Pillar 3: Outreach and formation of Institutions

[CaptainSifff]

Forming a network of institutions EU-SSI? FuturSSI?
Offer education to existing RSEs as well as to scientists

Risks, Opportunities and Challenges for education and the institutions doing that education.

[MakisH]

We could even think of a collaborative Master's program (across universities or online) similar to https://eumaster4hpc.uni.lu/

This would originate from such a consortium.

[CaptainSifff]

• Use the existing structures like the masters as examples for outreach?

[CaptainSifff]

There are a couple of things we can think of:
multiple institutions:

• Assuming we have institutions, which kinds of network can they form?
• Assuming these networks exist, what other stakeholders will profit
• Acreditation structures?

single institution:

• What policy needs to be implemented at a university(Leibniz, MPG, ...) ?

• What policies need to be present at a national level, such that these institutions will be created?

• How do domains profit from having a connection to such an institution?

• What are the benefits of these institutions for an individual?

• What are the benefits for a university?

• Are there policy changes in the funding structure necessary, such that Graduates can access their resources?

[jngrad]

single institution:

• How do domains profit from having a connection to such an institution?
  • training sessions and hackathons for highly transferable skills
    • how to set up continuous integration and code coverage reporting (skills: cloud, web APIs, containerization)
    • how to set up continuous delivery to e.g. deploy a software user manual (skills: webdev, cybersecurity)
    • software Carpentry every semester to train MS.C and PhD students in shell, git, and Python (or Julia)
  • consulting services for specific problems
    • performance porting (GPU, OpenMP or MPI+X), running software in web browsers (remotely executable Jupyter notebook or other cloud-based solution), scaling for big data, data/workflow visualization
• What are the benefits of these institutions for an individual?
  • clear contact point for any software- or algorithm-related problem
  • for PhD students enrolled in a graduate academy: offer ECTS points for attending a Carpentry or hackathon
• What are the benefits for a university?
  • better return on investment: one RSE can collaborate with multiple research groups
    • economy of scales for highly transferable skills: some tasks like setting up CI/CD are tricky to learn, but once you've set up CI/CD in a code project, you can apply it to other code projects with minimal changes
  • avoid huge loss of institutional memory when a PhD graduates and leaves
  • a stable central RSE position makes it easier to attract (and retain) people
  • hired RSEs can specialize themselves based on the needs of the research groups of the home University (vs a network where each node in the network specializes into a specific set of skills)

[CaptainSifff]

multiple institutions:

• Assuming we have institutions, which kinds of network can they form?
• Assuming these networks exist, what other stakeholders will profit
• Accreditation structures?

single institution:

• What policy/incentives needs to be implemented at a university(Leibniz, MPG, ...) ?

  • Pooling Resources in interest-driven networks
  • Networks enable interaction with industry and provide opportunities for students.

• What policies/Incentive need to be present at a national level, such that these institutions will be created?

• How do domains profit from having a connection to such an institution?

• A teaching facility can jumpstart the transition to dgitalization. Imagine a humanities department who has no-one to start digitalization

• What are the benefits of these institutions for an individual?

• What are the benefits for a university?

  • proper students
    • Local RSEs could improve digital literacy in the domains
    • If there is a master, contribute to the master, e.g. as supervisors
  • Help Academics:

    • Graduate Programs

    • Maintainathons

    • Consultation programs

    • Benefits: less costs, Reduce the average time of a PhD, Get more stuff done in the same time

    • Promotes Interdisciplinarity

    • Enables univeristies to distinguish themselves

• Are there policy changes in the funding structure necessary, such that Graduates can access their resources?

Other important aspects:

• institutions should aim for a mixture of profs and practitioners
• maybe teacher is a good carreer aim for senior practitioners.

[CaptainSifff]

My Suggestions for questions to the audience:

• What policy/incentives needs to be implemented at a university(Leibniz, MPG, ...) ?
• What policies/Incentive need to be present at a national level, such that these institutions will be created?

[knarrff]

* What policies/Incentive need to be present at a national level, such that these institutions will be created?

Maybe change wording to "institutions or networks"

[CaptainSifff]

did that in the respective etherpad entry.