Nordic RSE In-Person Conference 2024

How did you get to know about Nordic-RSE / conference

  • Found on UK-RSE chat (Nordic/events) +2
  • colleagues, internal chat +1 +1
  • Aalto data agents
  • CodeRefinery: oo
  • "by accident"
  • RSE Survey
  • Googling about RSE, via UK-RSE
  • UK RSE conference (Nordic-RSE) / colleague (conference)
  • RSE website
  • Matteo tempted with Sauna

Important info

Presentation slides/material

Ideas for lifting the coding competence of group

slides: https://rse2024.iedl.no

Just add if you have any other ideas or catch me during the break:

  • video recordings
  • make user support sessions without expecting anyone to show up. Give it time

Blog post discussion

Central of distributed

Central:

  • Communication and community
  • Sharing knowledge
  • Quaranteed salaries and long term positions
  • Rerpesentation towards the management

Decentral

  • Domain specialization
  • Light weight, can hire one person, no organization
  • Funding from projects is easy

Group work: Richard, Essi, Konstantin

What you would like to have known before:

  • support not the biggest project but diversity of projects when pitching, allowing underrepresented groups to participate in IT infrastructure
  • base support on user questions, don't develop fancy tools that nobody uses
  • Establish KPI:
    • time saved (based on user surveys)
    • number downloads (e.g. from Zenodo, PyPI) for supported data/software
    • access to websites (track these)

Group work: Jarno, Waldir, Tuomas

Advantage/Disadvantage Central

Disadvantage of central (advantage of embedded):

  • central IT lack subject knowledge of the research group
  • central can not follow up in close intervals
  • central is often very slow
  • central often use a different lingu, do not know the "standards" in the research group
  • easier to hold people "by the hand" to find a solution

Advantage of central:

  • central can easier find stable finance funding
  • theoretically easier to see synergies
  • easier to be heard by the university/lobby for resources

What support would you need:

  • stability for funding
  • organizational knowledge on how get internal funding
  • getting help seeing the big picture of the organization
  • service catalog of available central IT services
    • if possible, network with other to know who to ask about services
  • more colleagues/researcher buddies

What would you need

  • Ability to promote, and career structure
  • Ability to collaborate without a PI from our own institution

General remarks:

If you are embedded, try to connect to other embedded ones in the same institute/university.
Perhaps form a local RSE group.

Try to adopt the language of the research group/users, not the other way around.
Provide a room for beginner questions, don't assume that everyone knows the basics.

Naming things is hard.

Consider cultural gaps when gathering towards different user groups/insitutes.

Group work: Martin, Enrico, Radovan

How to enable and fund cross-border collaboration?

  • Funding to NeIC will change end of 2024.
  • Grass-root approach (e.g. seminar series) can be a good way to
    get started.
  • Competence matching across organizations
  • Group acts as nucleus to come with problems but the solution can be in a
    different place.
  • Collaborating on training creates better quality material and increases
    reach.
  • Grassroot approach might be a way to collaborate across funding silos.
  • Some organizations are so overloaded locally that they don't have time
    to collaborate on training and support.

In your org, do you apply for grants for RSE-type of work?

  • Short answer: yes. But longer answer not yet.
  • We will have to apply to network grants to finance training and
    collaboration.
  • Tension between supporting research and developing RSE services.
  • EOSC is an organization that funds skills and training.
  • Sometimes lots of reporting and paperwork is needed.
  • Training and reactive user support are good use cases for centralized RSE
    and collaboration.

What do you know now …

  • Trying to cover all work costs through projects is not achievable. Otherwise
    all you do is writing grants. You need some time centrally to support
    smaller projects and start new projects.
  • Enable and facilitate open-source work.
  • In-person contact important. Email and issue tracker is not enough.
  • Train the trainer part requires extra bandwidth and resources and is an impor
    tant gap between training and 1-1 help.

Where does funding go to and what are the effects?

  • In large compute centers most money goes to hardware and electricity and
    only a small fraction to support.
  • Centralizing computing saves money but can create disadvantage for some
    academic fields. The step got bigger. By not supporting those who are not
    yet on compute clusters, we will lose out on research and potential.
  • More money goes to hardware and support does not scale with the same speed.

Group work: Stephan, Simo, Yu

Benefits of having an RSE:

  • Helping users to get rid of steps that users don't want to do themselves
  • Good question to ask from users: "ask them what part of their job they don't like and automate it"
  • RSE can be a link between different groups and experts of specific subject in groups (e.g. each group can have a computational expert, but they can be the only computational)
  • There are lots of unexplored subjects in humanities and other traditional non-computational where tools from other fields can be invaluable (even if the tools are not novel in the original field they were developed in)
  • Democratization of tools to non-traditional computing users

What is needed from RSEs:

  • Lateral thinking across different research fields.
  • Proactive approach on meeting researchers.
  • Communication skills and skills to translate between language in a research field and language of computations
  • Being able to distill essential information to researchers in language that they can understand
  • Creativity on solving problems and seeing where users can benefit the most

Support:

  • Support from higher-ups on work that might benefit multiple stakeholders.
  • Organizations should understand that hiring people with wide range of interests and skills can be beneficial for people with specialized and more narrow interests (RSEs can speed up work of researchers)
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