Geoscience SIG Inaugural Meeting: sharing knowledge and building bridges across the geoscience community.

Breakout Groups

Participants from EPCC, MetOffice, Turing, Bristol Uni, NOC

How do you measure success in your team / individually?

Any training gaps for domain knowledge? And ways to fix those?

Basic science/maths knowledge (if you come from a computing background), and computing if you come from a science background
E.g. learn skillsets like DASK, to help people speed up their analysis
Seems like DASK is a training gap
SIG is a useful way for people to find out how we are overlapping with other people. Find ways to share knowledge through the SIG.
Within the company, have an in-person support day, also allows people to learn about new skills / disseminate info
SSI ran a mentoring scheme (couple of months duration) to link PhDs from non-computing backgrounds with Computer scientists to help with knowledge transfer
Communication between institutions.

Participants from UCL, Julich, Met Office, Durham, NOC, ICCS Cambridge

Career progression pathways that exist or you would like to see?

the standard is becoming Junior RSE to standard RSE to senior to principal to team lead to head of RSE (smaller unis might have standard and senior and a lead/head of RSE)
- often you have to apply for a new position, sometimes you can get promoted (UCL, no longer professional services) or regraded (Durham)
- In Germany/Juelich, there is not that much of a career path
- At NOC, you can pick your job category for promotion
How far can you get before it gets a management position?
- -> at UCL, you can get pretty high (Principal RSE)
- some people do not want be leaders, or are not good at it
Management training
- often targeted at researchers or administrators
- DisCouRSE Network Plus

How do you measure success?

The good old number of academic papers way
Handover to stakeholder
Agile style retrospective
Never a formal metric! MO: pre-define what success looks like for a community of practice Ex: survey members before and after. Use “evidence” to back claim for more resources/funding
For software project with users: difficult to get researchers to cite JOSS paper. GitHub badge? For people you know you can insist they cite the software but harder/impossible for ppl you don’t know.

Career pathway

Career pathway from technical expertise to policy work
But interaction between policy makers and RSEs.
MO tech: Quite a lot of options with a single position. In the Science division its quite different but changing soon.

Participants from Met Office, UKCEH, UoReading, NCAS, Alan Turing Institute, UoNewcastle

How do you measure success in your team or individually?

Depends on if you mean personally or professionally, the distinction between those
don’t break things, performance reviews
outputs (repos, papers, documentation)
usability of the outputs, not just that they exist / were created
meeting funding deadlines and promises, perhaps
more than just clocking in daily hours etc.

Career progression pathway that exist or you would like to see

At MO: existing progression framework (Foundation -> Mid -> Senior) but has recently been scrapped to be revamped
At UKCEH: RSE roles progression has similarly been reconsidered recently, attempt to put entire organisation into job families. RSEs still a bit fuzzy, don’t fit neatly into the “families” defined, sort of exist across 2. Still better than it was though, more defined in general. High focus on management still.
At The Turing: less formal routes (for applications management)? many move to industry. “fuzzy”. but institute is being restructured so all is in flux. meant to be criteria-based but it isn’t clear how true that is in practice
At Newcastle: no clearly-defined pathway beyond senior, e.g. define own job description for going beyond,
General: pros and cons to writing own job descriptions (at more senior levels), can be quite time consuming but does allow more freedom
At UoR: (ran out of time so SB writing into doc) management working to improve situation, but RSEs generally have to apply under Researcher form and application criteria (despite being under ‘Professional and Managerial’ family), at least for Junior -> Mid -> Senior, which is really not ideal e.g. feel like ‘special case’ having to clarify main aims/outputs are quality software/data not papers

This is free form, hopefully inspired by talks and slido questions/points:

Is there any (geoscience) domain knowledge training available for RSEs (or technical folks/RTPs)?
- NOC did something like that (has not happened in a while)
- ICCS had informal short climate science intro talks in team meetings (by Jack)
- The MetOffice also has courses on meteorology and climate science, though they are currently internal.
- -> Can there be something which is more widely accessible? (need funding and organisation)

How do we allow people to identify areas of knowledge across the SIG
- Handling big array data
- New libraries and data formats
- Visualisation
If we curate resources how do we keep this up to date, collaborative wiki, update every RSE con?
What would you like to see from the SIG going forward?
- More in-person or more virtual? -> show of hands shows interest in both
- Lightning talks (like today) -> virtual session with more of these
- Case studies and available software
- Blog posts -> space on the website
- Short intros of group members (who is involved) -> how to maintain it (it will be quickly go out of date)? -> PRs on GitHub
- GitHub repo pointing to useful resources -> Markdown doc, wiki, page on website
- Bytesized RSE -> do a geoscience version
- a logo -> logo competition
- “bring you own problem discussion” forum
- people to advertise their open seminars on the website