ScotRSE meeting
Yesterday (23 February 2026) saw the first in-person meeting of ScotRSE at the University of Dundee, bringing together about 30 Research Software Engineers from across Scotland.
The meeting opened with a short talk from David Beavan, President of the Society of Research Software Engineering, in which he provided an introduction to the Society and what it can do for RSEs, including support for events and regional groups and the amplification of local issues.
There followed a couple of talks from RSEs from the University of Glasgow. Nosakhare Osaro’s talk was titled From Pipettes to Pipelines: Transitioning from Wet-Lab Research to Research Software Engineering. A handful of key points:
- “Computational skills compound, lab skills plateau”
- Avoid “tutorial hell” – get to work on a real problem
- “Ask ‘stupid’ questions – they’re often the most important”
Ryan Field then spoke on Integrating RSE into research from the start, how can we as RSEs engage with the research community to make this happen?. This provided quite a bit of reassurance – the struggle to raise awareness of RSE/Research Computing services is a widespread one, not unique to us. One of his last slides listed “What we could do better”: Awareness, Advertising and Networking. That feels accurate.
The morning keynote Building Better Communities – Lessons Learned from the SSI was delivered by Neil Chue Hong, Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, which provided the funding for the event. Though presented in the context of building the ScotRSE community, the guidance and resources should prove useful in community building at the institutional level too.
After lunch, Nick Brown from the Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange spoke on CAKE: Aiming for connected and collaborative UK Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI). CAKE is aiming to provided a connected and collaborative UK Digital Research Infrastructure, and as well as DRI this talk introduced another acronym into the day’s discussions: dRTPs, or digital Research Technical Professionals – a broader category which encompasses RSEs and more besides. CAKE provides funding for placements and visits, knowledge exchange fellowships and retreats based around shared challenges.
The final speaker of the day was James Friel, from the University of Dundee. He’s leading a project funded by DisCouRSE to identify “skill overlap, upskilling opportunities, and skill-based career progression among dRTP staff” within the School of Medicine using the DIRECT Framework. Such staff tend to be siloed, which chimes with my experience, and reaching and engaging with them can be difficult.
Outside the talks, discussions focused on a handful of topics.
- Funding – in particular, the ability of RSEs to lead funding applications. Restrictions in this regard tend to be institutional policies, and are not typically dictated by funders.
- Collaboration – the Open Research agenda still has some way to go – researchers can still fear getting “scooped” and while data sharing has improved, it is not fully normalised.
- Education and training – lots of talk about the Carpentries and their process for developing new materials, with a mention of the Journal of Open Source Education.
Hopefully this will become a regular meeting. The one negative I would note is that the speakers were all men, as were 90% of the attendees – there is definitely scope to improve gender representation next time around.