 Hi everyone. 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. My name is Tom Honeyman. I'm the software program manager at the ARDC. I'm joined by Paola Andrea Martinez, software project coordinator in the software team at ARDC. Software is pervasive in modern life. Research is no different. We really have come to depend upon software to do modern research. In a survey conducted by the UK Software Sustainability Institute, around 90% of researchers acknowledged the importance of software, with about 70% saying that their work would not be possible without the use of software. Software is also a common output of research, perhaps surprisingly so to some. A recent literature analysis showed around 25% of research projects result in new software. Software is increasingly called on to be made more broadly available. The recently revised scope of the 2007 OECD recommendation concerning access to research data from public funding not only now calls for code relating to research to be made available, it also suggests the development of a suitable workforce to better support this shift in practice, going so far as to name research software engineers as a necessary part of this workforce. Across the literature, three common concerns emerge. Software is hard to see, especially 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. We need to standardize mechanisms and approaches to making software visible. It may be a common part of research and it may be starting to show, but I suspect we're only scratching the surface at this point in terms of just how much software is created within research. Best practice will certainly smooth the path to greater visibility. 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. Hopefully you've either encountered it during the recent consultation phase for the draft release, or perhaps during the poster session at this event. But if not, if you'd like to know more about the agenda, please visit the link on the screen and then get in touch with me or my colleague Paula 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 things 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, three layers and four columns, and a mapping of those 12 actions to relevant stakeholders. 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 the consultations around the agenda. I tend to use this table to give an indication of the coverage of the 12 actions of the agenda. Note that this can be read across for each row if considering complementary actions to work towards, for instance, the call to see research software in the first row, or it can be read from top to bottom. If your area of work is aligned with policy or advocacy work, for instance, it would be the last column. For a consideration of what actions we're 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. 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 to 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. Turning now to the guidance column, 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 socializing our existing guidance for 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, arising from the joint work of many contributors to a Research Data Alliance working group, in which we have been active participants. Finally, we'll socialize the output of another working group we've been active in, considering curation of data and code for computational reproducibility, that's the Cure Fair group. Relevant to shape, we're 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, we're still investigating, but we will be keen to socialize the outcomes of the workforce report once it's completed. Broadly speaking, we are looking to seed community activity across all three areas. We're considering relevant researcher communities at a scale that we can handle, as well as working with existing research support communities. For shape, we're still investigating, but the agenda consultations unearthed a large number of potential partners to work with. For sustain, we're still too early to report back, but this clearly relates to supporting the Research Software Engineering Association of Australia and New Zealand, and we're keen to work out how we can do that. 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 of the Fair Principles, but we will begin to shine a light on fair software as well as fair data. For shape and sustain, we're looking particularly to our international counterparts, and then also to communities for the evidence and exemplars that we can help to communicate across the sector. So that concludes the activities arising from the agenda that I can flag at this stage. As I flagged during the release of the agenda, we're planning to release a high-level implementation plan in the coming weeks, subject to the acute pressures of lockdown in Sydney right now, and also a final version of the agenda will be released, incorporating the feedback received during validation consultations, including, most importantly, the measure of actual interest in the agenda actions, as opposed to the levels of presumed interest that were recorded in the draft agenda. We're also anticipating initiating some further activities within 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. With that, I want to say thank you, and I'm very happy to take questions at this point. If you want to again read the agenda, you can find the link there, that's the Bitly link on this page. If you'd like to get in contact to discuss the agenda or the actions arising from it, we've included our email addresses there. Feel free to reach out to myself or to Paola. Thanks.