---

tags: seminar series

title: Motivating specialist services in universities (or, "Starting a RSE group")

---

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**General info**
- **Video connection details:**
- Zoom ID: 662 0907 5434
- Zoom password: rse
- Zoom invite link: https://uwasa.zoom.us/j/66209075434?pwd=VmRBaFRVOXNKNFRYb1NDRGY5SXZndz09
- **Contact:**
- **Date and time**: 2022-04-06, 14 -- 15 CET [convert to your time zone](https://arewemeetingyet.com/Helsinki/2022-04-06/15:00)
- **This page:** https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/starting-rse-group
:::

# Motivating specialist services in universities (or, "Starting a RSE group")

## Ice breaker question
- What is a RSE?
- Someone in a research group dedicated to writing software.
- Someone in an organisational level above the research group who supports multiple research groups in writing software. +1
- Somebody who can talk to both programmers and researchers and often has a bit more emphasis/background in one of the two
- A researcher who mainly does software engineering or a software engineer that focuses on helping research happen. +1
- Research Super Engineer
- A researcher who is evaluated mainly based on software produced rather than publications

## About the series

This is an event in the Nordic RSE seminar series.
* Reminder about starting recording
* Find out about future events:
* Check https://nordic-rse.org/events/seminar-series/.
* Previous seminar talks videos available at [Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8OyVrmJEuT2lrH7zXoBrhQ)
* Follow [@nordic_rse](https://twitter.com/nordic_rse) on Twitter for announcements
* Join the [Nordic RSE stream](https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/213720-nordic-rse) of the CodeRefinery chat
* Suggest speakers:
* on the [Nordic RSE stream](https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/213720-nordic-rse)
* by creating an issue on the [Nordic RSE website repository](https://github.com/nordic-rse/nordic-rse.github.io/issues)

## About the Nordic RSE

* Represents Research Software Engineers in the Nordics.
* Check out [nordic-rse.org](https://nordic-rse.org/) for other activities.
* Registereed as an association in Fall 2021.
* To become a member, fill in the [membership form](https://forms.gle/qCVVRGXPi3Hq7inW6).

## Speaker: Richard Darst

Richard Darst is a Staff Scientist at Aalto University, and the organizer of the Aalto RSE group.

## Abstract

Often, we hear about the goal to "start a RSE group", yet this can be a hard sell for management because of so many demands for funding and services. Instead, let's take a step back and see how we can motivate the whole picture of specilist services

## The presentation

### What is a RSE?
Perhaps see https://nordic-rse.org/blog/what-is-r-s-e/ ?

### The Aalto story

Background:
- Science-IT, HPC
- Science-IT, teaching
- Science-IT, daily support
- Recognize the difficulties people have in work
- "What do you know now that you wish people knew before": https://github.com/coderefinery/handsonscicomp/issues/8
- Realize there are huge spaces of skills which are needed but not taught more.

Building up:
- Frame in diversity: everyone needs to do work, not all have skills. Impacts different people differently [read more](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pVjFnxGzfy0DTPuc1XLQDFg0-44GUWwfSMxe5vVg-Lc/edit)
- Dean immediately understands and gives preliminary support
- Requests us to get 3 co-funded departments
- Take CS, Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, and Applied Physics (core departments of Science-IT, no surprise there)

### Remote work
- C19 started before we could hire our first people
- This turned out to be great: rather than being close once a week and distributed throughout the week, we were close all the time
- I really wonder if we can be as efficient if things were "normal"
- I have another talk on this topic I want to present sometime

### Current status and way of working
- Initial contact by any means (garage, personal reference, web form, email)
- Gitlab for tracking issues
- Divided people ad-hoc
- Time-division and person-domain multiplexing, multple projects at once (not scheduling at the level of months)
- We have enough projects to keep us busy while not falling too far behind. If we advertised more, we might fall behind.

### Future
- Funding to expand beyond school of science
- More hiring
- More project funding

### Other notes
- Funding: school (= 6-department unit) guarentees basic funding
- We try to recover as much as possible from projects
- Project funding
- Current idea: if a project lasts more than one month, expect project funding. Otherwise basic funding.
- To external funders, paying a RSE salary is
- Finance doesn't like micro-transactions, which reduces ability to collect small amounts of funding
- We can send invoices to anyone
- Outside: huge overheads
- Inside: grants don't accept it, so has to be done as salary (= much, much more admin overhead)
- Cross-organization collaboration

### Relation to other related service units

- Science-IT (HPC group): Core part of them
- IT Services: separate
- Department-IT: overlapping
- Research services: we take a similar high-level approach but do technical implementation as well
- Other "Technical Services": rather similar in spirit
- Educational Technology team:

### So what is the point of RSE, and specialist services in general?
- Not just knowing what to do, but doing it.
- "But researchers already know how to do their work"
- Open science: Researchers can do their work, but don't have time or skills to make their work reusable.
- Promote diversity

### Questions for discussion
- What is the difference between a RSE and other university service staff?
- Other services are usually aimed at all researchers at the same time. Research (software) engineers provide specialized solutions for specific research problems.
- Personally I think they are somewhat similar but just supporting different aspects of research.
- RSE vs expecting every researcher to know all related tools themselves
- I think should be slightly different depending on the field. In fields where the computational aspects are less embedded (humanities, less-computational oriented stem) then maybe cannot be expected. In more computational oriented fields (comp physics, maths, data science) I think the line should be blurrier and RSE skills should be taught already in grad / undergrad programs
- A researcher does not need to know deployment methods for software in order to do good research.
- A researcher is creating prototypes, an RSE can help in bringing them closer to production level.
- Researcher tools often have crude interfaces, better interfaces = more use
- how do we distinguish between what users should know and what support staff should know?
- Is users = researchers? Then: User knowledge, should be more field specific. Support staff knowledge should be more general (in the area where you support).
- RSEs employed as a specialised group versus working in projects. Advantages/disadvantages
- If you provide a service for a dedicated group, it's harder to maintain software development skills, there is less interaction with other software developers.
- A lot of the skills are the same between different groups
- How do we distinguish between specialist and non-specialist. should we?
- There are different levels of specialization. You can be specilized in a narrow field or in a comprehensive view of a larger field.
- General title: "Research Engineer"
- What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started your RSE career?
- How to run online events
- Should RSEs also be allowed to also carry on their own research in addition to assisting others research? (assuming they want to)
- How to reduce cross-organization silos?
- e.g. RSE at university X needs to help university Y.
- Exist outside the University! (e.g. like CSC)
- Only accept funding up to a certain percentage which comes with organisational strings attached?
- Network through Nordic RSE :smile: +1000$^{1000}$

## See also
- https://nordic-rse.org/blog/what-is-r-s-e/

## Final Q&A

- is this a question?
- yes, and this is an answer
- When was the RSE group at Aalto founded?
- 2020
- ..