Posted by n.chuehong on 18 August 2015 - 7:32pm

By Shoaib Sufi,Community Lead.

This is the second blog post highlighting the activities of the Institute over the last month. Today it's the turn of the Community team to talk about their work.

It’s been a busy time as ever in the Community team. We have interesting blog posts published from community members, informative workshops in the pipeline, and some exciting upcoming news about the team. Read on to find out more.

Community updates

We published an informative and reflective blog post by Institute Fellow Mike Croucher of Walking Randomly fame. Mike speaks about the dangers of thinking your software is correct and what you can do to feel more confident that it is. And if you have seen 2001 you know bad code can be quite dangerous...

Fellow Boris Adryan reported on his trip to promote "Better Software, Better Research" to Eclipsecon 2015 and gives an introduction to the Eclipse Science group which aims to make science software interoperable and interchangeable.

At the Institute we are very interested in open science and open data so in the spirit of openness we made the data and picture used at CW15 showing software use amongst the 90+ CW15 participants available via Zenodo. We also published another article on Zenodo this month which goes into detail about their support for depositing code, how the system was developed, and how it supports Open Science.

Workshops and Events

Workshops run by the Institute, attended by the institute and supported by the institute are a key way of helping to support and promote research software best practice.

We are supporting the PyCon UK 2015 Science Track via Institute Fellow Sarah Mount, this is a new venture for PyCon UK so please take a look at the announcement.

Institute Director, Neil Chue Hong, and Community Leader, Shoaib Sufi, are speaking at Software licensing and Open Access organised by Marta Teperek of the Research Operations Office team at the University Library, University of Cambridge, and championed by Institute Fellow Stephen Eglen. The event is open to non-University staff so if you would like to hear about Intellectual Property and Software Licensing options and how to best deal with EPSRC’s sharing policies come along. This builds upon other work in this area such as out IPCLC workshop held in December 2014.

We announced our Software Credit Workshop which is taking place at the Natural History Museum (a big thank you to Institute Fellow Farah Ahmed for agreeing to host us) on 19 October 2015. It’s all about how to improve the credit researchers and those who support them get for software related outputs, and you can register your interest in attending now - registration is opening soon. With involvement by CrossRef, GitHub, JORS, Mozilla Science and the Wellcome Trust, it’s looking to be an intense and useful meeting.

Fellows James Baker and Adam Crymble are running 'Programming Historian Live' covering the use of tools such as textual markup and transformation, web scraping, pattern matching and corpus analysis to help build your digital repertoire. Places are very limited (only three remaining at time of writing) - both James and Adam are excellent so if this is your cup of tea then avail yourselves of this opportunity as soon as possible.

Join the Community team!

If you are interested in joining the Community team at the Institute, we will be soon recruiting a new Community Officer. We’re looking for someone with a background in science communication or research who would like to try something different; you need a social personality, willingness to meet challenges, and have a genuine interest in research software. In the role you will help run our Fellowship Programme, promote the Institute, help organise events, and interact with the research community. Keep your eyes on Twitter to see when the advert is up.

That’s it for this month, don’t miss our next monthly update giving an overview of activities and events run for and by the Community. If there is an event or activity you would like us to promote, or any key publications impacting research software, please let us know by email.