[SORSE] About FAIRness and Research Software Managers

Wednesday Oct 7, 2020, 4:00 PM → 4:50 PM UTC

Virtual (Zoom)

Anna-Lena Lamprecht (Utrecht University), Rachael Ainsworth (Software Sustainability Institute)

We’re delighted to announce another great SORSE Event that takes place 16:00-16:50 UTC on Wednesday 7th October. We’re pleased to be welcoming two speakers at this event:

• Dr. Ana Trisovic, Harvard University: Improving. FAIRness with containers
• Jonathan Dursi, University Health Network: Help! I'm a Research Software Manager!

Please see further details below.

Language: English

By joining the event in Zoom, I hereby confirm that I have read and understood the privacy policies for participation.

Improving FAIRness with containers.pdf

Talks

1 Improving FAIRness with containers

The FAIR guiding principles state that published research objects should be made Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable for other researchers. Data repositories provide research dissemination following FAIR principles while also developing standards and tools to facilitate them. However, increased use of advanced research methods, such as virtual containers, supercomputers and GPUs, is introducing new challenges for research sharing. There is no standardized way of describing and disseminating such research outputs in data repositories. Furthermore, dissemination of data within virtual containers like Docker may hinder some of the commonly supported principles, such as findability and accessibility.

Improvements in documenting and sharing of advanced research materials in a FAIR-compliant way has recently been natively enabled in new container-based tools. This talk will present insights from community discussions on improving FAIRness with encapsulation in the context of the Dataverse data repository platform. Dataverse has a long-term commitment to preserving research artifacts to enable research transparency, reproducibility, and reuse. We will provide a review of a number of projects based on virtual containers to determine their potentials for enabling FAIRness of published research. In particular, we will review the following projects: Open Container Initiative, Singularity, ReproZip, and SciUnit, and their efforts on documenting and describing researcher’s computing environments. Some of the new concepts, such as data containers and Binder Boxes will also be considered. We evaluate each of these approaches against established FAIR principles in the context of dissemination in data repositories.

Speaker: Ana Trisovic (Harvard University)

Contribution Information

2 Help! I’m a Research Software Manager!

Research software development teams are too important to be managed poorly. But no one teaches us to be good managers — especially in academia.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Managing well is not a personality trait; it is a set of practices and skills that can be learned. Excellent practices, and the reasons they work, have been known for decades; they’ve been recently re-“discovered” by big technology companies, such as the re:Work effort that came out of Google’s Project Oxygen.

And the thing is, the more advanced and challenging of those skills and practices are things that our experiences in research (like building and maintaining collegial, multi-institutional collaborations) have already helped us develop. If we take the time and discipline to learn and practice the basics, we can quickly become good-to-great managers: helping our teams be more effective, supporting more research better, and making us all less stressed in and happier with our jobs.

This talk is aimed at research software managers, or research software developers who think they might be interested in being a team lead or manager some day. Using the re:Work effort as a starting point, we’ll cover what good teams have, and four simple but key practices many research software managers need in their toolbox: embracing your new role; weekly one-on-ones; frequent and specific feedback; and delegation.

If this abstract interests you, these resources may too:

• [re:Work] has excellent training materials
• The Manager-Tools podcast basics series is excellent
• Camille Fournier’s book The Manager’s Path is a new classic
• At a more basic level, I maintain a weekly roundup of links relevant to managing research computing teams.

Speaker: Jonathan Dursi (University Health Network)

Contribution Information