Catherine Jones

Registration for RSE 2018 in Birmingham in September is now open  

The last two conferences sold out, so the organising committee added 50% more tickets this year. However, tickets go fast, so please sign up early. 

The programme of talks, workshops and keynotes have been planned around the following themes:

* Good practice for software development

* Researcher-developer partnerships

* Community and careers

…

The RSE conference committee are looking for volunteers to help us run the RSE 18 Conference on the 3-4 September. You should be friendly and outgoing to help us with a variety of activities for our conference participants including:

• Welcoming and registering participants
• Assisting in workshops and talks
• Social media amplification
• Being the first point of call for participants

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By M. H. Beals, Catherine Jones, Geraint Palmer, Mike Jackson, Henry Wilde, John Hammersley, Daniel Grose, Robin Long, Adrian-Tudor Panescu, Kirstie Whitaker

This post is part of the Collaborations Workshops 2018 speed blogging series.

What does reproducible mean? Who do we want to help and support by making our research reproducible? At what point does non-reproducible research become good enough (and carries on to the highest standards of reproducibility?)

In our discussions during the first speed blogging session at the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop in Cardiff in March 2018, we brainstormed criteria for judging the quality of reproducible research. What emerged were two clear messages: 1) We all have our own overlapping definitions of the desirable features of reproducible research, and 2) there is no great benefit in rehashing old discussions.

In this blog post we outline 9 criteria that can be met by reproducible research. We believe that meeting as many of these as possible is moving in the right direction. Source code and data availability are often seen as important requirements, but documenting what code is trying to achieve, which other software libraries are required to run the code, the greater research ecosystem, what lessons were learned in the development of the…

By Catherine Jones, Diversity Chair.

Why did the RSE Conference have a diversity chair? What was the impact? What can we do better next time? These are the three questions I hope this blog will answer.

Different backgrounds and experiences enhance a team and help to avoid group think. Diversity has many different aspects, but the main two that the RSE conference focussed on were gender and ethnicity. It was an aspiration that the conference organisers, speakers and attendees reflected the makeup of the RSE community. Having someone responsible for diversity ensured that it was consciously considered during planning. As part of this commitment to diversity, the RSE Conference had a diversity statement  and code of conduct.

Who organised it?

What was the makeup of the committee? This was remarkedly gender balanced for the domain, the chart belows shows the gender split. Sadly it wasn’t very ethnically diverse.

Who contributed?

Of the registered attendees 72% were male, 16% were female and 12% preferred not to say or didn’t answer. So that for those who identified their gender 18% were female. Looking at ethnicity: 76%…