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

--- tags: seminar series title: Motivating specialist services in universities (or, "Starting a RSE group") --- :::danger **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 - ..