Guidance for Talks

Guidance on interpreting RSE work in our themes

For some ideas around how you may want to frame your talks around RSEs contribution to research excellence:

  • Techniques – What techniques have you applied to research problems and what lessons did you learn that could be communicated helpfully to the RSE audience. Make sure the talk focuses on the technique and not the research.
    • Note: The technique could be run-of-the-mill and still produce an outcome befitting of research excellence.
  • Enabling methodology – What tools, methods, frameworks have you developed to better enable the research landscape, how are they innovative?
  • Supporting others – How have you worked within a project to ensure that the project had a successful outcome that could otherwise have been out of scope.
  • How we define and recognise excellence – What does RSE excellence look like and how do we apply this to career structures to get recognition from funders, institutions and other stakeholders. Also should we seek to define it?
  • Developing yourself or others – Are you a new RSE working towards a goal, or a manager or mentor developing RSEs. Talk about your experiences developing RSEs and how this fits in a research excellence driven world.
  • RSE Teaching and Learning – How do we apply best practices in teaching and learning to software training. How do we ensure that we deliver high quality teaching and learning? How do we measure learning? How do we design materials to a high standard?

For some ideas of how to interpret what you do as DRI:

  • First let us define ‘things’
    • Things: Software or hardware that could be considered research infrastructure
  • Then we can say:
    • I bodge things – It is notable that not all things work on or with all other things, The bodge of making two things stick together is thus a critical part of DRI.
    • I make things – What do you make that is critical to research? How/is it recognised by anyone and what role does it play in the DRI?
    • I maintain things – Computing is not static, hardware and software need ongoing maintenance. What role does RSE have in the upkeep of this kind of DRI?