Posted by s.aragon on 15 March 2019 - 9:00am 

Photo by Christian Joudrey.

By Raniere Silva, Community Officer, Software Sustainability Institute.

The Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) is a fantastic opportunity to discover communities of practice around open science and software sustainability. Find out more about some of the communities that will be represented at CW19, from Monday 1st April to Wednesday 3rd April 2019 at the West Park Teaching Hub, Loughborough University, Loughborough.

Communities of practice (CoP) are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. From lightning talks, keynotes, mini workshops, discussion sessions and collaborative ideas the sessions at Collaborations Workshop are designed to help seed, nurture and grow new and established communities of practice with ideas and people.

Collaborations Workshop 2019 is organised around the topics of interoperability, documentation, training and sustainability. With only two weeks left before the start of this fantastic union of minds and activities, we are delighted to list some of the communities of practice that will be represented at the event.

Write the Docs

Write the Docs was founded by Troy Howard, Eric Redmond, and Eric Holscher in 2013 as a spin-off of Eric Holscher's side-project, Read The Docs, which since 2010 has been a vital resource to the Python open source community. Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation and share their experience at conferences (they have been hosted in three continents so far), local and online meetups. The community has programmers, tech writers, developer advocates, customer support and marketers among their members.

The Turing Way

The Turing Way community might be the youngest one attending Collaborations Workshop 2019. It started as a project led by Kirstie Whitaker, Turing Research Fellow, to craft a handbook for reproducible data science. The goal for the project is to support students, their supervisors, funders and journal editors in ensuring reproducible data science. Our Fellow Becky Arnold and member of The Turing Way wrote a blog post about community.

Research Software Engineers

The Research Software Engineering (RSE) community was created by people in a variety of roles who understand and care about both good software and good research. With the phenomenal growth of the community in the last couple of years, it was time to move the community forward to help organise formal associations in countries (e.g. deRSE). Simon Hettrick, Institute's Deputy Director, wrote about the secret behind the growth of RSE Groups in the UK.

And more

Write the Docs, The Turing Way and the Research Software Engineers are only three of the communities of practice that will be represented at the Collaborations Workshop 2019 in Loughborough. Members of our Fellowship network as well as members from The Carpentries are two more communities of practice who will also be attending the event.

To learn from, connect with these CoPs or to help understand how to form your own, register and attend CW19 by visiting the Eventbrite page.