# ScotRSE in Dundee - 23 February 2026

This is a collaborative notes document for our meeting.

## Session overview
10:00 - Refreshments and networking
10:30 - [Welcome](#Welcome)
10:45 - [Contributed talks](#Morning-contributed-talks)
11:15 - [Morning keynote](#Morning-keynote)
11:45 - [Discussion session 1](#Discussion-session-1)
12:25 - [Event photograph](#Photograph)
12:30 - [Lunch](#Lunch)
13:30 - [Afternoon keynote and contributed talk](#Afternoon-keynote-and-contributed-talk)
14:00 - [Discussion session 2](#Discussion-session-2)
14:30 - Afternoon break
14:45 - [Discussion session 3](#Discussion-session-3)
15:30 - [Closing](#Closing)
16:00 - [End and informal social](#Informal-social)

[Feedback, ideas, and event adverts](#Future)

## Attendees

Attendee details (as much detail, if any, you wish to share)

_Name, Job title, Institution, Pronouns, Contact details_
- Michael Donnay, Community Manager, Software Sustainability Institute, he/him, [e-mail]
- Iain Barrass, Head of RSE, University of Glasgow, he/him, [e-mail]
- Daniel Thedie, RSE, University of Edinburgh, He/Him, [e-mail]
- David Beavan, Principal RSE, The Alan Turing Institute / Society RSE, he/him, [e-mail]
- Neil Chue Hong, Director - Software Sustainability Institute, University of Edinburgh, he/him, [e-mail]
- Olexandr Konovalov, University of St Andrews, he/him, [e-mail]
- Ryan Field, University of Glasgow, he/him [e-mail]
- Paddy McCann, University of St Andrews, he/him, [e-mail]
- Adrien Morison, Uni of Glasgow, he/him, [e-mail] (interest in HPC, software design, type theory)

## Icebreaker

What do you want from this meeting? What do you want to say? How exciting was your travel here?

- It would be great to know what people are working on and what they're excited about
- I'm super interested in meeting all the fab RSEs in Scotland, now I'm living here, but working for London
- Do folks have a clear vision of what they want from ScotRSE, or set of challenges?
- Networking, I slept on the bus.
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## Welcome

Welcome from the organizing team and President of SocRSE

Notes and comments:
- Warm welcome from Simon Li, local host
- [Join the society](https://society-rse.org/) on Slack free
- or via [£20/year](https://society-rse.org/join-us/) for extra benefits (financial support, mentorship, groups)
- [SocRSE job board](https://society-rse.org/careers/vacancies/)
- SocRSE is here to support regional groups, how can we support ScotRSE and how can ScotRSE shape SocRSE
- Talk to David Beavan any time

## Morning contributed talks

Talks offered by attendees

### Talk 1 - Nosakhare Osaro
Title: _From Pipettes to Pipelines: Transitioning from Wet-Lab Research to Research Software Engineering_

Notes, comments and questions:
- Theme of 'messy data' seems to be present across research domains -> a potential shared challenge to work on, but at the same time data is often the most domain-specific element (where disciplinary knowledge is the most important)
- Can you talk more about the difference between lab and software collaborations?
- New RSEs: learn by practice on (small) real-world problems

### Talk 2 - Ryan Field
Title: _Integrating RSE into research from the start, how can we as RSEs engage with the research community to make this happen?_
Notes, comments and questions:
- [Slides](https://gla-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/ryan_field_glasgow_ac_uk/IQAISo4k_GG_TY2E0Zo2JsZeAUnvvI4N560IS5QhNwD_f5Q?e=VOdjIU)
- Should there be a Society of Research Data Engineers?
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## Morning keynote

Keynote by Neil Chue Hong, Software Sustainability Institute
Title: _Building better communities - lessons learned from the SSI_
Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31385125

Notes, comments and questions:
- Community is about what we share, but also what we _don't_ share.
- SSI is developing a "practical community building handbook for those for whom community building is not their main job". Contact Oscar Seip for more detail.
- What are other forces (in addition to AI) that might be driving changes for RSEs?
- Who are the ScotRSE superfans?
- What are the 'difficult but time limited' things ScotRSE could work on?
- Big challenge for any community is how to support third generation community leaders - what is in it for people who are tasked with sustaining a community?
- Address participation inequality: have "primers" of what ScotRSE is.
- Is the pruning of community about individuals or scope of the community?
- Mostly the latter. Find out what members expect and how the community can help (or not)
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## Discussion session 1

https://www.menti.com/alpsyto5xoge

Main topic: what is ScotRSE doing and what would you like it to do?
- What has/hasn't worked in our recent monthly meetings?
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- What format and frequency would be best for our regular meetings?
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- Who do went want to hear from in our regular meetings? Any volunteers?
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- Why is a "regional group" important to RSEs in Scotland?
- May give some an opportunity to get involved, in particular in person, to people who may not be able to participate in UK events.
- A regional group might also be less intimidating for newcomers than a UK-wide society
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- Would there be interest in an annual ScotRSE conference/workshop? In what form? With what funding?
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- What would people like ScotRSE help them do? (Could include colleagues in Scotland and connections with wider UK community)
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- Should ScotRSE be involved in providing or supporting training? If so, what kind of training? And how?
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- How do we find RSEs who don't know about ScotRSE?
- Connect with other Scottish organisations that have people doing computational work, see how we might go along to their activities/conferences
- Can look at Pure/Zenodo/repository deposits of research software
- Who should want to be part of ScotRSE? Just RSE's or wider research (technical) professionals and associated interested people?
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- What hasn't worked in recent meetings?
- Lack of awareness, should there be and email list?
- Newsletter

# Photograph

- Where shall we go for this?
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- What's the caption?
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# Lunch

Notes on how lunch was, what was discussed
- I liked the soup
- Lunch existed and had teacakes and tunnock's
- Always happy to see some Tunnocks
- Good oppertunity to network
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## Afternoon keynote and contributed talk

### Keynote by Nick Brown, CAKE

Title: _CAKE: Aiming for connected and collaborative UK Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI)_

Notes, comments and questions:
- Rolling, flexible funding for placements and visits (very broadly understood). Applications reviewed every month.
- Fellowships (£4k) to provide focused time to work on a specific knowledge exchange project.
- Retreats - funding and logistical template for people to run retreats around shared challenges.
- CAKE going to major conferences to represent UK DRI community.
- Other funding opportunities
- ACIT Hub - infrastructure engineers
- Step-UP - careers for digital RTPS
- CASDAR - data stewards community of practice
- SHAREing - hub for accelerated computer
- DRIFT Charted - hub for training and skills
- MInDS - applying the RSE model to careers for applied mathematics

### Talk by James Friel

Title: _Dundee DisCouRSE: Can we capture what dRTPs do?_

Notes, comments and questions:
- Project aimed at applying [DIRECT Framework](https://directframework.com/) across disciplines and building connections in dRTP community in Dundee
- Project wraps up in October, great to have results presented to ScotRSE community
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## Discussion session 2
Main topic: discuss potential Network Plus collaborations
- What are potential areas of shared interest?
- Funding/support for software used in teaching and/or skills development & training
- What are some larger collaborations we can work on (that makes it worth the challenge of applying)?
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- Navigating how RSE goals match changes to the funding landscape - how can we align with the new approach?
- Different universities have different approaches to costing RSEs (some attract overheads, some do not)
- UKRI funding to be divided into 4 buckets - RSEs fall across all of those buckets
- Buckets technically fall across funding councils (i.e. UKRI wide) but will likely be devolved to specific research councils in practice.
- Wellcome Trust launching new biomedical open software call in the next few months.
- Getting RSEs to lead grants
- UKRI rules say you can't lead a grant if you aren't guarenteed employment beyond the end day of the grant.
- University specific rules say which kind of contract is eligible. Good to know where the decision is made (by research office vs head of college/school)
- SSI have an informal evidence bank of successful examples - could SocRSE do this for RSE-specific roles leading on research grants.
- This might be a good area of policy research (evidence bank) for SocRSE to take in order to faciltate future advocacy. Some good evidence that lab manager-led grant applications have been successful has pushed more research intensive universities to adjust their approach.
- Who could do skills development for RSEs on how to prepare more competitive grant applications? Suggestion to pursue opportunities to sit on peer review panels or apply to be observers on panels.

- Challenges to collaboration
- Documentation of output
- How can we get people to share and taking the fear out of getting scooped
- What is current process of sharing
- How do we incentivise people to share evidence
- How do we motivate people to share their results once their paper is published
- Where does the data sharing and collaboration discussion needs to happen
- The sharing becomes more when it becomes necessity
- Data sharing could be enforced by the publisher
- Data sharing is the initial milestone to build trust for wider collaboration

- Are there any Scotland-specific concerns that would be worth focusing on?
- Relevant Scottish government themes
- SRC/Rural Affairs
- NatureScot
- Economic & social (inc. climate adaptation)
- Large equipment/resource sharing (same as England/etc but just in Scotland)
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Potential groups for further collaboration:
- Scottish Pooling Initiatives
- Scottish Imaging network ([SINAPSE](https://www.sinapse.ac.uk/)): they have an Informatics theme, might be a potential pool for ScotRSE members
- SUPA
- SICSA
- SULSA
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Funding for education
- Carpentries is very useful here, there are officially supported lessons and they have an incubator where lessons can grow – start it, submit to incubator. Prototype of lessons into the incubator, others discover it based on the website and tell them how mature it is. Also provides a route that other can use to contribute back.
- Also can run pick'n'mix workshops, which can combine multiple lessons from different Carpentries programs and incubator
- If running a carpentry then provides advertising via their website and routes, so can be highly effective.
- Lesson development course available online, how to use the template and gives general ideas how to put into lesson design based on general ideas of audience. Follow a story, with motivation and then how what learning will solve this. Some lessons lack this substance, arguably makes them more difficult to consume but no always easy to phrase this way
- Capentry lab is the mature polished lessons, then it is reviewed by carpentry – this is the sticker that says it is good. Journal of Open Source Educational Materials, can submit paper to this – potentially don’t need to be in carpentrys format but really helps if it has and been approved as a lab.
- By default always open source, can keep internal but often useful to advertise more generally. CC-By licence.
- For language translation Crowdin.com is very useful as it's a crowd sourcing translations, helps then share content with other countries more generally. Process got much better here, community can translate and then the next day it’s live. Idea of benefit that don’t anticipate.
- If apply for SSI fellowship, lots put carpentry instructor training in this to be funded as this leads to lots of outputs. If you want to do instructor training a good route, part of something wider. If see open call then apply, as it’s free – otherwise need to pay for it. Otherwise might have e.g. SSI which has “X” places. If institution is a partner then will fund “Y” instructors as part of this. $8k per year for 5 training via silver, do need to make the case for this but can be chicken and egg where need to demonstrate the demand but also need to have an instructor to do this.
- A strong approach is to work into grants carpentrys training as then can cover this, also reviewers can sometimes see this and view it favourably.
- Links:
- how to set up your lesson: https://github.com/carpentries/workbench-template-md
- what else to know to design it well: https://carpentries.github.io/lesson-development-training/
- Carpentries Incubator: https://carpentries-incubator.org/
- What's possible next: community building; Carpentries Lab, JOSE article at https://jose.theoj.org/ etc).
- A possible lesson for beginner RSEs: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/python-intermediate-development/

## Discussion session 3

Open discussion for the afternoon. Please add any suggestions during the day/session. If you'd like to facilitate discussion, please add your name to a topic.

- Are we interested in learning more about what Scottish funding & policy landscape looks like for RSEs? Or engaging with Scottish policy makers about RSE issues?
- How can we advocate for universities to change policy to allow RSEs to lead on research grants? (Some success in England 'setting universities against each other' and encouraging them to change policy because their neighbours have already done so)
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- Next steps for ScotRSE? Next in-person meeting/workshop?
- might be nice to have name badges/icebreakers
- get a room / space where discussion groups can happen more easily
- Strong interested in running another in-person event
- Share ScotRSE mailing list link in follow up email
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- Follow-ups from the day's talks.
- Ask people to volunteer for taking items forward
- Identify institutions not currently represented
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## Closing
Notes, comments and questions:
- Discussed AI and how RSEs need to re-shape how they talk about their work to continue to evidence their value when researchers can do vibe coding.
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## Informal social

Suggestion for what to do next
- Dukes Corner
- https://maps.app.goo.gl/yrchN6sezwUZRfbQ9
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## Future

Initial feedback:
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https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/dundee/scotrse-feb-2026-event-feedback

Ideas for future ScotRSE activities/events:
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And don't forget about SSI's [Collaborations Workshop 26](https://www.software.ac.uk/workshop/collaborations-workshop-2026-cw26) and the [International RSE Survey](https://www.software.ac.uk/news/2026-international-rse-survey)