Actions for the first three months

Simon Hettrick

1. Understand your group's activities, and plan for growth

2. Develop and share a model for impact

3. Build a community for support and recognition 

4. But start with the practicalities

Three months will pass quickly

Long version...

1. Understand your group and plan to grow

• Review services and optimise their provision

  • RSE services

  • Community

  • Teaching: SWC, lectures

  • Infrastructure: Github, Travis, Dashboard

  • Comms: blog, mailing list, Slack

• Potential to diversify into data science, diversifying client disciplines, possibly take on external clients and industry clients

• This will allow growth, from 13 current RSEs to the >40 needed

• Collaborate with RSE Brokerage

• Collaborate with Alan Turing Institute

2. A model for impact

• No RSE Group has developed a model for describing return on investment

• Conducting a review of the group's work is the perfect time to develop this model

• Develop and refine a survey model

• Share this model with the other groups

• Possibly get other groups to use the survey on UCL infrastructure, and share the results as an open-research

3. Build the community

• RSE Groups can’t advertise without creating demand that they can't fulfill

• Community work increases recognition without promising RSE availability for projects

• A lot of community work being done:

  • Technical socials

  • Drop-in sessions

  • Slack

• Self-supporting communities

• Join with other London universities, and split management overhead

• Work with business and comms manager

4. Practicalities

• Need to get to know...

• ...staff

• ...past clients

• ...finances and HR

• ...working practices

• ...activities

• ...governance

5. Long term plans

• It will take three months to review activities of the group and get to know everyone

• Need to plan for the next 1-2 years

• Need a way to integrate that plan into RITS activity

  • Possibly the Research Delivery governance group