My experience note of RSE Asia Australia Unconference 2022

This is my experience note about RSE Asia Australia (RSEAA) Unconference 2022. RSEAA was held as an online event from September 14 to 16, 2023.

Kozo Nishida
Oct 18, 2024 Research Software Engineering, Community Building, Unconference, Experience Blog

What is the RSEAA Unconference?

An unconference is a conference which is driven by the participants who engage in active discussions with optionally having presentations too.

The RSEAA 2022 unconference had a mixed style of regular conference and unconference. The regular style part had three keynote and a panel discussion. Recordings of the keynotes and panel discussion are available on YouTube.

In addition, it should be noted that the summary report is published at DOI (figshare) below. (It’s great, so please take a look.)

Mosbergen, Rowland (2022): Research Software Engineer Asia Australia Unconference Summary Report. figshare. Online resource. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21201989.v2

Thoughts on the keynotes

RSEAA 2022 had three keynotes. I watched the Mars’s and Anne’s keynotes live. (I was unable to watch Jess’s keynote live.)

Here are my thoughts on Mars’s and Anne’s keynote.

Mars Lee

Mars is a technical illustrator at Quansight.

Mars has a slightly different career path for RSE, and she introduced it in the keynote. I think Mars’ talk was a great talk that helped improve inclusivity of the RSE community. You can check the slides in this GitHub repo.

Anne Steele

Anne is a community manager of the Turing Way.

Anne’s talk covered her career history, what she’s learned through her career and the projects she’s working on. Anne introduced the objectives of equality, diversity and inclusion in improving reproducibility and openness of research.

In Japan, where I live, there is no Community Manager for Open Science like Anne. So it was an exciting opportunity for me to know about this role.

About the “Unconference” part

The parts other than the keynote were held in an “Unconference” format. Here are the themes of the discussion that took place there.

Within the RSEAA 2022 Zoom Event, we were able to enter and leave rooms that were divided into different themes for the unconference.

  • Computational Reproducibility
  • Quantify RSE outputs
  • Benchmarking domain-specific research workflow solutions at an international level
  • Hosting research software
  • Bridging the gap between biologists and programmers
  • What exactly does the most senior RSE look like?
  • Questions to ask your supervisor at your RSE performance review
  • What would a secure RSE position look like?
  • Let’s discuss employment realities, as a student, as a grad, as a postgrad, as an ECR
  • RSE Silos
  • Software as first-class outputs
  • Justifying maintenance work
  • A Web Platform for RSEs
  • Actionable Items 1 - Community Building
  • Actionable Items 2 - Peer programming and collaboration

What are your thoughts on each of the above themes? Probably all of them are exactly what you(==RSE) want to discuss with someone. I was very impressed to learn that there are places (communities) in the world where people can discuss these themes.

“Impressions about the RSEAA accessibility” and “a call for non-English-speaking RSEs participation”

RSEAA 2022 had a great attention to accessibility. I am Japanese and I am not good at English. However, RSEAA 2022 had Zoom’s Live Transcription feature, so I had no trouble listening to English. Many Japanese can read English, but cannot listen or speak.

RSEAA 2022 was well prepared on accessibility and Liz Hare provided a high level accessibility report for the conference. If you’re avoiding joining the RSE community because you’re not good at English, don’t be afraid. The RSE community is a community that cares about inclusiveness. Please feel free to join to the RSE community!

Further information about RSE and my gratitude for RSEAA organizaers

If you are interested in the RSE community, please take a look at International RSE Survey 2022. It was released during this RSEAA 2022. I think that looking at the survey results will help us understand the current situation and think about the future.

Finally, I would like to thank all the organizers for running RSEAA 2022.

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