Building research software communities
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Cohen, Jeremy
Even where institutions have a central research software team, there is still scope for software development work to be undertaken by researchers/developers in individual research groups. Research software communities are a great way to support a "grass roots" base of researchers and developers building software, helping them enhance their skills, network with peers and build new collaborations. In this talk I'll provide my perspective on the benefits of research software communities and look at examples of building a UK-based local, institutional community and a wider regional community. Through these examples, I'll look at challenges faced in starting and sustaining such communities and highlight some of the key benefits they can offer.
 I am Jeremy Cohen. I'm based at Imperial College London. I'm one of the UK EPSRC funded RSE Fellows, so that's one of the UK funding bodies that's funded now, a group of research, software engineering fellows over two cohorts. So I started my fellowship last year and one of the focuses of the work that I'm doing is on communities. There's also a couple of other areas that I'm looking at that are more focused on particular research topics that I'm looking into, but I'm going to be talking today a little bit about some of the work that I've been doing to build in particular two communities, but also some of the background to that and some of the lessons that have come out of the work in trying to put these communities together and try and get people engaged. So I'm going to start with a statement. Some of you may agree with me, some of you may not, but I hope by the end of the talk you will be convinced that research software communities are important. Why are they important? Well, because many people may have found that if you're a research developer, life as a research developer can be somewhat lonely and there are some reasons for that, but in particular research developers may be working in a research team, but they may equally be working alone and in fact many developers do spend a lot of their time working alone if they're working in a domain where there are not many people coding. It's not uncommon to be the only developer within a research group, but equally there are now a lot of RSE teams that are appearing. So some research developers do find that they have a slightly lonely existence, but for many others now with RSE teams emerging that's starting to change. Despite this growth of RSE teams, there will still always be in my opinion developers in research groups and for those developers communities can really help to support this kind of grassroots space of people who are working in a research team. What can communities do to help with that? Well, in particular they can help provide interaction with other developers because even if you work with one or two other developers it's always great to talk to other people who code to learn about the tools that they're using, the libraries that they're using and so on to get technical advice and assistance, or indeed to give technical advice and assistance to other people who are struggling with particular problems. And also if you talk to people in different domains it's a great way to see a different perspective on how to tackle problems. It's also a really good way a community to attract newcomers to a field. So if you've got people who are starting to think about building software and research or have been building software and research and are kind of a little bit lost, a community is a great way to get them engaged. There are some different types of community. There's obviously local communities, there's regional communities which I'll say a little bit about shortly, and then there's the kind of national or even international communities that we heard Alice talking about in her talk a short while ago with the UK RSE community and the German community research software engineers. So I'm going to look a little bit now about some of the background of building some different types of communities, but bear in mind that my focus here is really on the kind of local and regional communities. So if you want to look at building a community, what do you need to do? You need to determine some structure for that community. What is that community actually going to do? And what are its aims? What is the primary purpose, which may kind of seem obvious in terms of getting together a group of research developers or research software developers, but actually you perhaps need something a little bit more than that. What are you actually trying to do for those people? How are you trying to particularly help them? What are you going to offer to them? Is it just going to be somewhere where people get together and chat or is there something more than that? And do you need funding or do you have funding? That's actually a really big issue because actually it's really easy to get some people to come together and maybe have a chat and have a coffee or whatever, but actually really funding is very, very important in trying to make these things happen and make real opportunities available to people. So I'm going to look a little bit about the sort of community structure. I'm going to go through each of those issues now and look at some of the points. There are kind of two, I suppose, main structures of communities that you might look towards. One is the kind of virtual community structure. So you've got an online focus. It's great if you have people who are widely geographically distributed. They can interact through all of these kind of means that we're probably all very familiar with. Or you can have a physical community where the focus is more on kind of face-to-face meetings and workshops and so on. And I'm going to look more at the second aspect here and the kind of examples that I'm giving are very much more based on the second aspect. I mentioned about the primary purpose. Is it something that's social? Is it more focused on skills development, on training, or on developing collaborations, kind of getting people together to build other research collaborations that are kind of a function of what the community is doing? What's your community going to offer? Is it just going to be technical seminars? Are you going to run social events? So there's clearly sort of combinations of different things that could fit. Are you going to run training workshops? Or are there other activities that you've really got in mind? And I suppose these are all things that can develop as your community develops. But it's also really important, in my opinion, to have more of a kind of idea at the start about where you want to go with these things because that will really shape how the community can develop. And I mentioned briefly this point of funding before. And the question of do you have funding? Is it required? But actually, really the basics of booking rooms and offering catering and so on, if you're looking at communities that are going to bring together quite large numbers of people, the amounts can add up quite quickly. And that's actually really quite important. The next question is, do you know who your target audience are? Who are you actually trying to reach out to to get engaged in this community? How are you going to reach out to them? Do you know what they're actually looking for? And how are you going to get them engaged with the community? Because it's quite often the case that people express an interest in being part of a community. They might be interested in research, software engineering, they might say they're interested to come to events or whatever. But actually, how you're going to engage with your community to try and make it grow is really quite a difficult challenge. You need to develop some sort of presence for your community. And I mean, there's all the obvious things around having web pages, mailing this social media, and also having some sort of initial event schedule. But once you've got all these things in place, then there's the real challenge, which is that you need to announce your community, you need to promote it, you need to publicise it. And there are many ways to do this, but it's not always straightforward to get people really engaged and get people actively involved in the community. So it's really important to look for as many opportunities as possible to get the message out there to people. And also to think really importantly about long term sustainability, because sometimes it's really easy to get things started. And then it can all kind of just drift off and you can lose momentum very easily. So that's a really important point in terms of the sustainability. So one thing that I think is a particularly important lesson that I've certainly observed is that if you want to maintain attendance at your events, you need to keep growing your community. So it's not sufficient to say, my community has 100 members. So every time I run an event, I'm going to expect to get 30 or 40 people turning up. Certainly from my experience, it doesn't necessarily work like that. Because when you've got a very broad community like a research software community, people come for different reasons, they have interest in different areas. And if you have one event that gets a certain number of people, the next event may have a different focus, you're going to lose some people who are not interested from that point of view. You're also going to lose some people who have come to see what the event is like and have decided that they want to remain on the mailing list or they want to remain part of the community from that perspective, but they're not going to come to every event. So you really need to keep growing the number of members in your community just to keep to stand still in terms of your attendance at events. It's certainly something that I have observed. It sounds obvious, but keep organizing events and don't underestimate the amount of time that it takes. Because again, you know, sometimes it's really, it's great when you start off, you can be really enthusiastic, you can set up your events, you can run them, and it's all really exciting to start off with. But actually then sometimes organizing events can become something which is somewhat more mundane every time you've got to go through the same process. But actually it's really important to keep up with that and not to let things kind of drift off. Because if you do that, the people who are part of your community will probably also drift off. You need to kind of keep people engaged. And also be realistic about the time that this takes, because I said it takes a long time, but actually the lead time for events is really, is something that you really need to think about. Because if you want to get speakers in, obviously people are busy, people have busy diaries, and you therefore need to really think quite a long way ahead. So you need to be thinking, it may be one, two, three events ahead to keep up a schedule that's going to get people engaged and get people involved. Just a little bit about metrics and how you kind of can judge the success of your community. So mailing list members is at one level actually a really good way of knowing how many members you've got, because it's very easy to look and see how many people are registered on the mailing list. But it's also not a great measure of engagement, because as I mentioned before, people will often sign up, they will come along to an event, and they might then stay on the mailing list, but not actually come to any more events. And again, from experience, people very rarely leave the mailing list. They're often quite interested to see what comes through, but they're not going to be that engaged to turn up. So it's a great way of saying how many people have shown an interest in your community, but it's really not a good way of knowing how many people are going to turn up and get involved with the community actively. Event attendance gives you, I guess, a more accurate idea of engagement, but it's very difficult to know whether that's because of the topic that the event is about, or whether it's more generally community related. Some people will come to an event because they want to be part of the community. They want to network with people, they want to kind of be involved in that perspective. But there are others who come purely because they want to see the technical materials being presented, and they're not so interested in the community as such. And so that's again a kind of fairly difficult measure, but it's something which can give you an idea. And again, I guess, particularly with event attendance, you can get a really strong idea if you do surveys after events of kind of why people are there and what they're interested in. So that might be something you can add on to give you a better idea, but it's still not a perfect measure. The other possible thing to look at is social media activity. So if you've got a Twitter account and you've got people following you, retweeting, you've got a blog, whatever, this can be a great way to get some idea of engagement. Again, it's very difficult to know how many of those people are actually going to actively get involved beyond the social media aspect. But I think together these things can give you some fairly strong measure of how much people are willing to get engaged with your community and be part of your community. And so while it's really difficult to have just one particular measure, it is possible to get an idea of how much people are interested in the community and how much it's worth you putting in the time to actually try and grow that community and build it. So in the second part of the talk, I'm going to now look at a couple of case studies. So I'm going to look at two communities that I've personally been involved in building. One is the local community at Imperial College. And that's one of their local, that's based just for the departments at Imperial College. And the other one that I'll then look at is the regional community for London and the southeast of England that I've also been involved in setting up. So in terms of our local community at Imperial College, this was started back in 2015. And this really started out as a result of a lot of the work that I do is multidisciplinary. So I spend a lot of my time, I have a computer science background, so I work in the department of computing. And I spend a lot of my time talking to scientists and researchers in other domains. And it's very clear that going around, there are people everywhere writing code. And this is partly as a result of Imperial College being a science and technology and medicine-focused institution. But actually, it's probably the case in these days in many, if not all, institutions that there are people everywhere writing code. And so, you know, it's very, very clear that these people exist, but there was no way for them to kind of come together around the topic of building research software. The opportunities for them to come together with other people was much more focused around the research topics and the research that they were doing. So the idea was really to start this community and get people together to talk about the software side. So as I said, there are many researchers and developers at Imperial. And this was really, the idea of this was to bring together people across the faculties and departments of Imperial. So we started off with a mailing list. As I said before, that's not a great way of giving you a sort of an absolute number of people that are interested, but it is a good way of getting people to show an interest to start with and to be able to then reach those people when you have events. We now have over 170 people registered. But actually, I don't actually have a graph of the registration, but actually, that is something which actually ramped up very, very quickly from the start. So we went from nobody to, I think we started off in late 2015. And within the first two months, we'd gone from zero to kind of around about 120 people registered. So I think that's quite a rapid rate. And the challenge then has been actually trying to build beyond that. So as I say, we're now up to around 170 people. We started off with kind of tech talks monthly. So this was kind of sort of lunchtime or late afternoon events where we did a kind of one or two talks of around 25, 30 minutes. And then we had drinks and snacks afterwards as an opportunity for people to chat and meet other people in the community. But we've also subsequently explored some other event formats and tried to look at some different approaches to getting people involved because clearly there are people who want different things out of the community. So what are the challenges that we've faced? One of them, a really major challenge is just reaching potential members because you might think that if you're in an institution, it's quite easy to go and find people around that institution. And the reality, I think that we've found is that's not necessarily always the case. It's quite easy to get emails sent out to different departments and different lists for researchers or whatever. But these don't always reach everybody. And often there are people who are there who are really not getting the information but who are keen to get involved in this kind of thing. And that's something that I think is really important but also really difficult. Also, we've tried to find a mix of general and domain specific events. So as I mentioned before, when you have an event, it's very difficult to know whether people are coming because they're interested in the topic or because they're interested in the community. So we've tried to do events that cross the kind of two areas. So ones are the general for people who just want to learn generally about stuff that's going on in the research software field. It might be something about a library that's kind of general software library that people want to use. Or it might be some general talk about the latest developments in a particular area. And then we've also focused more on domain specific events. So running an event for a particular department, for example. So as an example, recently we had an event for the physics department where we focused on getting physics researchers together to talk about things that are of interest to them. But we also invited people from the wider community to come along. And actually several people did to kind of learn more about that area and what people are doing in that area. Timing of events has been quite a big challenge because of course there are people who have different commitments. Some people are not able to come during the middle of the day. Some people are not able to come kind of later in the day. And what we've tried to do is vary the timing of our events and have some that are kind of like 5-630 or 4-30-6 and then have some that kind of cross lunchtime sort of 12-130 or something like that. And I think the simple answer is that no event is perfect timing for everybody, but actually by varying the timing we've had some success in getting different groups of people to come to different events. The other thing which is quite difficult I think is getting a number of people to attend. And you know it's very easy to have the mailing list and send emails out, but that doesn't always attract a large number of people. And that's something that we're still trying to understand kind of how to structure the events and how to structure the topics to try and get more people to attend. In general the attendance numbers at the events have been somewhere between kind of 10 and 40 which is a very wide range and it really depends on kind of what the topic is and when it is and so on. But for general kind of lunchtime talks and whatever it tends to be more in the range of 15 to 20 which I guess is reasonable for a kind of local community but we would like to be able to grow that if possible. So another thing to I think to point out here is that the naming of your events and how you kind of picture events in community matters. So one of the things that we that we have noticed is that in fact that's been raised I think by other people that I've spoken to is that how you name your event is really quite important in what it means to people and how that brings people in. And I don't think that there's any kind of straightforward answer to say how to do that but it clearly is something you need to think about how the naming of your event affects kind of how people view it and whether they think it's for them. Because some people will be put off by a name and think that isn't an event for me, it's not an area I'm interested in and you know if you can make your event if you can name your event in a way that makes it sound more general or more focused to a particular area that you're trying to focus on that can be really important. So I'm just going to now finish off with a second case study which is looking at this regional community research software London. So this is a community that is something that I've been setting up as part of my fellowship work and it's intending to bring together people from institutions across London and southeast of the UK. So that's a very very large area. There's a lot of institutions in that region and we started off in in autumn 2018 so not quite a year ago and what we wanted to do was to bring together people from across these institutions to give opportunities for people from larger institutions to meet people at different institutions but also to support smaller institutions who are unable to develop their own local community. And so what I did initially was go out and talk to a lot of people at different institutions and it was very clear that for smaller institutions there was a real desire to get involved with these kind of things and to get engaged but not an opportunity to do so and it was really interesting to find people who are RSEs who are based at sort of domain specific institutions that are focusing on a particular thing who maybe there are five, ten RSEs there and they're really kind of cut off from the rest of the RSE community. And so that was something that we really really wanted to focus on but we also wanted to have an opportunity for people more generally at locations where there are already communities to get involved and to try and kind of bring these groups together. So we started off in October 2018 as I say we had a launch event where we got 50 people along so that was kind of from a standing start within about sort of three weeks and we got a lot of interest from people. There were 12 institutions represented at that event and we then went on to try and to organize this Forest London Southeast event in February of this year and that was the kind of first of what we intend to be an annual workshop for this community and so that was a one-day event. We had over 100 people registered over 20 institutions represented so this shows the kind of growth over a pretty short period of time of people really getting engaged and the challenge here is very much as I mentioned before how do you not lose that momentum and how do you keep this going and that's something that I'm kind of I think perhaps going to struggle with a bit because it is difficult to know once you get to that sort of level how to to grow things further. So one of the particular challenges with this community is that the the members are widely distributed geographically. So there are some people who are close together in central London there are several institutions but then there are a wide range of institutions that are outside of London and people are in general probably within about an hour's traveling distance of central London at all of these institutions but it's not practical for people to come to a sort of one hour lunchtime event or whatever unless it's something that they're really interested to go and hear a talk on. So that's a really big challenge how do we kind of cross those those sort of those different groups and so these kind of one-day events are a good way of getting people to come along who are more widely distributed but there's also need to do stuff that I think that's local as well to try and keep the momentum up. Again how do you based on this idea of how do you get people to if people are coming from a long distance they probably won't come if the event is very short because it's not worth their while to make the trip but equally shorter events are good because people who are kind of located in a similar area are more inclined to pop out of the office for 45 minutes or an hour to come and hear a talk and to network with some people who they might be able to collaborate with or whatever. And there's also really quite a big set of varying requirements of the members of this community because again being a community that covers so many different institutions this is a real challenge. So I hope that gives you a kind of a bit of an idea about the different issues that come up when you're building a community and some ideas of different types of communities and I guess what I'm going to finish off with is kind of the biggest lesson that I probably learned after this process which is to say that it's hard work and it really is hard work it can it can seem easy to start with because you can get momentum up quite quickly but then it can get very challenging so don't give up and it can be a very rewarding and valuable way to support research developers to build a community where you can bring people together and have an opportunity to inspire people to get more involved in in research software and research software engineering. So thank you very much indeed and if we have any questions. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about the event in the wider area that you did for the day? Okay so I'll just repeat the question for the for the video. So the question was can I talk about the event that we did that was the day long event and say a bit more about what we did for that event. So the basically the focus was on talks and we had different we had different lengths of talks we had 15 minute talks and then we had five minute lightning talks and we got people to make submissions in advance so we had an abstract submission process in advance. Every every talk was reviewed every submission was reviewed by three people. It was intentionally a fairly sort of lightweight process because we wanted people to to kind of feel that that it was a community opportunity to kind of get together and present but equally we wanted people to get some feedback on on what they submitted and kind of how that was viewed by the people who were reviewing. So there was this basically the whole day was a series of we had a keynote to start with and then we had several sessions of kind of 15 minute talks and then five minute lightning talks. I think we did it as one or two 15 minute talks and then a sort of a couple of lightning talks which worked quite well and then we had a poster session as well and we had quite a bit of time for people to kind of talk and you know we had lunch and coffee breaks and whatever for people to kind of try and meet other people and talk to people around the community. So yeah it was kind of a fairly traditional workshop in that sense but the talks were much more focused on I guess sort of general research software engineering topics and so while they were often domain specific they were pitched in the way that was kind of easy for people to get in to get involved with. Sorry, maybe you can have a short talk. Yeah, so you mentioned funding so how was it how were these communities funded? The second question is you mentioned that you need to keep like pace to keep the people like coming so what would you say what's the main measure you can take to keep people being interested to keep the community. Okay, so right so the first question was on funding and how the funding was provided to support these events so some of the funding has come through through my fellowship because like this was one of the activities that I proposed to do so that's EPSRC UK EPSRC funding but also we've had contributions of kind of small amounts of funding from different people so we have support with the one-day event from the UK RSE network and we've also had support from kind of other research groups who have wanted to sort of help out by running events for themselves. The other question that you asked was on remind me right most important thing to keep them momentum and keep the community alive and I think the answer to that is probably just to keep organizing stuff keep doing things because if you leave a long gap people just lose interest so it's really to have a kind of a an active schedule and keep things going and keep people engaged and yeah the best way to do that is to invite them to come to things and you know get them to talk to people and so on so yeah.
 I am Jeremy Cohen. I'm based at Imperial College London. I'm one of the UK EPSRC funded  RSE Fellows, so that's one of the UK funding bodies that's funded now, a group of research,  software engineering fellows over two cohorts. So I started my fellowship last year and one of the  focuses of the work that I'm doing is on communities. There's also a couple of other areas that I'm  looking at that are more focused on particular research topics that I'm looking into, but I'm  going to be talking today a little bit about some of the work that I've been doing to build  in particular two communities, but also some of the background to that and some of the lessons  that have come out of the work in trying to put these communities together and try and get people  engaged. So I'm going to start with a statement. Some of you may agree with me, some of you may not,  but I hope by the end of the talk you will be convinced that research software communities  are important. Why are they important? Well, because many people may have found that if you're a  research developer, life as a research developer can be somewhat lonely and there are some reasons  for that, but in particular research developers may be working in a research team, but they may  equally be working alone and in fact many developers do spend a lot of their time working alone if  they're working in a domain where there are not many people coding. It's not uncommon to be the  only developer within a research group, but equally there are now a lot of RSE teams that are  appearing. So some research developers do find that they have a slightly lonely existence, but for  many others now with RSE teams emerging that's starting to change. Despite this growth of RSE  teams, there will still always be in my opinion developers in research groups and for those  developers communities can really help to support this kind of grassroots space of people who are  working in a research team. What can communities do to help with that? Well, in particular they can  help provide interaction with other developers because even if you work with one or two other  developers it's always great to talk to other people who code to learn about the tools that  they're using, the libraries that they're using and so on to get technical advice and assistance,  or indeed to give technical advice and assistance to other people who are struggling with particular  problems. And also if you talk to people in different domains it's a great way to see a different  perspective on how to tackle problems. It's also a really good way a community to attract newcomers  to a field. So if you've got people who are starting to think about building software and  research or have been building software and research and are kind of a little bit lost,  a community is a great way to get them engaged. There are some different types of community.  There's obviously local communities, there's regional communities which I'll say a little  bit about shortly, and then there's the kind of national or even international communities that  we heard Alice talking about in her talk a short while ago with the UK RSE community and the  German community research software engineers. So I'm going to look a little bit now about some  of the background of building some different types of communities, but bear in mind that my focus  here is really on the kind of local and regional communities. So if you want to look at building  a community, what do you need to do? You need to determine some structure for that community.  What is that community actually going to do? And what are its aims? What is the primary purpose,  which may kind of seem obvious in terms of getting together a group of research developers or  research software developers, but actually you perhaps need something a little bit more than  that. What are you actually trying to do for those people? How are you trying to particularly help  them? What are you going to offer to them? Is it just going to be somewhere where people get  together and chat or is there something more than that? And do you need funding or do you have  funding? That's actually a really big issue because actually it's really easy to get some  people to come together and maybe have a chat and have a coffee or whatever, but actually  really funding is very, very important in trying to make these things happen and make real opportunities  available to people. So I'm going to look a little bit about the sort of community structure. I'm  going to go through each of those issues now and look at some of the points. There are kind of two,  I suppose, main structures of communities that you might look towards. One is the kind of virtual  community structure. So you've got an online focus. It's great if you have people who are  widely geographically distributed. They can interact through all of these kind of means that  we're probably all very familiar with. Or you can have a physical community where the focus is more  on kind of face-to-face meetings and workshops and so on. And I'm going to look more at the second  aspect here and the kind of examples that I'm giving are very much more based on the second  aspect. I mentioned about the primary purpose. Is it something that's social? Is it more focused  on skills development, on training, or on developing collaborations, kind of getting people  together to build other research collaborations that are kind of a function of what the community  is doing? What's your community going to offer? Is it just going to be technical seminars?  Are you going to run social events? So there's clearly sort of combinations of different things  that could fit. Are you going to run training workshops? Or are there other activities that  you've really got in mind? And I suppose these are all things that can develop as your community  develops. But it's also really important, in my opinion, to have more of a kind of idea at the  start about where you want to go with these things because that will really shape how the community  can develop. And I mentioned briefly this point of funding before. And the question of do you have  funding? Is it required? But actually, really the basics of booking rooms and offering catering  and so on, if you're looking at communities that are going to bring together quite large  numbers of people, the amounts can add up quite quickly. And that's actually really quite important.  The next question is, do you know who your target audience are? Who are you actually trying to reach  out to to get engaged in this community? How are you going to reach out to them? Do you know what  they're actually looking for? And how are you going to get them engaged with the community? Because  it's quite often the case that people express an interest in being part of a community. They might  be interested in research, software engineering, they might say they're interested to come to events  or whatever. But actually, how you're going to engage with your community to try and make it grow  is really quite a difficult challenge. You need to develop some sort of presence for your community.  And I mean, there's all the obvious things around having web pages, mailing this social media,  and also having some sort of initial event schedule. But once you've got all these things in place,  then there's the real challenge, which is that you need to announce your community, you need to  promote it, you need to publicise it. And there are many ways to do this, but it's not always  straightforward to get people really engaged and get people actively involved in the community.  So it's really important to look for as many opportunities as possible to get the message  out there to people. And also to think really importantly about long term sustainability,  because sometimes it's really easy to get things started. And then it can all kind of just drift  off and you can lose momentum very easily. So that's a really important point in terms of the  sustainability. So one thing that I think is a particularly important lesson that I've certainly  observed is that if you want to maintain attendance at your events, you need to keep growing your  community. So it's not sufficient to say, my community has 100 members. So every time I run  an event, I'm going to expect to get 30 or 40 people turning up. Certainly from my experience,  it doesn't necessarily work like that. Because when you've got a very broad community like a  research software community, people come for different reasons, they have interest in different  areas. And if you have one event that gets a certain number of people, the next event may  have a different focus, you're going to lose some people who are not interested from that point of  view. You're also going to lose some people who have come to see what the event is like and have  decided that they want to remain on the mailing list or they want to remain part of the community  from that perspective, but they're not going to come to every event. So you really need to keep  growing the number of members in your community just to keep to stand still in terms of your  attendance at events. It's certainly something that I have observed. It sounds obvious, but  keep organizing events and don't underestimate the amount of time that it takes. Because again,  you know, sometimes it's really, it's great when you start off, you can be really enthusiastic,  you can set up your events, you can run them, and it's all really exciting to start off with. But  actually then sometimes organizing events can become something which is somewhat more mundane every  time you've got to go through the same process. But actually it's really important to keep up with  that and not to let things kind of drift off. Because if you do that, the people who are part  of your community will probably also drift off. You need to kind of keep people engaged. And  also be realistic about the time that this takes, because I said it takes a long time, but actually  the lead time for events is really, is something that you really need to think about. Because if  you want to get speakers in, obviously people are busy, people have busy diaries, and you therefore  need to really think quite a long way ahead. So you need to be thinking, it may be one, two,  three events ahead to keep up a schedule that's going to get people engaged and get people involved.  Just a little bit about metrics and how you kind of can judge the success of your community. So  mailing list members is at one level actually a really good way of knowing how many members  you've got, because it's very easy to look and see how many people are registered on the mailing  list. But it's also not a great measure of engagement, because as I mentioned before,  people will often sign up, they will come along to an event, and they might then stay on the mailing  list, but not actually come to any more events. And again, from experience, people very rarely  leave the mailing list. They're often quite interested to see what comes through, but they're  not going to be that engaged to turn up. So it's a great way of saying how many people have shown  an interest in your community, but it's really not a good way of knowing how many people are  going to turn up and get involved with the community actively. Event attendance gives you,  I guess, a more accurate idea of engagement, but it's very difficult to know whether that's because  of the topic that the event is about, or whether it's more generally community related. Some people  will come to an event because they want to be part of the community. They want to network with people,  they want to kind of be involved in that perspective. But there are others who come purely  because they want to see the technical materials being presented, and they're not so interested  in the community as such. And so that's again a kind of fairly difficult measure, but it's something  which can give you an idea. And again, I guess, particularly with event attendance, you can get  a really strong idea if you do surveys after events of kind of why people are there and what  they're interested in. So that might be something you can add on to give you a better idea, but it's  still not a perfect measure. The other possible thing to look at is social media activity. So if  you've got a Twitter account and you've got people following you, retweeting, you've got a blog,  whatever, this can be a great way to get some idea of engagement. Again, it's very difficult to know  how many of those people are actually going to actively get involved beyond the social media  aspect. But I think together these things can give you some fairly strong measure of how much people  are willing to get engaged with your community and be part of your community. And so while it's  really difficult to have just one particular measure, it is possible to get an idea of how  much people are interested in the community and how much it's worth you putting in the time to  actually try and grow that community and build it. So in the second part of the talk, I'm going to  now look at a couple of case studies. So I'm going to look at two communities that I've personally  been involved in building. One is the local community at Imperial College. And that's one of  their local, that's based just for the departments at Imperial College. And the other one that I'll  then look at is the regional community for London and the southeast of England that I've also been  involved in setting up. So in terms of our local community at Imperial College, this was started  back in 2015. And this really started out as a result of a lot of the work that I do is multidisciplinary.  So I spend a lot of my time, I have a computer science background, so I work in the department  of computing. And I spend a lot of my time talking to scientists and researchers in other domains.  And it's very clear that going around, there are people everywhere writing code. And this is  partly as a result of Imperial College being a science and technology and medicine-focused  institution. But actually, it's probably the case in these days in many, if not all, institutions  that there are people everywhere writing code. And so, you know, it's very, very clear that these  people exist, but there was no way for them to kind of come together around the topic of building  research software. The opportunities for them to come together with other people was much more  focused around the research topics and the research that they were doing. So the idea was really to  start this community and get people together to talk about the software side. So as I said,  there are many researchers and developers at Imperial. And this was really, the idea of this  was to bring together people across the faculties and departments of Imperial. So we started off  with a mailing list. As I said before, that's not a great way of giving you a sort of an absolute  number of people that are interested, but it is a good way of getting people to show an interest  to start with and to be able to then reach those people when you have events. We now have over  170 people registered. But actually, I don't actually have a graph of the registration, but  actually, that is something which actually ramped up very, very quickly from the start. So we went  from nobody to, I think we started off in late 2015. And within the first two months, we'd gone  from zero to kind of around about 120 people registered. So I think that's quite a rapid  rate. And the challenge then has been actually trying to build beyond that. So as I say, we're  now up to around 170 people. We started off with kind of tech talks monthly. So this was kind of  sort of lunchtime or late afternoon events where we did a kind of one or two talks of around 25,  30 minutes. And then we had drinks and snacks afterwards as an opportunity for people to chat  and meet other people in the community. But we've also subsequently explored some other event  formats and tried to look at some different approaches to getting people involved because  clearly there are people who want different things out of the community. So what are the  challenges that we've faced? One of them, a really major challenge is just reaching potential members  because you might think that if you're in an institution, it's quite easy to go and find  people around that institution. And the reality, I think that we've found is that's not necessarily  always the case. It's quite easy to get emails sent out to different departments and different  lists for researchers or whatever. But these don't always reach everybody. And often there are people  who are there who are really not getting the information but who are keen to get involved  in this kind of thing. And that's something that I think is really important but also really difficult.  Also, we've tried to find a mix of general and domain specific events. So as I mentioned before,  when you have an event, it's very difficult to know whether people are coming because they're  interested in the topic or because they're interested in the community. So we've tried to do  events that cross the kind of two areas. So ones are the general for people who just want to learn  generally about stuff that's going on in the research software field. It might be something  about a library that's kind of general software library that people want to use. Or it might be  some general talk about the latest developments in a particular area. And then we've also focused  more on domain specific events. So running an event for a particular department, for example.  So as an example, recently we had an event for the physics department where we focused on getting  physics researchers together to talk about things that are of interest to them. But we also  invited people from the wider community to come along. And actually several people did to kind of  learn more about that area and what people are doing in that area. Timing of events has been  quite a big challenge because of course there are people who have different commitments. Some people  are not able to come during the middle of the day. Some people are not able to come kind of later in  the day. And what we've tried to do is vary the timing of our events and have some that are kind  of like 5-630 or 4-30-6 and then have some that kind of cross lunchtime sort of 12-130 or something  like that. And I think the simple answer is that no event is perfect timing for everybody, but  actually by varying the timing we've had some success in getting different groups of people to  come to different events. The other thing which is quite difficult I think is getting a number of  people to attend. And you know it's very easy to have the mailing list and send emails out,  but that doesn't always attract a large number of people. And that's something that we're still  trying to understand kind of how to structure the events and how to structure the topics to try and  get more people to attend. In general the attendance numbers at the events have been  somewhere between kind of 10 and 40 which is a very wide range and it really depends on kind of  what the topic is and when it is and so on. But for general kind of lunchtime talks and whatever  it tends to be more in the range of 15 to 20 which I guess is reasonable for a kind of local community  but we would like to be able to grow that if possible. So another thing to I think to point  out here is that the naming of your events and how you kind of picture events in community matters.  So one of the things that we that we have noticed is that in fact that's been raised I think by  other people that I've spoken to is that how you name your event is really quite important in what  it means to people and how that brings people in. And I don't think that there's any kind of  straightforward answer to say how to do that but it clearly is something you need to think about how  the naming of your event affects kind of how people view it and whether they think it's for them.  Because some people will be put off by a name and think that isn't an event for me, it's not an area  I'm interested in and you know if you can make your event if you can name your event in a way that  makes it sound more general or more focused to a particular area that you're trying to focus on  that can be really important. So I'm just going to now finish off with a second case study which  is looking at this regional community research software London. So this is a community that  is something that I've been setting up as part of my fellowship work and it's  intending to bring together people from institutions across London and southeast of the UK. So  that's a very very large area. There's a lot of institutions in that region and we started off in  in autumn 2018 so not quite a year ago and what we wanted to do was to bring together people  from across these institutions to give opportunities for people from larger institutions to meet  people at different institutions but also to support smaller institutions who are unable to  develop their own local community. And so what I did initially was go out and talk to a lot of  people at different institutions and it was very clear that for smaller institutions there was a  real desire to get involved with these kind of things and to get engaged but not an opportunity  to do so and it was really interesting to find people who are RSEs who are based at sort of  domain specific institutions that are focusing on a particular thing who maybe there are five,  ten RSEs there and they're really kind of cut off from the rest of the RSE community.  And so that was something that we really really wanted to focus on but we also wanted to have  an opportunity for people more generally at locations where there are already communities  to get involved and to try and kind of bring these groups together. So we started off in  October 2018 as I say we had a launch event where we got 50 people along so that was kind of from a  standing start within about sort of three weeks and we got a lot of interest from people.  There were 12 institutions represented at that event and we then went on to try and to organize  this Forest London Southeast event in February of this year and that was the kind of first of what  we intend to be an annual workshop for this community and so that was a one-day event. We had over  100 people registered over 20 institutions represented so this shows the kind of growth over  a pretty short period of time of people really getting engaged and the challenge here is very  much as I mentioned before how do you not lose that momentum and how do you keep this going and  that's something that I'm kind of I think perhaps going to struggle with a bit because it is difficult  to know once you get to that sort of level how to to grow things further. So one of the particular  challenges with this community is that the the members are widely distributed geographically. So  there are some people who are close together in central London there are several institutions  but then there are a wide range of institutions that are outside of London and people are in general  probably within about an hour's traveling distance of central London at all of these institutions  but it's not practical for people to come to a sort of one hour lunchtime event or whatever  unless it's something that they're really interested to go and hear a talk on. So that's a really big  challenge how do we kind of cross those those sort of those different groups and so these kind of  one-day events are a good way of getting people to come along who are more widely distributed  but there's also need to do stuff that I think that's local as well to try and keep the momentum up.  Again how do you based on this idea of how do you get people to if people are coming from a long  distance they probably won't come if the event is very short because it's not worth their while to  make the trip but equally shorter events are good because people who are kind of located in a similar  area are more inclined to pop out of the office for 45 minutes or an hour to come and hear a talk  and to network with some people who they might be able to collaborate with or whatever.  And there's also really quite a big set of varying requirements of the members of this community  because again being a community that covers so many different institutions this is a real challenge.  So I hope that gives you a kind of a bit of an idea about the different issues that come up when  you're building a community and some ideas of different types of communities and I guess what  I'm going to finish off with is kind of the biggest lesson that I probably learned after this process  which is to say that it's hard work and it really is hard work it can it can seem easy to start with  because you can get momentum up quite quickly but then it can get very challenging so don't give up  and it can be a very rewarding and valuable way to support research developers to build a community  where you can bring people together and have an opportunity to inspire people to get more involved  in in research software and research software engineering. So thank you very much indeed  and if we have any questions.  Okay.  Can you talk a little bit about the event in the wider area that you did for the day?  Okay so I'll just repeat the question for the for the video. So the question was can I talk about  the event that we did that was the day long event and say a bit more about what we did for that event.  So the basically the focus was on talks and we had different we had different lengths of talks  we had 15 minute talks and then we had five minute lightning talks and we got people to make  submissions in advance so we had an abstract submission process in advance. Every every talk  was reviewed every submission was reviewed by three people. It was intentionally a fairly sort of  lightweight process because we wanted people to to kind of feel that that it was a community  opportunity to kind of get together and present but equally we wanted people to get some feedback  on on what they submitted and kind of how that was viewed by the people who were reviewing.  So there was this basically the whole day was a series of we had a keynote to start with and then  we had several sessions of kind of 15 minute talks and then five minute lightning talks.  I think we did it as one or two 15 minute talks and then a sort of a couple of lightning talks  which worked quite well and then we had a poster session as well and we had quite a bit of time  for people to kind of talk and you know we had lunch and coffee breaks and whatever for people to  kind of try and meet other people and talk to people around the community. So yeah it was kind  of a fairly traditional workshop in that sense but the talks were much more focused on I guess  sort of general research software engineering topics and so while they were often domain specific  they were pitched in the way that was kind of easy for people to get in to get involved with.  Sorry, maybe you can have a short talk. Yeah, so you mentioned funding so how was  it how were these communities funded? The second question is you mentioned that you need to keep  like pace to keep the people like coming so what would you say what's the main measure you can take  to keep people being interested to keep the community. Okay, so right so the first question  was on funding and how the funding was provided to support these events so some of the funding has  come through through my fellowship because like this was one of the activities that I proposed  to do so that's EPSRC UK EPSRC funding but also we've had contributions of kind of small amounts  of funding from different people so we have support with the one-day event from the UK  RSE network and we've also had support from kind of other research groups who have wanted to  sort of help out by running events for themselves. The other question that you asked was on remind me  right most important thing to keep them momentum and keep the community alive  and I think the answer to that is probably just to keep organizing stuff keep doing things  because if you leave a long gap people just lose interest so it's really to have a kind of a  an active schedule and keep things going and keep people engaged and yeah the best way to do that is  to invite them to come to things and you know get them to talk to people and so on so yeah.
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