Initial draft of blog post for competencies paper #362
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Nice start, and I like the general style and length.
Besides the inline comments:
- Why not using Markdown headings for the sections?
- The one-paragraph-per-line style makes leaving comments a bit complicated...
- In my "read soon" list: https://mango.pdf.zone/i-give-you-feedback-on-your-blog-post-draft-but-you-dont-send-it-to-me
competencies-blog-post.md
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| So what, or who, exactly is an RSE? Ask three people for a definition of RSE, and aside from the common words "software" and "research", you're likely to get three different answers! This is because the space in which RSEs work, and the work that they might do, is not always straightforward to define. RSE's inhabit a previously "hidden space" - the wide gap between the work of researchers in an academic institution and the work of professional service staff whose roles can include everything from finance and student administration to managers of enterprise computing infrastructure. While the work of an RSE, of course, includes software development, RSEs at one end of the scale representing this hidden space will have roles that look very much like that of a researcher or academic. At the other end of the scale, the role of an RSE will look very much like that of a professional software engineer working in an industry environment. While an RSE undoubtely writes software, their role is defined by a much wider range of skills, competencies and experience. | ||
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| Generic definitions of an RSE can be helpful - a common such definition generally highlights that "an RSE is someone who applies specialist software development skills to support and undertake research tasks". Nonetheless, while not incorrect, this definition masks a vast amount of complexity that we look into in great detail. |
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I have the feeling that it takes too long to hint what the actual topic of the specific blog post is about, and this sentence sounds like a bridge to the main content, which goes to a different direction.
Maybe change the "that we look into in great detail" part. (also: what does "great" mean? who is "we"? - not the authors of the blog post, probably, and not referring to the blog post)
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Good point! the talking persona might need to be adapted on the publication outlet
competencies-blog-post.md
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| Given this complicated and rapidly developing space, we set out to better understand and to identify the foundational competencies of a Research Software Engineer. | ||
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| In work initiated by Heidi Seibold and Florian Goth, a small team of co-organisers ran a workshop session, “Teaching and Learning Research Software Engineering”, at the German RSE conference in Paderborn, Germany in February 2023 ([deRSE23](https://de-rse23.sciencesconf.org/)) which initiated the discussions to understand what exactly the competencies of an RSE are. | ||
| This led to a lengthy process of detailed discussions over the course of around two years, with further workshops organised at the 2023 de-RSE Unconference in Jena, Germany ([un-deRSE23](https://un-derse23.sciencesconf.org/index)) and then at [deRSE24](https://go.uniwue.de/derse24) in Würzburg, Germany. |
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While surely interesting to some, I believe this and the sentence before do not really fit as nicely into this blog post. I believe they do provide too much historic insight, distracting from the main message “read the paper!”. I suggest to drop them (but not necessarily the next one, since this explains the scope of the paper, giving hints to the prospective reader to the question “is this relevant to me?”.
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shorten to: We integrated the community early on through multiple workshops(deRSE23, undeRSE23, deRSE24), and we would like to thank everybody who participated.
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We could also link to more specific information if we shorten.
However, for deRSE23 and un-deRSE23 sciencesconf only has a table for each date and a popup for specific workshops.
The links would be
https://de-rse23.sciencesconf.org/program/graphic/date/2023-02-22
https://un-derse23.sciencesconf.org/program/graphic/date/2023-09-26
https://events.hifis.net/event/994/contributions/7914/
competencies-blog-post.md
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| After defining the core competencies, we look at career levels - what should RSEs be expected to know and at what level of detail at different career stages? | ||
| A series of tables look at the previously defined competencies in the context of a set of career levels, defining the expected skills and level of knowledge for each. | ||
| We also recognise that researchers and academics increasingly expect to be able to apply some technical skills themselves so we look at the RSE skills that researchers and academics might want to learn to support this. |
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The 'this' is a little unclear to me here. Is 'them applying technical skills' what the 'this' refers to? Also: we might want to mention that this is essentially their first step to become an RSE (at one end of the spectrum).
Co-authored-by: Frank Löffler <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Frank Löffler <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Frank Löffler <[email protected]>
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Thanks for all the comments on this everyone. I'll catch up with things here and make any further fixes or updates based on the discussion above. |
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If you reuse it, cite the de-RSE one as the original one. |
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remember the license. |
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As discussed in the meeting: we should aim to have a reference version of the blog post (published on the de-RSE blog?) - this will be released as CC-BY 4.0 - anyone else publishing the blog post, e.g. on a local institutional blog, should include a link back to the original "reference" version of the blog post. This is useful if we want to syndicate the blog post to increase visibility. |
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@knarrff What's your opinion? Can you use the current state of the blog post already in the de-RSE blog? |
competencies-blog-post.md
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| _Flo's suggestion: The TeachingRSE collaboration_ | ||
| _Jeremy Cohen, Florian Goth, et al._ (author list to sort out - if we need one at all?) |
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TODO
I think The TeachingRSE collaboration is fine, maybe with a link to https://de-rse.org/en/working_groups.html or https://github.com/the-teachingRSE-project.
A statement like "original blog post draft by @jcohen02" would also be nice.
competencies-blog-post.md
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| It starts with some general background and terminology before highlighting what the collaboration worked out as the key values of an RSE | ||
| - what RSEs are trying to achieve in their role and the values that underpin that work. |
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| It starts with some general background and terminology before highlighting what the collaboration worked out as the key values of an RSE | |
| - what RSEs are trying to achieve in their role and the values that underpin that work. | |
| It starts with some general background and terminology before highlighting what the collaboration worked out as the key values of an RSE - what RSEs are trying to achieve in their role and the values that underpin that work. |
Otherwise, this appears as a bullet point.
competencies-blog-post.md
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| The authors then look at the competencies themselves, identified through extensive discussion and debate about what RSEs do and how they do it. | ||
| These skills are grouped into those that relate directly to software, those that are more research related and those that are communication focused. | ||
| The collaboration identifies these three areas as the core of what an RSE provides - specialist, high-quality software engineering knowledge, an understanding of the research environment (potentially working as a direct contributor to research itself), and the ability to communicate well and work highly effectively with researchers who may not have a computational background, IT savvy personnel who may not have a research background, and managers who may have neither. | ||
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Somewhere here, we could include a screenshot of the table of contents, to get a sneak peak into the actual competencies, without overbloating the text:
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brings up the artistry discussion in #138
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The post is out now. What to do with this branch? |
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@jcohen02 The CI should work now if you update your branch. |
This PR contains a first draft of a blog post relating to the competencies paper.
We should add something about the teaching RSE project and how to get involved in the final section. For now I've just left a placeholder for an email address or similar.
Feel free to make/suggest edits, restructuring or other changes.
At present this is just slightly under 1000 words which I think is probably about the length that we want to aim for (I'd be inclined to aim not to go over 1000 words if possible).
This PR addresses #361.