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Building Research Software Communities

Building Research Software Communities: Running a workshop on community building and sustainability for the research software community

Michelle Barker, Jeremy Cohen, Daniel Nüst, Toby Hodges, Serah Njambi Rono, Lou Woodley

On Wednesday 17th March 2021, around 50 individuals from a wide range of different countries and time zones came together for the first of two 2-hour sessions that formed our “Building Research Software Communities: How to increase engagement in your community” workshop.

Run as part of the SORSE Series of Online Research Software Events, this workshop brought together an organising team consisting of 3 members of the international research software community and a group of speakers including experts in community engagement and sustainability. In this blog post we provide an overview of the workshop and some of the key messages and outcomes.

Why run a communities workshop?

The workshop’s three organisers – Michelle Barker, Jeremy Cohen and Daniel Nüst – between them have experience of starting and running, or participating in a range of research software communities at local, regional, national and international levels. Observing that many research software communities face similar challenges when getting started or trying to sustain activities, the workshop was set up with the aim of helping to address these issues.

Scientific or research communities are often set up by enthusiastic individuals who are keen to help their peers, raise the profile of their field and provide opportunities for training, knowledge exchange and networking. After what is often an extremely promising start with many people engaging and lots of attendees at initial events, it’s quite common for a community to lose momentum and for numbers to reduce to a small but committed group of people. Community organisers may begin to wonder where they went wrong, what they could have done differently and why people are not participating in the same numbers. Many people in the research software community are now involved in developing or helping to run communities (such as national Research Software Engineering (RSE) organisations) or want to initiate grassroots activities, but they are often without the experience or training to do so. The aim of this workshop was to try and offer some ideas, guidance and training from a group of scientific community engagement and sustainability experts to help begin to address this.

The workshop

The workshop included a combination of lightning talks and longer sessions run by leading experts in community engagement and sustainability from the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) and The Carpentries. You can find the full agenda on the workshop webpage. It was attended by participants with varying degrees of responsibility for, or interest in, managing research software communities.

Starting with a group of 4 lightning talks to set the scene, we heard from both current and former community managers representing communities at different stages of development. This provided a great opportunity to hear about some challenges faced but also success stories. Following the introductory lightning talks we had our first collaborative session of the workshop with Daniel Nüst running a short group feedback session.

Your three biggest community challenges

In the feedback session, participants were split into breakout groups, each with their own collaborative document, and invited to discuss and note down the three biggest challenges they’ve experienced/observed as a community manager or member. The results from this session helped to guide the discussion during subsequent sessions. The session provided a wide range of interesting and helpful responses which were summarised into five core areas:

  • Engagement – Keeping community members interested and engaged; managing challenges around limited time availability and workload issues
  • Incentives – Different environments (e.g., online / in-person) provide different motivation or incentives to participate in a community; what benefits/opportunities/activities incentivise participation?
  • Expectations – Be realistic about what a community can offer or what to expect from a community
  • Communication – Keeping community members informed; reaching out to potential new members; highlighting community aims and activities, etc.
  • Participation – Will people participate? How long will they participate for? How do you maintain participation?

Describing member engagement with the CSCCE’s Community Participation Model

After a chance for the workshop participants to discuss their community challenges, Lou Woodley, Director of the CSCCE, ran a session looking at “Describing member engagement with CSCCE’s Community Participation Model”. One of the key elements of this session was the presentation of the CSCCE’s Community Participation Model which defines four modes of member engagement that can take place within a community and one meta-mode – the champion mode discussed on day two. Community participants generally begin to engage with the community in the consume mode, taking in the materials that are made available through, for example presentations at events and online content such as newsletters. Levels of engagement can build through contribution and scaffolded collaboration to the highest level of engagement – co-creation – where participants work within the context of the existing bounds of community activity to create something new.

Download a guidebook describing the model in full here.

Community Champions

After a quick recap of the previous day’s material, the workshop slot on day 2 kicked off with a session from the CSCCE on Community Champions. The champion mode is the fifth mode in CSCCE’s Community Participation Model and highlights member engagement by emergent leaders within a community, who take on roles to maintain, grow and evolve the community’s activities. This might look like co-chairing working groups, serving on a code of conduct committee or spreading the word about the community to recruit new members. Lou Woodley highlighted the principles behind developing community champions and the important role that they can play in supporting community sustainability and ongoing engagement – something a community manager is unlikely to be able to do alone.

Community Sustainability

The final session of the workshop was a collaborative session on community sustainability run by Toby Hodges and Serah Njambi Rono from The Carpentries. Toby and Serah highlighted the challenges in ensuring community sustainability and presented various ideas to help address them. Using a collaborative document, a number of thoughts and comments were gathered from workshop participants in response to some important questions around the topic of sustainability. You can read more details about this workshop session in Toby and Serah’s “Pondering on the Question of Community Sustainability” post on The Carpentries blog and see a video of the session on the workshop’s SORSE event page.

Useful Links and Further information

This workshop was run as part of the SORSE “Series of Online Research Software Events”. The SORSE series has now finished but you can take a look back at other SORSE events, many of which cover related topics, and see videos from many of the events via the SORSE Programme page.

Videos from parts of this communities workshop are available on the workshop’s SORSE event page and further details including the full agenda and session descriptions are available on the workshop website.

Why not join the CSCCE’s Community of Practice on Slack? It’s a great place to gain new knowledge about community development, engagement and sustainability and to share your experiences and questions.

 

The content of this blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. The post has also been published on the de-RSE and CSCCE blogs.

Remote working for researchers and developers

This post was compiled by Mark Woodbridge, Jeremy Cohen and Tony Yang of Imperial College’s Research Software Community.

As COVID-19 drives us into uncharted territory, many of us at Imperial will be having our first ever experience of working off-campus for an extended period of time. It, of course, depends on our role, but many members of the College community will be no stranger to mobile working – pitching up at one of the many campus cafes, breakout spaces or a coffee shop, getting out our laptop or mobile device and switching very quickly into a state of focused work. Maybe finishing those next couple of paragraphs of a paper or report, fixing that annoying bug in our scientific code that someone just reported, or responding to an urgent technical query from a collaborator. Sometimes a change of space or environment provides just that little shift in perspective that you need to help solve that challenging technical problem, or get the right wording for that difficult section of the paper, much more quickly than if you’d sat in your office staring at your screen for hours!

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be facing a rather different reality of remote working which is likely to involve spending a significant amount of time working in one space, without the flexibility that comes from being on a large campus. While our primary concern is going to be for the health and safety of our family, friends and colleagues, many of us will also have concerns about how we’ll manage to work effectively in these difficult times. We may have worries about feeling isolated, about maintaining our research efficiency and quality, about meeting deadlines, or more generally about how things will change in our day-to-day working lives as our routines are uprooted completely!

Within Imperial’s Research Software Community, many of us are software developers (Research Software Engineers) or academics/researchers who spend a significant amount of time writing software. The software developer community has embraced remote working over recent years and there are now many examples of companies that operate an entirely remote model with individual developers distributed around the world. If you’re a developer with a laptop and a good internet connection, location is no longer a barrier. In the research community, things are a little different and while many of us will be aware of cases where individuals spend the bulk of their time working remotely, discussion, collaboration and the opportunities posed by ad hoc meetings in the common room make working in a campus environment important and beneficial. Nonetheless, one huge benefit of the wide-ranging use of remote working in the software community is the wealth of tools, advice and examples now out there that make lone, remote working much easier.

A few members of Imperial’s research software community have come together (remotely!) to provide some tips, examples and advice that we hope might be helpful if you’re working remotely. There are many similar articles online but here we’ve tried to provide some thoughts and examples from our own experiences and we hope that these will be particularly relevant to members of the College and its research community. We’ve marked resources only accessible to Imperial members with an asterisk.

1) Communicating with colleagues

Even if you don’t consider yourself to be the most outgoing person, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of communication with colleagues or collaborators when you’re working alone. If we’re on campus most of the time, we probably have many informal chats with others in our office, people we bump into in the corridor or coffee room, etc.

Think about perhaps scheduling at least one 30 minute catch up with one or two colleagues each day. It doesn’t need to be time wasted through unstructured chat, although even this sort of meeting can be really valuable in helping you to feel connected and ultimately helping to improve your wellbeing. The College recommends and supports the use of Teams but many other solutions are available.

Some other suggestions:

  • Deliberately check in with others and ask how they are – especially if you know they are isolated.
  • Video calling, however uncomfortable to start with, can go some way towards replicating the interactions we’re used to in the campus environment.
  • Celebrate and share achievements, however large or small – from bug-fixes to new releases of your code!
  • Try remote pair programming or debugging: e.g. Live Share
  • Take part in an online community. Our local Research Software Community is on Slack*. There is a new Remote Working Wellbeing* group on Yammer. Outside Imperial many Meetup groups and other events (e.g. CW20) are now going online.
  • Reach out to others: whether housemates, or your local community via Facebook or other virtual groups. Consider volunteering where it is appropriate to do so.
  • Contribute to an open source project. Open source projects (such as The Turing Way) tend to have an established and inviting online community. If it is complementary to your work, and you have the capacity to do so, then making a contribution – even fixing a typo – can be a very fulfilling experience and introduce you to a broader community.

2) Maximising focus

Some people will be used to working from home for at least one day a week – perhaps in an environment that enables us to concentrate at least as well as in the office. But many of us won’t have anything resembling a home-office (or even a desk!) and may have caring or other responsibilities that are difficult to combine with sustained focused work. Generic advice is therefore almost impossible to provide, but here are some ideas:

    • When working in isolation without scheduled meetings or other engagements it can be easy to confuse time spent working with actual productive hours. Try setting alarms or using a timer for focused periods.
    • Messaging apps are great for keeping in touch but can also provide a stream of interruptions. Decide when you’ll be online and offline and set/indicate your status appropriately. And conversely, be mindful about how and when you contact others.
    • If you’re able to control your hours and environment then take advantage: work when you’re most productive, listen to music for programming, ambient sounds… or simply concentrate in potentially unfamiliar (but welcome!) peace and quiet.
  • Delineate your working day (and your workspace) – consciously decide when you’re working and when you’re not, and somehow communicate this to those around you.
  • You may need to be especially creative if you do have caring responsibilities. Don’t be afraid to adopt a working pattern or shifts different to those of your colleagues – as long everyone is aware and can continue to communicate effectively. You may find these Parent Scheme resources helpful.
  • Take breaks, rehydrate, try to eat healthily (especially considering the reduced physical activity you may be getting), and try to get some fresh air. Imperial has a virtual running club if you’re looking for some motivation!
  • Take advantage of the time saved by not commuting: perhaps by taking up a new hobby – ideally something that exercises a different part of your brain! Consider trying meditation: the College Chaplaincy is offering remote sessions and there is also a Mindfulness group* on Yammer.

3) Working comfortably

Without a home office and the availability of the usual alternatives such as libraries, shared workspaces or even coffee shops it can be difficult to find a comfortable place to work for prolonged periods. Ideally find more than one place where you can work and then alternate – even if one is the sofa! Experiment: improvise a standing desk (maybe putting your stockpile to good use…). Take breaks to relieve any tension and give your body a break by stretching or trying some beginner’s yoga. However, if you feel that your health and/or productivity is affected then don’t hesitate to talk to your supervisor or to Occupational Health, who have published some tips for remote working.

A new way of working

We hope that some of these ideas can ease the transition that will undoubtedly be challenging for some of us. But it’s also an opportunity to reassess how we work and how it fits around the rest of our lives. So try to establish clear boundaries between work and relaxation time and spaces, make yourself comfortable, and connect with colleagues, friends and family where you can. Also remember to take enough time off and do not work for prolonged periods without breaks in order to avoid burnout. Transitioning into remote working is a process and a reduction in productivity initially can be expected to happen. Aim to develop a routine, but in the meantime be patient and experiment. Don’t worry, you will soon learn how you work most productively, and hopefully pick up some good habits for the longer term! But if you do struggle then be sure to communicate, take advantage of the many resources out there that can provide help, and ask for advice and assistance if necessary.

Keep safe and we wish you lots of productive (remote) coding, paper writing or research!

Further reading

Did we miss any useful resources? Join the discussion on Slack* or let us know @ImperialRSE!

* As a post targeted primarily at members of the Imperial College London community, this article includes some links that will be accessible only to members of the College. These are marked with an asterisk. Nonetheless, we have included many publicly accessible links and if you are not a member of the College community, we hope you’ve found the content interesting and helpful.

 

The content of this blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.