 Kia ora, everyone, and welcome to this policy and strategy panel discussion as part of the RSE Asia-Australia Unconference called Georgina Ray Tokolingua, my name's Georgina Ray. It happens to be Te Reo Māori o Wiki, which is Māori Language Week in New Zealand, so doing my best to apply one of our national languages here, and it's a really fun and exciting journey that we're all going on locally to build our shared knowledge of Te Reo Māori and share it with the world. So I am really privileged to be part of this panel discussion as the facilitator today, so thank you for that opportunity. I'm the Science Engagement Manager at the New Zealand East Science Infrastructure. We refer to ourselves as Nessie, and in that role I get the privilege of thinking about things like the RSE community, working with colleagues you'll be far more familiar with people like Nuriya who do all the hard work here, so that's how I fit in. Now, I'd like to note that the organisers of this first RSE Asia-Australia Unconference would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which they stand, the Yagura people and the Terrible people, Wurrungi, sorry, Wurrungiri people of the Kulin Nation and the Muwenina people. They wish to pay respects to elders past, present and emerging leaders. They also acknowledge the contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who continue to maintain their identity, culture and Indigenous rights. Okay, now, before we get into the discussion itself and you get to meet or learn and hear from all the fabulous people pinned to the screen with me, I wanted to point out that this Unconference does have a code of conduct, so please head to the conference website and check that out. If you're not familiar with it, helps it be an inclusive and a good event for everyone involved, so I do highly recommend that. Now, policy and strategy, we have a fabulous line up of a variety of different people with different experiences and perspectives, I think, although we might see some common themes emerging as well, who knows. So first off, I was going to invite each of the panellists to introduce yourselves. I'm going to suggest that we do this by way of the order in which you appear on my screen, so that's a, you know, we'll go with that. So, Sir Anjit, we'd love to hear from you. Can you introduce yourself a little bit about what you do, why you think you're here for the audience. Thank you. Thank you, Georgina. Hello everyone. My name is Sir Anjit Gaur. I'm a statistician based in India. And I am also the co-founder of the RAC Asia Association, which I started during one of my, during my projects with open life science cohort for last year. So it is almost one year for RAC Asia this month. And we have been doing quite some outreach and community work at RAC Asia. Besides, besides my work, I also do some open source projects, like I'm a technical writer with Google Season of Docs for the R Development Guide. Previously, I was involved with the Code for Science and Society at the Digital Infrastructure Incubator, where I was helping to build our community. I have also done Google Summer of Code with the Julia Language Organization. And more recently, I was a subject matter expert with the NASA Transform to Open Science Program, where I was, I contributed in the Open Science Tools and Resources Team. So that is where basically I am and also building the RAC Asia Association. And this is the first time that I am collaborating with the RAC Australia New Zealand Association. And this is our first conference with them. So I'm looking forward to hearing to the other panellists. Thank you. And I'm honoured to be invited on this panel. Thank you, Sarah and Jake. And I must say, my first impression of the group Asia RAC is, gosh, that sounds huge and ambitious. So I'm very excited to hear about all the plans and strategies and policies from you through the next hour or so. Next up on the screen is Andy. So I'll hand over to you now, Andy. Let's hear about why you're here. OK, thank you. I can tell you a bit about why I'm here. So I originally came from a physics background and sort of fell into coding because I was interested in modelling the circulation in the ocean. And so some time ago, I used to do lots of coding and writing models for the ocean circulation and trying to release them and so on. It was in the days before there was even such a thing as a research software engineer. And around about 15 years ago, I came back from overseas to Australia and started working at ANU doing ocean modelling and climate modelling here. And one of the things I've been pushing over the last few years at least is basically setting up infrastructure to help our ocean models be used more widely by a wider group. And so that was no longer doing the coding myself, but I've put together a group that we called COSMA. COSMA stands for consortium of ocean sea ice modelling in Australia. And if you look at the thing behind me, that's an image from an ocean sea ice model. And this stuff around Antarctica there is sea ice and the rest of it is looking at a snapshot of salinity at the ocean surface in one of these models. So you can see pretty high resolution and a fair bit of detail there. So I guess our main aim with COSMA was to kind of expand the community and basically support the research through infrastructure that was software. And then a few years ago, the government funded an initiative that we know is AccessNRI. And AccessNRI, Access is Australia's climate model and weather model and Earth system model. And AccessNRI is essentially funded through research infrastructure money out of the Australian government. And our mandate here is to provide the infrastructure behind climate and weather modelling in Australia. So we're a pretty new organisation. I was appointed here in March at the time there were only a couple of other employees. We're now sort of about half full, but we're still expanding. Most of the people we will employ here are research software engineers. And so it's nice to be invited along to this event and to hear what all of you have to say. Awesome. Thanks, Andy. And I think establishing a group and what's probably a space that not everyone understands might be an experience that lots of people on this call have worked through or are about to. So good to hear that one. Now, Manadeep, introduce yourself, please. Thank you. Hi, everyone. So my name is Manadeep Sinha. I am an astronomer, a computational astronomer by profession. And that's a supercomputer with me in front with binary black holes that they meet government. Basically, so I study galaxies. Generally like galaxies are what we see. And I write lots of code and run lots of simulations to figure out how we map. So that's sort of the what of what I do. But there are two other aspects of what I do, which is how we do. So for me, the things that are important is how we carry out our research. So for example, being end goal for me is always reproducibility and open and reproducible. So for me, these are the policies, these are the things I always try to prioritize in my circles of influence, making it open, make it publicly available, making it reproducible and so on. The last one is who does it and who gets the credit and that's sort of why I am here. So back in 2017, I co-founded the RSE UNZ, the Research Software Engineers. This wasn't the thing that existed. And it's like, oh, okay, we really need to do this. And so, and so, so from that point on, I've been involved in getting, raising awareness about this RSE term. Look, this is a critical part of our research infrastructure. These people have the skills and also trying to be inclusive, right? Because we know this field is very male dominated. So like who gets to do the work, who gets to be involved, who gets the credit. These are aspects I care about. And hence, these are things that bring me on board for a panel like this. And thanks, thanks actually for inviting me. Yes, and we have seen your name associated with this work for a long time. So thank you and look forward to hearing from you today. Now last, but definitely not least, is Asif. So I think coming all the way from Malaysia, although I'm not sure if you're physically there at the moment, but please introduce yourself. Hi, thank you, Georgina. I, since you mentioned about slides, I just managed to find a few slides that I could show. Is that okay? Absolutely. Well, that all depends on if this all works, but give it a crack. Okay. So can you see that? Can you see it? Yes. Okay, I think that works. Yeah. So I want to say, well, you can call me Asif. I feel like I'm the outlier of the group here. I just discovered that I may be an RSE wanderer or a lost soul. Until recently when Roland Moss Bergen, I think I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly and his listening, invited me to be part of this panel. I didn't even know of the term RSE. So I quickly did some homework before this panel. And I realized that I've been actually doing something like this for the past many, many years. I just didn't recognize the label RSE. And so I'm really happy that I've been finally enlightened and made aware of this. So very quickly about myself. Sorry, professional journey. Well, I was actually born in India, but so that's not. And then, okay, this is, I edit the past minute professionally. I was, I grew up in Brunei and then I moved to Singapore. I did my bachelor's, my master's, my PhD, everything there. So 11 years in Singapore. And that's when I started doing bioinformatics at the bachelor's level, master's and PhD level, although my bachelor's was biotech, but towards the end I got introduced to bioinformatics, the wonderful world of informatics. And then I moved to the US Johns Hopkins. I was there for about a year and I continued pursuing that area of research and Hopkins sent me to Malaysia. There was a collaboration with Pradana University, a brand new university under the mandate of the government to set up something pioneering, something top notch. So we moved over there to help set up Pradana University. I was there for eight years and then recently I got seconded to Turkey where I'm still doing the same thing, trying to promote and grow data science bioinformatics. So as the name implies, data science bioinformatics, there's a lot of informatics, there's a lot of computational work there. So of course we need, we do work with RACs. This is just very quickly. So my role, I was former dean of school of data sciences. Again, there's a lot of relevance. Director for Centre for Bioinformatics, chief data officer. So I love and start up. EpiBionet is Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network. Again, something I've been doing for many years. I'm the president at the moment but I feel so embarrassed that I was not even aware of the term RAC. So I'm also part of the, I'm one of the executive co-director members of Goblet, global organisation for bioinformatics, learning, education and training. And I'm going to do my bit to introduce them to this world of RAC. And this is the Association of Medical and Bioinformatics in Singapore. And my bioinformatics is Malaysian Bioinformatics Network. So everything that I've done, the roles I've helped have very much relevance to this. Again, just embarrassed. I didn't know. Personally, in terms of research, this is what I do. Again, computational immunology, vaccinology, virology, very much applied. But I do use a lot of data. We're housing techniques, informatics. We develop tools, algorithms, et cetera. So I do work a lot with these software engineers. And I have a lot to share in terms of the problems, the challenges and all that. So I look forward to the rest of the discussion. That's all about me. Thank you. Thanks, Arsif. And I would say, please don't be embarrassed. This is fabulous to have your views here because I think that new perspective will be interesting balance to some of the people that have been around the chat for a little longer, not looking at anyone. And yeah, some of it could well drive what sort of strategy and policy we might need, I guess. So without further ado, I'm going to crack straight into the questions. So we have got a few prepared. But I will emphasise that the way this session is structured is where we've got a few questions to cover off as a panel discussion, but then, well, depending on time, from half-past onwards. So we'll be half-past because it could be half-past anything depending on where you're signing in from. It will be half-past four for me in the afternoon. We will move into a Q&A with the audience. So please store up those questions, drop them in the chat even, although they might get lost, so store them on a bit of paper as well. And definitely we want to see that conversation, kōrero in New Zealand, kōrero conversation happening in the chat around some of this stuff as well. So where are my questions? There they are. Very good. The first question we have is, what do you think has improved in recognition of the work of RACs in the last few years? And so I was going to start this one, but I'm going to start with Samjit. We'll give everyone an opportunity. For Asia, I've just started it last year, so I don't have much to share from Asia. But in general, I can say that RAC as a movement has progressed a lot. In the UK, it has, I would say, it's now a very established role and community and it's thriving over there. And as other parts of the world pick up on the roles and the community, I think it is progressing in different parts of the world. So Australia has been doing it since the past four to five years. Asia has just started, so these are some of the major hubs where RAC is emerging as a community and as well as a profession. So that's my take on it. Fabulous. And does anyone want to jump in next before I volunteer told you? Fabulous. To Manatee, go for it. Yeah, to me, the biggest thing that has increased is the awareness. Just the fact that there is this term called research software engineer. The fact that it's not a completely opaque and obscure thing as much anymore. When I see jobs in, again, my context is Australia, but I see jobs that are advertised with research software engineer in the title. But this is your position. That to me is a way, like, hey, look, you know what category you're looking for, right? As humans, we are sort of tend to think of ourselves in groups. And so the fact that research software engineers are getting more formal in terms of jobs is a big way. But there's a wide variety of global movements that are happening, which are helping. Like what Sarangit was talking about, NASA tops, for example, the Transform to Open Science. It's not really an RAC thing, but RACs will be fundamental in making open science happen, right? So there's a variety like OECD recommendations that came out earlier for Australia. So lots of things are happening worldwide that's raising awareness on this RAC role. Yeah, Andy, do you want to jump in? Sure. So I agree that raising the awareness is important, and I agree that that's happening as well. And I think, you know, five years ago it was fairly uncommon to hear people call research software engineers and it is becoming more prevalent. But the other thing which I think has changed at least in Australia in the last few years and not so much, well, I don't know so much about Asia or New Zealand, but is that, you know, the way things work in Australia is there is separate money for research infrastructure, right? And there's becoming a broader recognition that actually research infrastructure is not just hardware, it's not just telescopes and computers and things like that, but actually software is infrastructure too. And I think that's really important because when people think of infrastructure, infrastructure say to support research, then they care about it. But I think many people may think that software is this sort of ephemeral thing that can appear and disappear at will, but it needs real long-term care just as physical infrastructure does. And so I think that that is a big step which has occurred in the last few years and certainly will help us in the future. Yeah, that's a really interesting perspective and one that just sneaking in my own perspective here. In the New Zealand context, there's a sort of government review of our research sector at the moment. If you're familiar with it, reports to Arapaiarangi or Te Paikahurangi was the foundational sort of scene-setting report. And through the consultation process, that theme, Andy, sang through loud and clear. They had a whole section on infrastructure. How should it be funded? All those standard sort of things. And when you went to the consultation sessions, people were going, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about the people? The infrastructure's nothing without the people and it was a fabulous theme that came through so clearly. And we're starting to hear our policy people from MB, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, sort of rehearsing that back to us. So really valuable. Now, Asif, new to it all, but still I guess you can also frame this in terms of what this has meant for you in just the last year or so. But how has things changed for you in the RSE space? Right. So I agree with Manu about the awareness and I'm going to touch upon that. But before that, I just want to state that I cannot overemphasise the importance of RSEs. I mean, these people who do this work are really, really important. And the last two years being based in Turkey, having difficulty finding these people really further highlights the important work that these people are doing and the demand that's there for such individuals. It's just tremendous. And I'm struggling to find people, especially in academia because the industry grabs them and takes them. So just wanted to declare that importance and I think all of you know that, people from my area maybe do not still recognise that. And so that brings me to the next point that RSE recognition or these individuals in academia, it's still a mess. I don't think we have a proper structure of how to, I mean, though I've been doing bioinformatics and we should be a bit more well-versed with how to handle this. Of course, there are places where I think this is better, but in many parts of Asia, I mean Malaysia, even in Turkey at least. And maybe to some extent Singapore too, I think a proper structure for career, for actually how to engage with RSEs, how to take advantage, maximise them. I think that's still lacking. I think the industry has got this somewhat figured out, but in academia personally feel still a mess. And then coming back to Manu Dip's point about the awareness, now that I am aware about RSEs, I think the awareness within the RSE circle of people who do the software engineering research, they themselves are more aware of this, but I think the problem is people who work with RSEs, these people are not really that aware of this world. I mean even the label RSE, it's not something that they are aware of. And I can see this from my line of work and the people I work with. Again, this was like news to me. So imagine those who don't really do much of bioinformatics or data science at least in academia. So I think that awareness is still lacking and much more needs to be done. I'm really happy to see that the RSE community has really come together and established itself and performing chapters or what nodes across the world. I think maybe the next step would be really to reach out and connect with the life scientists, the biologists, the researchers really, the researcher community who work with them but don't really understand or don't really make, are not really full aware of the challenges that the RSEs feel. So that's I think the crux of the problem and maybe a lot more. And I implore the RSEs to actually look into that, to help us as researchers to do more for you guys and to really work better together. So and then in terms of recognition, I think much has improved coming to the real question of what has improved. I think I remember when I was doing my bachelor's, these software engineers or coders, I mean, I don't want to use this but I have even heard the word coding monkeys. Sorry to say that, but by researchers or scientists who just use these guys and don't really show that respect the importance. I think they know the importance of these people but somehow the bigger importance of the credit usually goes to people who think about the problems, the research question. And these people are just the go-to people. You go, hey, do this for me and you do this and build this and that's it. So in terms of recognition, credit, I think much has improved. I give you one example. I mean, you have a research question, a research problem and usually it might be very biological. So when you publish a paper, you just publish that particular aspect of the research question, the hypothesis and the software part might be a very small component of that paper but especially in our field of bioinformatics we do recognise that the same work could be published from the software perspective. So you could publish a separate paper with just that software in mind and the person who developed it could be the first offer instead of being somewhere in the middle. So trying to salami or look at the different facets of that work and trying to give credit to that different facet and publishing it as a separate aspect and getting those recognition and there are journals that accept and welcome that kind of submission NAR, Nucleic Acid Research and Database Issues, Web Server Issues and High Impact Factor and they don't ask you to write big and they accept not rather easily but there's a big chance of being accepted and there's so many other journals I think JOS is also there. So in terms of recognition there's much improvement and also I feel Github as a repo for codes has been a big help and this has really grown has really helped biologists who are learning how to code showcase their work and get recognition and get citation. So I think this advent of micro-citations has really helped and these, you know, your Github repositories can serve as some sort of micro-citation that go into CVs, your CVs and help you see career advancement get promotions, etc. So in terms of recognition I think there's much that has improved. Okay. Thanks all for now. That covered a lot of terrain there and I think there are, there's a few different things that we could probably pick up on there but I can see there's a bit of chat going on around publishing software and the pros and cons of that and I think perhaps this is actually the nice segue into the next question which is while we can pat ourselves on the back for improvements so far and I think as if your example of the language we've used in the past for these fabulous people towards the language and the labels that we have now which are positive, constructive and meaningful, that's a huge improvement, right? That's something we can all be proud of. So what do we have to do more of then to incentivise recognition and I guess I'm really interested from definitely from the policy and the strategy angle but open to tactics and things as well. What do we need to change here to get that really recognised? Anyone want to jump in first? Yeah, I guess I can jump in and it sort of relates to what people are putting in the chat at the moment. So there's a comment that maybe we need to publish papers along with software and in the chat people are saying well, is publishing really where we want to be? Should we have GitHub contributions to that metric and there is a really wide push within universities to have non-traditional metrics recognised. So, for example, people in fine arts want that. People who are making contributions to policy want, not just journal papers as being how they're recognised and so I think maybe that's something that we can push for is to have a system which does recognise people for their contributions to code and the impact that that trade has rather than needing to publish a paper in a journal to demonstrate value. Okay, who wants to follow on? I can, basically. So, it's sort of a tell, last year I was applying for a promotion and so I am the author of a very popular astronomy package like runs really fast and it's cited quite a few times a year. So I talked to the promotions committee, the promotions manager and he was like, hey look, I have this fantastic piece of software that works for a lot of people worldwide and how do I put it into my promotion stuff. And the response was basically cost cognitive dissonance for me. The response was that we view software as a regular part of research, therefore we don't count it as your research output. So you're saying the thing that's a core part of my research that lets me do my work is not actually acknowledged as my work. So, for starters, this is something we need to acknowledge that. Come on, this is software, without research software our research has no legs essentially. Most of our research, not all, but just about most of our research requires research software and I think the levers need to come down from higher up at the national policy level before things can change on that. Sarah and Jay, you've got something to add here. Yes, I would like to pick up on what Mano Di was saying. So I had some similar experience where I was building a code base and developing the methodology there. But somehow my senior or the person who was supervising me was not convinced that that is actual research writing code is actual research and for them it is more about the theory and unless you do something novel in the theory it won't be recognised as much. So one way that I can I personally feel can affect us making them aware that there are journals and ways of publishing publishing the software itself and citing the software and it is an important part of my work unless I would have written unless I wrote that software my work would have not progressed actually. So and I only started writing the theory after I was able to do it on my program or write a code for it. So I still don't have a proper answer for that why there is that kind of bias or why software is seen as bit lower in the research field and why theory research is considered superior or higher up. So one way to convince people who are following the traditional academic pathway is to show that there are authentic journals that publish software as the first output say the journal of open source software or many similar journals there are also data papers as I would like to highlight. So there is a chapter in the Turingway book which discusses about publishing different kind of articles so there is a chapter on micro publishing, there are chapters on data papers, software papers, method papers so that is one way where you can highlight that all these steps of research are important and each has a significant value in the whole research process. Absolutely and what would you do or what would you like to see more of to get the incentives right. Right So I think a lot of the problem that the RSE community is freezing is well to some extent is due to ignorance of the people at the higher level who have the so-called power to decide the promotion of the RSE so and the only I think the key solution to overcome that is to have communication more communication more awareness is really key because I think if they're ignorant they don't understand, they don't see and it's our job then to make them aware make them see how this is really important and as Manojip and others have mentioned it's like the core part of your project there's no leg without the software I mean how can they not see that and they don't recognize that what's the mental block for them to not be able to see really know that and it's just mind-boggling that kind of statement that was just shared so I think communication and awareness key and how do we do that how do we then get this out there so I think there are various stakeholders that we need to engage so organizations themselves that deal with RSEs I think they themselves need to recognize this and I think the owners is on the researchers in those organizations to come together unless you are just one in that organization but if you are a few in that organization to really come together and make the top management recognize and if you are part of that top management then the job I think becomes much easier but really to make this recognition at the top level and one way to do that is not just to tell them they're important everybody would say sure you guys are important but this can translate in the form of career progression trajectory I think often that's really lacking okay you come in I give you a title of RSE where do you go from there what's the next step the community itself I think still are struggling to have that well defined so some sort of a trajectory so people when they come in it's the next step so they are progressing so that needs to be done and having that established by the organization working with RSE seeking their help how do we figure this out how do we reward people who do this for us that's very important I think secondly in terms of awareness at the university level the courses, the curriculum individuals are at the learning stage that's when we change their mindsets and make them aware and make them see the value so curriculums may need to maybe start introducing the word RSE or have, I'm not saying have one full course but at least somewhere along that curriculum awareness needs to be made I don't know myself how that should be done but I think it's really important at the university level at the undergrad level because that's where most of these guys software engineers know and very few of them may do masters of PhD so I think it's essential that at the undergrad level this gets spelled out even the problem what's an RSE I think that's important and then I think publication or through repositories of the GitHub and others alike or pre-prints so I think more of that needs to be done so it encourages micro citation it encourages reputation like how many people are using and they also grants actually I think Chan Zuckerberg foundation has also been funding a lot of these software projects and they're really looking at the utility of that software how many people are really using as one of the criteria for funding not so much I think about the publications and all that but really having a community around your software so getting it out there in GitHub and then tracking the use visitor number of visitors and the community that you build around that I think that itself will speak about your work and make the organisation important work that you are doing so I think more of that needs to be done and we should not be shy to put our code there, seek help there are a lot of slack channels a lot of places where we can get help and be part of our own small community where this work is done last but not least I think you know conferences so are these conference conferences it's a very good example of making people realise their worth so that they go and demand or at least negotiate that with the people that really matter but I think more importantly this is a good start but I think it would be great if RSE could be a small track in non-RSE conferences could be for example we have INCOV actually we have our own flagship international conference on bioinformatics for 21 years we never had a track like that I think having RSEs go into all these other bioinformatics conferences or data science conferences people who use software engineers and to have a small track or small session or even just a talk an oral presentation to be given so that you reach out to the researchers out there I think that's going to have huge impact on RSE itself so I think these are simple yet very effective some of these are simple some of them are not simple but these are some of the things at the top of my head that I think we could do by the way I hope everyone was noting those down that was fabulous Serenji you've got your hand raised yes so I was reflecting on what I feel in regions where this term has not got much of awareness I feel that it gets dissolved with the data science world or the data science profession and RSEs could be seen like this could be very parallel to what a data scientist is so I have a question for the panel itself how would you emphasize a difference between a data science job and a RSE job so if I want to share it with someone how I can tell them that this is something different or even though if it is parallel it's quite different from the data science world so yeah any thoughts there Job title I mean we advertise for research software engineers Job title I think that's really important to get that up front and when we're advertising for a data scientist we actually will soon it will be a job title of a data scientist and just specifying within the roles specifying what they're doing rather than having a generic kind of cover all advertisement I think that's yeah be specific about what you want I suppose I see for Menadip yeah yeah Menadip go ahead sorry I actually I think the roles have a lot of overlap and part of it is because both roles are somewhat fuzzy and again at RSE AUNZ we have intentionally more inclusive in terms of how you enable the research part either through software or maybe through scaling or hardware and so on so a data scientist is possibly more closer to the end in terms of getting results out in terms of insights out but I think there's a lot of overlap and in terms of skills as well frequently these statistics it's modern research we need lots of statistical tools to get the right one know that we have a robust result so I think it's not a zero sum game like it's here's what does the job require and here's what your skills are and then see what works better for you like if you passive yourself do you think of yourself as a research software engineer to me that's more at the nitty gritty level or can be more at the nitty gritty level like this is running on this platform whereas a data scientist can be a little more removed from the underlying platform like the real but again it depends on that that's how I see it I see yeah so I agree with the other panelist I think the overlap is part of the communication problem I think the definition itself I was listening to a video earlier trying to prepare myself I felt that there's still no formal definition maybe there is and I'm not aware of the definition that was shared through this YouTube talk was that you have software engineer and you have research so there's a spectrum and some people are at the more software engineer side some people are more on the research side some people might be in the middle and do you still consider yourself to be an RSE and as part of this communication I think a definition would really help if there's one out there already that's really great the distinction from data scientist actually there's so many terms out there you have software engineer itself how is that different from RSE you have computer scientists how is that different from RSE data scientists so I think that needs to be first sorted out within the RSE community if it is already then that's great then I think the next I think is what Andy was saying should really use the right label so software engineer I think it's a great one instead of data scientist but I actually as Andy was talking about that I was just thinking do people actually use the word RSE to advertise this like research software engineer software engineer yes but what about RSE so I think so maybe to declutter distinguish the roles is by advertising and getting the terminology that's recognised by RSE is to be used when we seek out such individuals that should help but really I think defining so that the RSE themselves are very clear what is the distinction between a data scientist and RSE so that they can apply that accordingly that's it I'm going to sneak in and answer here as well Serenjit because over in New Zealand at Nesse we advertised for and hired a couple of years ago now a data science engineer so someone who and the person who took the role has still has a part time you know part of their role part of the FTE carved out to be a data scientist but in their role with Nesse they are doing the RSE style work with data scientists so just to mix it all up or add another element of confusion to the mix yeah very interesting now I'm just looking at the time it's 20 past the hour we have one more of our some structured questions to go so I'm definitely going to put that to the panel and we have already got some questions through in the chat thank you Paula for capturing those so they're not lost forever in the thread so I'll move on to that final question and then we will open the floor essentially so that final question is what is the importance of having RSE contributions evaluated for career progression I might start off with Andy just mixing it up yeah okay thanks critical obviously and I guess something that I wanted to point out and this is actually the same with the last conversation as well is that we're not the only community facing this right so people who are working on microscopes in biology labs they're often science trained got a very high level of training they're employed as professional staff because that's the only category which suits them because they're not writing papers and so they have no way to progress in their career so it's actually a wider conversation and in this as with the need to use for example software as a non-traditional research output we can combine with other communities to make some progress here so the rest of the research infrastructure landscape which is very much focused on physical infrastructure they have the same problem and so they are making waves and maybe you'll see something from the increased directors in the next few months with a position paper on essentially opening up a third track within the university system which will promote people based on their technical competence and their abilities rather than either managing people, managing progressively more people or writing progressively more papers and teaching more classes so I think that's what actually has to happen and if that happens then the pathway becomes clearer but at the moment the problem is that with research software engineers as with many other essential workers landscape there is no category that's designed for those people and no promotion system designed for those people so that's what needs to happen and that needs to happen at quite a high level in my view but we have allies in that we're not the only people trying to do it and that's what we need to use as our lever okay maybe Asif next you're muted yes I think Andy pretty much covered this as I mentioned earlier so I think it's very important that the RSE contributions be evaluated for career progression and it's the people who are higher up and really so-called supervisors of these individuals have to have this aspect as part of that end-year evaluation but rather than having it simply you know what did you do but it needs to be stretched out okay yeah you built the software and that's about it but it needs to be expanded into looking at the complexity of that work itself what goes into making that software the difficulty that they went through the challenges they faced and how did they overcome rather than yes you built and that's it I think this evaluation going a little deeper the format of such an evaluation if there is one if there is an organization that has already got that figured out I think that's something that needs to be shared so that others can adopt I think there's a saying that the future is already there just not equally distributed so I think some people as Andy was saying needs to be done and how best it needs to be done it just needs to trickle into those places where they do not have those and apply those and implement so that these RSEs can really progress and be feel rewarded and sense of gratification Thank you and Seren Shakespeare Yes I think we were discussing the career progression for RSEs in one of the sessions and we did make a list of what kind of recognition can be given so they can make a record of the kind of contributions they're doing and always discuss it with their supervisor or senior manager so that they are able to quantify the progress that they have made throughout the year so we were also discussing about having regular annual performance reviews for RSEs and progress them according to their performance in those reviews Georgina you are on mute Oh that's my trick just Thank you Seren Jeet Yeah definitely some good things that we can apply real things we can apply there so Manadeep what are your thoughts here on the importance of having RSE contributions evaluated for that career progression I mean it has to be we are in a sort of capitalistic society if you're not getting some value out of paying someone why are you keeping them around so clearly that's if as a community as the research sector if we value RSEs we have to value start off with value in their contributions I actually think that it needs a broader rethink around what are the traits we value this is sort of like what specific things about RSEs do we value and capturing we always want to try to get down as a metric but a lot of what RSEs do is a little more fuzzy in terms at least in my experience it's more collaborative here like I have solved someone else's problems with 10 minutes they've been like oh hey I'm trying to do this oh why didn't you try that software package how is this ever going to get translated into an RSE contribution it's just it's just the knowledge bank that exists within the university and it's sort of a I'm saying university that's my context but within any research organisation and so we need to not value that as well not just here's the research output here's the software you produced here's the software you maintained is how that created impact it's a broader effect but yeah it has to be absolutely so I think there's consistent view there we've got a theme well thank you to the panel for indulging us with all your experience and insights there so now we're going to move on to the Q&A from the floor so I'm not going to open up to sort of raising your hand and asking a question quite yet because we do already have some captured from the chat and they look quite good so the first one that we have here is from actually I'm going to stop sitting down well I have for an hour does everyone want to just take 30 seconds stand up turn around and sit down again go for it I haven't been timing that but I think you know Friday afternoon for me that was not 30 seconds I'm a bit tired it's Friday just bear with me anyway okay now we're energised from Aaron and this question rang true when as I've said that we need to think about what's happening in the curriculum what's happening in the undergrad to upskill people and to build awareness of RSE as a career path and RSE as a skill set so Aaron asked has anyone on the panel learned RSE skills during undergrad or was it ad hoc so what sort of skills should we be emphasising during early career development to be a fabulous RSE so what I thought we might do is first off anyone and this is not just the panel I can see the rest of you over here raise a hand if you learnt these skills or some core part of these skills in your undergraduate training we've got one one taker two no one from the panel that's a two sorry I blew it out but three yes okay okay well that that feels a bit nicer I thought it was going to be zero but we'll put it to the panel then what what skills do you think are maybe pick three what are your favourite three what were the three top four no more than three so I have a graduate degree in statistics so I'll pick the first skills as statistics due to due to the course that I studied I also learnt a bit of programming so programming in R python and Julia and then I was doing a project where I learnt Github so these are three main skills that I learnt during my studies and some projects just immediately after my study but RSE so when I discovered the RSE role I actually felt that I have found my tribe so this is the place to be so yeah that's where I am awesome any any other skill sets the panellists learnt during undergrad that over and above what Saranjek just shared perhaps they were the same I can say that I obviously did my undergrad a long time ago but I dropped out of any computing topics and I picked up logic instead, formal logic and it was far more useful to coding than actually doing the computer science so I'm not sure if that would still apply there Interesting computational thinking that's what they teach in the young kids a few days isn't it Asif Right so I think when you talk about skills as we talked earlier the very definition and the overlap with data science so I think if you take a computer science course then a lot of those skills are going to be relevant if you do an engineering even if you do bioinformatics for example I think they teach you coding, they teach you statistics they teach you well there's always a research project so you also get some research experience the research process, the research methodology you know research question, hypothesis objective testing the hypothesis and things like that so I think these days I feel you know a lot of these undergrad courses do have research component final year research project or if they go into honest year then research is a big part of that so if they do research they're going to be bound to use some aspects of RSE because informatics is just so prevalent these days it's omnipresent everywhere you can't really do much these days without informatics so but of course in terms of software engineering aspect I think analytical skills, problem solving skills and the research understanding the research process would be some common ones and I think the logic mentioned by Andy is usually they don't they're not formally taught but that would be also something that I think it's generally there so yeah there's I think it's quite out there in Menadip would you like to add anything there? Yeah so what's on your side version control statistics are essential the things that I think help quite a bit is testing so continuous integration specifically I think helps quite a bit and the other one that helps is some knowledge about the operating system the number of people I students usually ACRs that are confused about paths and how to compile which will get picked up and so Python paths and library paths and what are you and it's all a mystery usually but that sort of helps understanding how a program works, how a computer does what it does Excellent I just want to add on just a little I think there's always this conversation you know should you take a master's degree by coursework or by research the title is the same I personally feel that doing taking a research one is where you actually really learn the art of utilizing those skills to problem solving and that's when you actually learn more about a particular skill rather than just going to a course and having go through some standard examples of course you still need those but really applying it to solving problems I think is where these skills get ingrained in us and stay with us I think so do as much as long as people do research I think many of these skills will come to the fore and get utilized Excellent and that makes me think I was in a listening into a panel discussion hosted by ARDC earlier in the week around building the skills gap and one of the panellists said there's upskilling and then there's building competency and just upskilling is not enough so exactly what you're saying there being able to apply things is really valuable Thank you now I'm going to move to the next one of the next questions I'm shuffling the water around a little bit such as my privilege so we've heard a lot about this sort of gap in awareness how do we make sure that people particularly powerful people influential people know about ARDCs and how that can help us so decision makers and what not and Nuriya has asked the question how can we involve more influential ARDC advocates to reach decision makers and this is sort of getting into that well what can we do about this where people's ideas from the panel anyone want to go first here anyone done some of this recently I can't say I have done this but I just feel like in terms of advocating maybe we need to focus on what ARDCs enable rather than rather than the people themselves and so then that would be coming back to the software as infrastructure and of course if you're going to have software being infrastructure then it needs skilled people to operate and maintain it but that seems to me to be an important an important point to make amongst the decision makers because there's no point just advocating for a career or a cohort of people if you can't connect them to the art courts or the impact they have does that make sense absolutely so you build awareness on this thing that is meaningless to the audience connect it to what they know anyone else want to add to that one I think as if you had it in your mouth didn't you yeah so I think I touched a little about this earlier so just want to add on well one way might be reaching people at the top for the ARDC community actually to become part of these other organizations where you have these influential people who have the power to shape things and change things so I don't think it stops ARDCs to be part of such organization just to give you an example I mean we at AP Bionet we share Pacific Bionetic Network we would welcome for any of the ARDC individuals to become a member and be one of the executive board members I don't think we have a criteria that would prevent them so they are more than welcome to run for election in fact we have election this year so if anyone of you would like to nominate yourself I can nominate you if you're interested so we'd be happy to have these individuals become part of our organization and help us recognize, realize and shape the direction of our field through your lens, through your perspective and bring some of the values that you would like to see happen and we have we work with Asia Bioneticians in Asia Pacific so we are in a position to bring about this change and if you could educate us, make us aware and see what you are really about then we can help push that forward and I think that becomes a very effective top down approach of course you also need the grass root approach which is what you are doing but I think it's usually of course both are needed but you see much more this ripple effect if you have from top down because the people with power are really up there so I mean for example we have ISCB which is the global one, we have Goblet so many of these you guys easily, one of few of you could be part of that in fact there's a saying they are not enough people at the top there so it's very lonely and we would welcome you guys to come and join us and help chart this direction that would make the RSEs happy and really get them what they want so there are people who are willing to help there are people who may be not more reluctant but I think it's largely because of lack of awareness, so the more awareness more communication and that would happen with you guys being part of the club rather than from the outside advocating but from the inside I think it's going to be more effective so anybody wants to be signing up for everyone and executive board member you can put your name there and I'll tell you what to do next thank you these are career opportunity for someone Manatech did you want to respond to that one as well? I don't quite really but the thing I have found is a challenge is people seem to understand established academics tend to understand data and then trying to say no no this is different this is software yes data is obviously very important data is critical but without software it's not you're not going to get anything out of your data just pointless and it's just so the concept of research software being important and critical needs to circulate a little bit I think before and we're seeing that we're starting to see that but like the NRI road maps that come about things tend to get typecast towards data just no it's not data it's important it's so interesting I've been working a little bit around some I guess it's sort of policy stuff in New Zealand and the infrastructure investment sort of space at the moment we got a draft report through and it was all about data it was fabulous and software wasn't mentioned at all and so we took the time to put together a response a paper for the authors as some feedback which was right if you have data it needs to be analysed if you want to analyse it you need software which is if you're not from that background that isn't necessarily obvious so talking to the people their level of understanding and we managed to change the report so that it went from no mention of software to 19 mentions of software so we're looking forward to that one coming out but suddenly they just had no idea and we had an opportunity through a we had a little click in the armour an opportunity to weasel in and it was successful so I sort of think not everyone is going to have those opportunities of course but if they come up it's kind of our job we've got to take that burden on and put the effort into education and build that awareness yes now next question this one's from Tom and I was wondering about saving it to the end but we're nearly there this might be the end who knows it depends on your responses but and I'd like to say thank you to the barista and the house I just got a delivery I'm very distracted but yes thank you so Tom has asked you each to paint a picture given a magic wand in the passage of time how would you describe the ideal life of an RSE in 10 years time I think it's a fabulous question and I don't know if we can all answer it because that's that challenge right what does career progression actually look like but I will pass the magic wand to each of you so is anyone looking particularly fearless right now on the panel and I'll pass the one to you first otherwise I'll work my way around the screen Manadeep you've got a fabulous smile on which means you must be ready for the the answer sure can I do the Brazilian $2.00 I think the first thing that I think is that I don't think of an RSE as an individual functioning I think of RSE groups that allows for because RSEs to me should have should have broad range of expertise so the way I think of it is sort of a centralized team of RSEs and that sort of differentiates on seniority and experience and so on that have long term contracts and that are valued within whatever system that there are that have the flexibility should it suit them to switch between their RSE type track let's pretend this exists to an academic managerial type track or a HEAL type track so they can move in and out and possibly go out to the industry like one of the things that we sort of hit upon here is you RSEs are much more valued in industry rather than academia including the paychecks it's not comparable someone would want to stay in academic academic research because of something else that's possibly usually is the research component so yeah I would like to see teams at research organizations that collaborate with the departments that enable open and reproducible research values that we want so yeah that's how I see it fabulous now saranjit I'll pass the magic on to you now what's the gold standard for life in 10 years apart from the Maserati and the regular trips to Fiji yes so what I think would be to build the capacity where the RSEs or the RSE professionals can get absorbed into teams from one team to another so there is a cross team collaboration so say there is one team in Asia and one in Australia and the RSEs so that they can transfer the skills from one area to other and also learn from there and be back so that kind of when that kind of smooth movement is possible I would feel that is a golden time for the RSE profession so that they can bring back more skills and also transfer what they have learned on their own team and there is more of instead of being just concentrated in one part of the globe this becomes a more global community and a global movement which involves people from all parts of the of the globe excellent Asif the magic one is yours I wish that really does happen okay so my so-called magic one what I wish for would like to see in 10 years would be that coming from academia that academia to catch up with industry in terms of so-called RSE utopia so that utopia that we imagine for RSE and what would that utopia look like at least in my world easy to find because as I mentioned I've been struggling to get them industry grabs them so hopefully many of them would like to also stay in academia and contribute because they are well rewarded so that's one easy to find and I also like by then that the roles become clearly defined this idea of the definition and all that gets sorted out and third would be career progression trajectory be well defined so we have clear matrices metrics for evaluation trajectory all the way to higher levels so that be well defined and also have various avenues for recognition publication software and who knows some other ways that are not yet thought of for recognition even the smallest aspect what comes to mind is what Manu Dipo was saying earlier he comes and solves the problem in 10 minutes somebody has been struggling for maybe months or weeks how do you capture that kind of recognition so maybe people will come up with some ways to even have those kind of recognition recognize and really lastly for the community to be one and come together to solve complex problems collaboratively as a team science that's my vision of the RSE Utopia you're sitting the bar high that's for sure sounds like a great place to be and I guess Andy it's no surprise the magic one goes to you next I thought there are only three wishes and we've had our three wishes does that mean I'm off the hook so actually I have a slightly different take on this I wonder if a lot of what you're talking about can be encapsulated with research software engineers having positions which gave their own autonomy so some level of autonomy to decide where their contribution would be most valuable and be able to guide their own development something I I don't like about the notion that RSEs are just supporting rather than pushing the envelope is that then they need if they're supporting they need a line manager who tells them what to do and I feel like we would all be more productive if we had some level of autonomy so there you go you've got to have dreams Andy I would add my one in that once all of these things are in place as well for the fabulous RSEs out there that their outputs their software is well funded and has long term funding as well so not just them but their software that will take the stress off too now I don't think there are any questions extra questions from the floor that have come in through the chat and we've got six minutes left so I'm going to move to our wrap up which is the final opportunity for each of you as panellists to give us some advice on what we as a community we as RSEs or advocates of RSEs should be doing next to reach these goals so I'm going to, I'll give you a warning this time kind just kind of on the last time so I'm going to go, Serenjit, Andy Manadeep and Asif because that's the order on the screen for me Serenjit, what do you think we should be doing next to these goals? So first of all, I'm really happy that RSE Asia sorry, RSE Australia New Zealand reached out to RSE Asia when we are so young and gave us this chance to collaborate with them and organise this unconference just being a part of this process has taught me a lot and also made so many new connections for me and I can obviously take back to my community and promote it more there so at RSE Asia we look for such opportunities to collaborate and also look for support so if you are able to promote the work that we do at RSE Asia because we are completely volunteer run association that would be a big help for us as we develop in our initial days and a progress further when we have that kind of support and community involvement I think we would be able to convince the policy makers back in Asia to consider this as a more formal role and also improve the strategy that is present in the Asian context so yeah Andy what do we need to do next for you I guess I just want to emphasise we should find allies we should build links with different parts of the research sector that are in the same situation even if they are not research software engineers but they have similar problems with the system and if it is just one community trying to change the system it is probably not going to work if we can find colleagues across the spectrum of research who have similar needs I think that will help I agree with the things that have said but one thing I would like to add is as an RSE you might really feel undervalued especially with senior management in your organisation your skills are actually valued in the real world and change is coming eventually it will be here so don't panic eventually we will get there awesome and Asif right thanks my biggest take home from this meeting is the discovery of RSE so I am just thinking how many more they are waiting to discover RSE please reach out to all of them out there well I am not disappointed with what I have discovered and I think there are many more like me out there will be very pleased to learn about this movement and to really help take it to the next level and we are ready to do that so communicate reach out as much as you can awesome so that's it we have solved the problems of policy and strategy for RSEs in Australia Asia and possibly beyond we are going to do it through collaboration supporting others asking for help working together we are going to be aware that our problems aren't just ours and that maybe we can leverage that and work with others to help solve our problems we are going to maintain hope we will get there and we are going to keep talking about this because the more people that understand the problem and know that they are one of us the better and the closer we are going to get to solving this problem so a big virtual round of applause I don't know can we do that maybe some reactions pop some reactions in folks thank you so much to the panellists really have enjoyed this conversation I look forward to actually meeting some of you in person one day and otherwise I will see you online sometime and so that's the panel over you now have a break and