By Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director.

This month, we welcome a new team member, attend a meeting of European organisations with an interest in software sustainability and support a bid to further bolster the RSE community.

We are happy to welcome Olivier Philippe to the Southampton team. He will be based in Southampton team as our new Policy Officer. Olivier brings with him experience in research design, surveying and is skills in both R and Python. One of Olivier’s first tasks will be to work on improving the transparency of last year’s software survey by repeating the analysis in R using Knitr to track every operation. He will also begin work on a survey of Research Software Engineers which will provide a valuable insight that we need to support the community.

Software sustainability in Europe

An interesting development this month was the invitation of Neil and myself to a Knowledge Exchange workshop on software sustainability. Knowledge Exchange is a co-operative effort that supports the use and development of ICT infrastructure for higher education and research. Their desire to investigate software sustainability shows the increasing interest in our field outside of the UK and will provide an excellent opportunity to pass on our experience. We’ve been tasked with reporting on the workshop. The report should be ready by November, so keep an eye on our website for further details.

Bringing RSEs together

The combined efforts of many RSEs and our RSE campaign has achieved much over the last two years. However, success comes with a burden: as communities grow and organisations proliferate, it becomes more difficult to effectively communicate with everyone and share information. This month we supported the University of Southampton in making a bid for a Research Software Engineer Network - or RSEN - to EPSRC. If successful, the RSEN will coordinate across RSE groups, help organise events and create a single point of contact for RSE activities. The Software Sustainability Institute will work closely with the RSEN if it is successful, share metrics with the network and use its findings in our continuing campaign to gain recognition and reward for Research Software Engineers.