By Shoaib Sufi, Community manager.

Thursday 29 January 2015, on the day a mini blizzard struck Manchester and closed its airport something much more important to software in research was happening in sunny London. The Fellows 2015 Inaugural meeting took place in rooms annexed to the library at Imperial College London. The Fellows were introduced to the Institute, discussed thorny problems related to software and data and helped each other create plans for their Fellowship year.

We kicked off with a brief overview of the Institute with a focus on insights into our strategically important research into understanding the research software community;  understanding how best to engage their communities, and how to benefit from our web and social media presence. There was a lot of interest in running Software Carpentry events and taking part in our Open Call for projects.

Next stop was discussion time. There was a highly informing discussion about the challenges that the Fellows faced in using software in their research domains. A number of themes stood out, such as the difficulty of recruiting and maintaining software engineering effort (highly relevant to our with with Research Software Engineers), getting credit for software outputs; support for sharing data - especially big data, standards for reviewing code and data for journals, and clarifying intellectual property rights in software and data.

In the afternoon, each Fellow presented their plans for upcoming year. It was great to see Fellows making connections (e.g. around Micro CT Imaging) that they could build on, and also good to see some discussion (and even disagreement) on issues like how to acknowledge a software developer, model developer, data producer as an author on a paper. There was also a great discussion on how different cultures have developed around different seniorities of researchers, and the impact this has on credit and credibility of computational techniques.

There was a buzzing atmosphere all day, especially during the breaks, and by the end of the day, I felt like we’d gained a much greater insight into our new Fellows work. I’m really looking forward to working with them this year. With not a snowflake in sight all made their way home after an exhausting but exhilarating day.

Thanks to Fellow Torsten Reimer who did the local organisation. If you would like to raise some issues about research software, and meet the our new Fellows, you should attend the Collaborations Workshop 2015.