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
• 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
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  • Check https://nordic-rse.org/events/seminar-series/.
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  • on the Nordic RSE stream
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About the Nordic RSE

• Represents Research Software Engineers in the Nordics.
• Check out nordic-rse.org for other activities.
• Registereed as an association in Fall 2021.
  • To become a member, fill in the membership form.

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
• 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 +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
• ..