What’s happening at RSECon25?

There will be several sessions related to dRTP skills at RSECon25.

Gutenberg: A Training Platform for RSEs

On Tuesday 9th September 13:45-14:30, in Room OC0.03, there will be a walkthrough of Gutenberg, an interactive training platform developed by RSEs for delivering training in software engineering and research computing related topics to researchers, students and other RSEs.

This walkthrough will introduce the core components of the system and demonstrate how it can support material authors, learners and instructors.

1. Authors develop course content purely in Markdown, with the addition of some custom callouts, to be stored in one or more separate Git repositories, allowing easy version control and collaboration. The platform renders this material into navigable courses with embedded challenges, code blocks, comment threads, and other multimedia content.

2. Learners can browse available courses, enroll in them, and track their progress. Challenges let learners test their understanding, while embedded comment threads provide space for discussion and clarification both amongst peers and with instructors.

3. Instructors and admins have access to an extended interface where they can design and schedule events, monitor learner progress, see feedback, and respond to and resolve questions and comments.

This walkthrough will also include how to set up and deploy your own Gutenberg instance. With configuration options and a containerized setup, it’s easy to run a local or hosted version for your own or shared training materials, whether you’re working individually or as part of a team.

DRIFT

Project management beyond the process: How do RSE team leads learn what the role requires?

On Tuesday 9th September 14:30 - 14:45, in Room OC0.03, Neil Chue Hong and Charaka Palansuriya will give a talk titled ‘Project management beyond the process: How do RSE team leads learn what the role requires?’.

The project management curriculum document is available for review on zenodo - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17035678

Abstract: Research today cannot take place without Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI). But how are the teams that develop the research software which underpins DRI managed, and how do we ensure that those leading the teams have the right skills to make them effective and inclusive leaders?

There is a wealth of technical training material targeted at researchers, Research Software Engineers and other Research Technical Professionals (RTPs). Much of this material is open and freely accessible, and institutional RSE groups now play a large role in upskilling practitioners, as disseminated at RSECon. At the same time, through the UNIVERSE-HPC project, we are aware that this availability of training material doesn’t directly translate into a more skilled and capable workforce.

A particular gap that has been identified is the lack of training materials aimed at teams developing research software, including helping those new to managing or leading diverse teams. There are a large number of resources on software project management, and general team management, but few which take into account the particular challenges of working in the research environment.

This talk will present work that DRIFT (a follow-up to UNIVERSE-HPC) has done to identify the existing resources, approaches and audiences, and understand what adaptations might be required to be able to use existing materials in a research software engineering context. Starting with the goal of teaching project management skills as they can be applied to software development in research environments, we would like to get feedback from participants on a curriculum, in particular to identify any “hidden” objectives, such as enabling inclusive leadership and research integrity. This will contribute to an openly licensed course that will be piloted in 2026, focusing on the challenges of working with teams with different experience levels, promoting effective communication and knowledge transfer, and creating positive working environments.

Poster

There will also be a DRIFT poster and a lightning talk on this poster will be given on Tuesday 9th September 15:09 - 15:11 in OC1.05.

Training Day

A Training Community Day will be held as a Satellite Event to RSECon on Friday 12th September, in OC1.09. This event will bring together the community of RSEs and digital research professionals (dRTPs) interested in teaching computational skills. The programme will include the launch of the Teaching and Training SIG as well as other presentations and discussions relevant to the community.

For details see https://rsecon25.society-rse.org/training-community-day/