[Note: In December 2021, I decided to write down my experiences with the founding of US-RSE. Vanessa Sochat convinced me that it would make more sense for all interested US-RSE members to write a collective post, which we have now done as https://us-rse.org/2022-02-06-a-brief-history-of-usrse/. So much of this blog post overlaps that one, but some of it doesn’t, and I’m publishing this as a record of my recollection. Any errors or discrepancies are mine.]
For me, Research Software Engineering (RSE) and the US-RSE Association came out sustainable software, and my thinking about sustainable software really crystalized while I was a program director at NSF and led the SI2 (Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation) program that had been created by Manish Parashar and Abani Patra, then was led by Gabrielle Allen, before it was my turn to shape it and lead it for about four years, from 2012 to 2016. During this time, I was influenced by what the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK was doing, particularly around RSEs.
After I left NSF and moved to the University of Illinois, I took a more hands-on role in RSE activities, including thinking of my team (Scientific Software & Applications, SSA) of scientific software developers and HPC applications scientists at NCSA as RSEs. I started by attending the first RSE conference in late 2016. Based on that, and wondering about the possibility of creating a US RSE community, I volunteered to customize the questions and answers for US participants in the first international RSE survey in September 2017. Because I was thinking about this at an RDA plenary just before this where I was talking with Sandra Gesing in a session on science gateways, I wrote to Sandra on September 26 2017:
Hi Sandra,
To follow-up on a brief discussion at the gateways meeting at RDA:
I’ve “volunteered” to work with the UK Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) to create a US-flavored version of the RSE survey that they’ve done for 2 years now. I wonder if you might be interested in working on this as well?
Basically, I’m working with Simon Hettrick to “translate” the survey questions and answers, which is all done in GitHub. I also plan to add another note that says if the respondents are interested [and] want to be part of a possible RSE group, or if they want to organize such a group, they should do something (maybe volunteer through a separate Google form, so that the data in the survey itself will remain anonymous.)
The survey will be run by Southampton, and the data will be published, so I don’t believe there are any IRB issues to worry about, but I welcome your opinions on this too.
Does this sound at all interesting?
If so, do you have suggestions for other people who might also be interested?
Thanks,
Dan
Sandra was excited about the topic and joined me in doing this work.
After the survey was completed, 10 people had volunteered to work on a US RSE organization, and on January 25, 2018, I suggested to Sandra we write to them to get some activity going. Sandra pointed out that there was also a UK-organized meeting for leaders of RSE groups that was happening the following week in the UK, that she and four other US people were attending (though I was not due to a conflict with another meeting), and we should bring these together.
So the email I sent on January 26 to the 13 other people in the combined two groups (there was some overlap) was:
Hi,
The first 10 of you are the people who went through the US RSE survey to the end, and then took the extra step of filling out the form saying that you were interested in helping to organize a US RSE organization.
[10 names/emails, including Ian Cosden, Chris Hill, and Lance Parsons]
In addition, there are 5 US people going to an international RSE meeting in the UK next week, including Chris and Ian and Sandra (who worked with me to create the US version of the survey). The other two are:
[2 names/emails]
I’m now writing to introduce you to each other, at least electronically. It might be useful for each person to write a short email saying who they are and why there are interested.
After that, I want to encourage you to talk to each other, and try to find a way to move forward, in particular after some of you participate in next week’s international meeting.
Sandra Gesing and I, as the organizers of the US version of the RSE survey, offer you at least moral support.
We are also co-PIs on the just starting US Research Software Sustainability Institute Conceptualization project (http://urssi.us), and we will likely cover related topics in our project workshops and survey; we look forward to working with a US RSE community, or helping one form.
I can help make connections to the UK RSE organization as well.
Finally, I can also help make connections to public and private US funding agencies, if you can conceive of activities where funding is needed.
But at this point, I want to turn this over to you to move forward. Feel free to copy Sandra and I on any emails, and to ask for help if you think we can provide it.
Dan
As an aside, I met Ian Cosden at a workshop in Princeton May 2, 2017, and I remember sitting down at a table with him where he described his group to me, and I replied that it sounded like an RSE group, and sent him a bunch of material about RSEs, which I think helped him think about his group and other models.
And as a less-related aside (since the title of this post includes personal), the first email I can find between me and Chris Hill was from 2004, where we talked about the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) and running it on the Grid, but I think I first met Chris in the late 1990s while working in the NASA HPCC program, or perhaps when I was working on applying the Common Component Architecture (CCA) to coupled climate models, around 2002.
Ok, back to US-RSE. 2018 was fairly quiet, though key activities were Chris Hill creating our Slack team, our GitHub organization, and our initial website while at the international leaders meeting. In December, Ian updated the website with a new structure, and we gradually started more actively publicizing the association.
In April 2019, Sandra created a mailing list (a Google group), and used this to increase promotion of the association. And probably the key activity of 2019 was Ian taking the organizational lead, writing an email to nine of us on May 14:
Dear all,
In the last couple months the US-RSE group has clearly seen a rise in interest, membership, and engagement. The growth is extremely encouraging, and with a small amount of effort, it’s only a matter of time before we reach a significant level of activity.
I wanted to reach out, not via slack, but in a more composed email. The nine of you (plus me) are all listed on the website as the current steering committee, for the sole reason that you either (a) wrote your name as a contributor in the document that helped define our mission or (b) expressed interest in participating around the same time. When I put the new website together, I just ran with it and appointed us the “Steering Committee.” For better or worse, that’s all it took in December.
It’s unlikely that we can continue with a completely ad-hoc organization forever. New members are (hopefully) going to be continually joining. I’d like to propose that we decide on some semi-formal organizational issues, now, rather than wait for actual problems to arise. Perhaps it’s too early. But better too soon, than too late.
At some point, there are decisions that will have to be made that will affect the direction of the community – some already have been made (I’m certainly guilty of this myself). One big question we need to answer: Who gets to make these decisions, and on what basis?
I know we are all volunteering our time for this, and everyone is busy. So whatever we decide will only work if it’s low maintenance and something that can evolve over time.
So as a starting point, let me propose the following:
These things obviously aren’t going to happen overnight, but we can get the ball rolling. I don’t think we want to be closed off from the rest of the group, or purposely hide things, but having individuals run wild or randomly throwing things out to the group at large for input in slack isn’t going to work forever.
If I’m way off the mark here let me know.
Best regards,
Ian
This led to the first steering committee, which we recognized at the time was just a way to get things going, and that we would move to a democratic process in the future. Since then, we’ve had a lot of organizational growth that has taken us to where we are today, with many more people joining, our governance structure becoming more formalized, and now 2 sets of elections that have led to all steering committee members being elected.
One final thing that I am happy about is a discussion I started in a September 2019 steering committee meeting about creating a diversity statement on the US-RSE website. I wrote on the steering committee slack site shortly before this meeting:
Note that we don’t say anything about diversity in https://us-rse.org or https://us-rse.org/about/ or https://us-rse.org/mission/ I think we probably should have increasing diversity of the US-RSE community (not our just members, but the larger community) as a goal.
This wasn’t a new idea; US-RSE had talked about diversity from an early point, but we weren’t really doing anything in an organized way about it, and I felt like saying it publicly as part of our mission could be a start. This led to diversity, equity, and inclusion being the topic of our October 2020 community call, and this in turn led to the DEI slack channel and the DEI working group, led by Lance, which wrote our DEI statement and has been active in promoting DEI through a variety of activities.
There’s a lot more that could be written about US-RSE, and I’m sure other people will have other views of their own parts in leading us forward. I urge them to write additional posts, or contribute to a new version of the collective post. And in the meantime, a good source of information is Ian’s talks in our 2020 and 2021 annual general meetings.
This post has also been published as https://doi.org/10.59350/kshhv-rxa77 on the Rouge Scholar.
Daniel S. Katz's blog 