulip about next biweekly and Unconference kickoff~~

### Agenda

- Intro / welcome
- choose chair for next meeting
- Matteo chairs
- actions followup
- seminar series
- Please suggest talk ideas and invited speakers
- Are we doing the AI series? An ideas on topics?
- Stephan spoke to the philosophers around his department. What do we wanna talk about? Interesting arguments about the ethics of "AI experts". We need to decide what to talk about.
- What is interesting for us?
- Matteo thinks it would be great to start with a "review"?
- Stephan will come up with some ideas and propose those to us for input.
- advertising and attracting new RSEs
- need to develop a stable strategy
- some housekeeping needed, to determine where we reach our members (Zulip? Mailing list? Twitter?)
- RB: every meeting we have different people and we have been unable so far to develop a real strategy to have Nordic RSE as a real centre for people, and not just a loose group.
- SS: we need first to develop a list of goals and to-do list.
- MT: we need also to look more professional. Membership should be paid, but then people need to get something out of the money.
- Biweekly on June 1st: we talk about strategy.
- Kickoff meeting for Unconference planning
- 25th of May at 14.00. Matteo will write on Zulip. Radovan updates the calendar.
- Update taskforces (top of document)
- there is a list of taskforces at the top of this document, should this be updated?
- JR: the taskforces have never really worked well
- RB (from above): we could have topical biweekly meetings where we talk about either seminars, or website, etc.
- Conclusion: we deleted the taskforces and move all to the biweekly community meeting mighty power.
- AOB
- Samantha: 30th of May there will be a RSE finnish meeting
- https://link.webropolsurveys.com/EP/E985513091EE5ED6
- Jarno: start advertising for next seminar: https://nordic-rse.org/events/seminar-series/
- tweet? Toot? (Matteo can tweet)

# 2023-04-20
:::info
- **Chair**: *in absentia* Matteo
- **Participants**:
:::

### Old Actions
- [SS] talk about philosophy people at Århus
- ~~[MT] ask LF about Brad Chamberlain's video on YT~~
- ~~[JR] contact Beatrice Schåutte about seminar talk~~
- ~~[JR] put Richard's talk on the calendar and website~~

### Agenda

- Intro / welcome
- choose chair for next meeting
- rkdarst
- actions followup
- seminar series
- RD: what about making it more discussion/meeting like, less planning? We can do whatever, RD will try to propose more things along this line.
- Came up between Jarno and Matteo: can we organize a mini-conference in end 2023/2024?
- Few people joining from different countries in the Nordics (the most active)
- Goal would be to have a workshop and produce some internal articles, check-lists, vision, etc
- Hopefully it would snowball into a larger physical conference the year after
- Kickoff meeting for Unconference planning
- Matteo absent: but dates coming
- Update taskforces (top of document)
- there is a list of taskforces at the top of this document, should this be updated?
- RB: yes, I think this is outdated. For instance I seem to lead seminar series but I haven't
- domain name registrar
- JR has been working on this and group in Trondheim kindly offered to extend registration by 1 year and we need to acknowledge them on our website
- Attracting new RSEs?
- SS will check nordic-rse webpage and see what can be modified/updated to make it more clear who we want to get involved and why. Needed in order to
- international RSE council
- RB needs to schedule next video call and will introduce MT there
- AOB

# 2023-04-06

## No meeting today due to Easter break
Next meeting: April 20th 2023

# 2023-03-23

## No meeting today due to the CodeRefinery course

# 2023-03-09

:::info
- **Chair**: Matteo
- **Participants**: Matteo, Stephan, Richard, Jarno
:::

### Actions
- [SS] talk about philosophy people at Århus
- [MT] ask LF about Brad Chamberlain's video on YT
- [JR] contact Beatrice Schåutte about seminar talk
- [JR] put Richard's talk on the calendar and website

### Old Actions
- [SS, MT] look around for humanists to talk about AI/ChatGPT
- [LF] upload Brad Chamberlain’s talk on YT
- [JR] contact Beatrice Schåutte about seminar talk

### Agenda

- Intro / welcome
- choose chair for next meeting
- Matteo (will be Easter's week)
- actions followup
- Stephan got to talk with some people from philosophy, will find out what they are doing and possibilities for a talk
- Matteo asks Luca about Brad's talk
- seminar series
- Topics:
- Perspectives on ChatGPT, OpenAI from the humanities
- Jarno still has to contact Beatrice Schåutte
- how do you organize RSE support technically?
- Richard will give a talk about this next week, 15.03 at 13.00 CET / 14.00 EET
- Join us next week for a talk on what a Nordic RSE group looks like: Aalto RSE will discuss it's internal arrangement and what others can learn.
- What does a Research Software Engineering (RSE) group at a Nordic university look like? Aalto RSE supports the whole university, and Richard Darst and other Aalto RSE members will discuss the history behind their team, the way it works, future prospects, and lessons for others. This talk will focus on the administrative side of things, and discussion will focus on what one should know to reproduce this work at other universities.

Aalto University is the leading technical university in Finland. Started in 2020, Aalto RSE now serves the entire university in computing, data, and software problems. They work as part of Science-IT, which is effectively the local "HPC team". They have good connections to the local IT Services, Data Agents, and other research services.
- What do we want Nordic RSE to be?
- We started discussing about who is the "target" of the association, and what we want to be for our members.
- Are we a group of professionals sharing stories, or are we a community that helps each other to build more for ourselves?
- How do we build the community? We seem to agree that physical presence is needed, as well as a written out direction. Organizing a conference takes too much time and effort for many of us. But maybe having presence in other conferences might be a good step.
- Ultimately, we also think that the success of other associations is partly explained by their member composition, which might be more willing to engage in "extra" activities that help them further their career or building a network.
- We decide to talk more about these topics in the weeks to come and trying to have them more present in our weekly discussions.
- Kickoff meeting for Unconference
- Talk next time
- Update taskforces (top of document?)
- Talk next time
- AOB
- [Github discussion](https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/119815-general/topic/Is.20GitHub.20bad.3F): should we be concerned? -> talk next time