 Hi everyone, my name is Tom Honeyman. I'm the Software Program Manager at the ARDC. Today I'm going to talk about a National Research Software Agenda for Australia, and what the ARDC is starting to contribute towards this agenda. The Australian Research Data Commons is a part of our federally funded National Digital Research Infrastructure. In this role, we think about research software infrastructure in three ways. First, the informatics infrastructure that enables discoverability and access to research software in the form of identifiers, registries, repositories, but also platforms, including those that enable contributions or authorship of specific software, or perhaps re-execution environments for existing software, or reproducibility as a service, if you like. Second is the idea of research software as a class of intangible asset. We have for many years made the argument that data assets are a type of research infrastructure, and so it's natural for us to argue the same for software. Third is human capital, or soft infrastructure. Especially when considering the maintenance of longer-lived research software infrastructure, we argue that we must understand that it is the workforce, its distribution and health that is the core form of infrastructure for sustaining software. Across the literature, three common concerns emerge. Software is hard to see, especially in analysis code, which is very often discarded shortly after creation and use, but also for software created with the intention that others will use it, better visibility is still a concern, as well as credit and tracking impact. A common refrain is that for some of the software arising from research, it is poorly put together. There's a lot of reasons and potential solutions to dig into here, but simply put, it's pretty clear we need to better bridge the worlds of research and software engineering. Finally, for not all kinds of research software, but definitely for the research software infrastructure which researchers have come to accept and depend upon, it can be diabolically hard under the status quo to maintain these efforts to keep this software going. And so we have three core concerns to address. My central message is that we need to see, shape and sustain research software. The ARDC is seeking to catalyze change with reference to these three areas with the release of a draft national agenda for research software. The central strategic aim of this work is to seek recognition of research software as a first-class output of research. If you'd like to know more about the agenda, please visit the link on the screen and then get in touch with me to discuss. So now turning to a roadmap to address the call to see, shape and sustain research software and ultimately the actions of the agenda. We must consider for each, what makes the change to see, shape and sustain possible? What makes these easy? What makes them normal? And what makes them codified? For those that are familiar with it, this is a variant of the Centre for Open Science Strategy for Culture change. Guidance here includes relevant materials and assistance. Advocacy here is shorthand for both advocacy and adoption of both policy and incentive structures. The agenda is a set of 12 actions organised in a grid of three layers and four columns and a mapping of those 12 actions to relevant stakeholder segments across the nation, not just the ARDC. I tend to use this table to give an indication of the coverage of the 12 actions of the agenda rather than the full wording of the agenda items. For the remainder of this talk, I'd like to put forward the actions and activities that we are beginning with at the ARDC with some initial indication of the areas of interest from partners that arose during consultations around the agenda. Note that this can be read across for each row if considering complementary actions to work towards, for instance, the call to sustain research software in the last row, or it can be read from top to bottom if, for instance, your area of work is aligned with policy or advocacy work shown here in the last column. For a consideration of what actions we are looking to kick off, I'm going to consider this column by column. So turning first to the infrastructures. We're looking to commission three reports to cover off three types of infrastructure relating to research software, those that I flagged at the open of this talk. Software informatics, concerns, research software as a form of intangible asset, and the research software tools authoring workforce as a form of soft infrastructure. For C, we're specifically looking at what we have at a national level, where the gaps are and what is adequately fulfilled at the international level. In the agenda consultations, this was an area where opposing solutions and interests were put forward, and so we hope the report will help clarify the path forward. For shape, we want to unearth the research software that is developed or maintained with significant Australian contributions. This unearthing will inform many of our subsequent activities. For sustain, we want to measure the workforce of research software tools, developers and maintainers. This is harder than it sounds, given it is often not identified as the core component of a software author's role. For guidance, we will start with our ARDC core competencies, where there are parallel actions in data. We are otherwise looking to community activities to further drive priorities in this area over time. Relevant to C, we will initially focus on socialising our existing guidance on software citation and publishing, and further developing our resources. Many participants in the agenda consultations called for this. Consistent with our work in advocating for fair outputs, we will shortly begin actions to adopt the emerging Fair for Research software, or Fair for RS principles, as I have already discussed in session 2. Finally, we will socialise the output of another working group we have been active in, considering curation of data and code for computational reproducibility. Relevant to shape, we are mostly still investigating areas to focus on, but software quality checklists emerged as an early area of interest in the agenda consultations. Similarly with sustain, I must admit we are still investigating, but we will be keen to socialise the outcomes of the workforce report once completed. Broadly speaking, we are looking to seed community activity across all three areas. For C, we are considering relevant researcher communities at a scale that we can handle, as well as working with existing research support communities. For shape, we are still investigating, but the agenda consultations unearthed a large number of potential partners. For sustain, we are still too early to report back, but this clearly relates to supporting the RSE Association of Australia in New Zealand. Finally, for advocacy work, some of our actions are waiting for the relevant communities to fall into place. We believe that the three reports will inform future directions and should hopefully unearth the raw materials for some good case studies. For C though, we will straightforwardly continue our advocacy for fair, but begin to shine a light on fair software as well as data. For shape and sustain, we are looking particularly to forums like this, then also to our local and national communities for the evidence and exemplars that we can help to communicate across the sector. The agenda consultations have already unearthed some good examples of career progression structures in some organisations. We are going to work these up and spread them to see if we can drive greater uptake. As flagged during the release of the draft agenda, a high level implementation plan will be released in the coming weeks, subject to the acute pressures of lockdown here in Sydney. A final version of the agenda will be released, incorporating the feedback received during validation consultations. We are also anticipating starting some further activities in this financial year that are not flagged here. Hopefully, we will be able to announce these in concert with the release of these other documents. If you would like to track our activities as they develop in this space, I would suggest signing up for our newsletter via our website listed here or following us on LinkedIn or Twitter if that's more your thing. Again, if you'd like to dig into the agenda, which includes many references, I simply skipped here and far graded detail on the framework and the rationale for the framework, as well as the specific stakeholder segmentation, then that is accessible via the bit.ly link shown on the screen. I'm really happy to chat subject to time zones, of course. My email is right there on the screen as well. With that, thanks for your time and I'm very happy to take any questions.