The teachingRSE project: "Teaching and Learning Research Software Engineering"

It started all at a workshop at deRSE23 in Paderborn where the community came together to discuss what to teach to future RSEs and in which institutions to bring up the next generation of RSEs.

As we discovered, the scope of this task is so big that we had to split the paper in different subpapers highlighting different aspects

Get the latest version of the respective PDF files here:

• "Foundational competencies and responsibilities of an RSE" (competencies.pdf)
• "Institutionalized Organisation of RSE Education" (institutionalised_education.pdf)
• A separate web project on surveying and curating existing resources, the learn-and-teach project website
• "A Survey of Initiatives Providing Educative Material in the RSE Space" (survey.pdf)
• "Educating RSEs in Germany - What Needs to Be Done" (call_to_action.pdf)

How to contribute - Some of our rules

This paper is intended as a collaborative effort and we are looking for input from you.

We follow GitLab/GitHub flow

Please utilise semantic line breaks!

We use British English

We have regular meetings, out meeting notes can be found here: https://pad.gwdg.de/s/pVBQ3Sh7Z#

If you want to get notified of our calls, and participate in the discussion by E-Mail, we have a Mailing-List: https://lists.uni-wuerzburg.de/mailman/listinfo/teachingrse

• competencies.md will be published on arxiv. LaTeX tags/code is fine in here.
• survey.md will move to a website, hence this file has to be Markdown
• We utilise tags to categorise issues and PRs to the respective paper.

You can contribute in various ways:

1. Propose content/text via pull request
2. Improve existing content via pull request
3. Review or comment on pull requests of others

To build the PDF files, we recommend a full TeXlive installation. You will also need to install a few Python packages:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Bibliography

We use a single, shared BibTeX bibliography file for all papers in the teaching RSE project. This is imported as a git submodule from another repository. See the instructions in that repository if you need to add bibliography entries.

When you first clone this repository, the bibtex folder is empty. To download the bibliography, run the following commands:

git submodule update --init --recursive
git config --local submodule.recurse true

This will populate the folder with the contents of the remote bibliography repository. To modify the bibliography, you need to clone the-teachingRSE-project/bibliography, commit your changes and push them. Then you can synchronize the local bibliography submodule by running the following commands:

git submodule update --remote bibliography
git add bibliography
git commit -m 'Synchronize bibliography'

If the remote bibliography repository is broken, you can roll back the bibliography version in the submodule. For example to go back 4 commits in the past, run:

cd bibliography/
git reset HEAD~4
git checkout .
cd ..
git add bibliography/
git commit -m 'Roll back to an older version of the bibliography'

How to create a pull request

• Fork this repository
• If you clone your fork locally, run

  git submodule update --init --recursive
  git config --local submodule.recurse true

• Create your changes in your fork
• Go to the pull requests page of this repository and push new pull request
• You can add DRAFT, or WIP to indicate work-in-progress PRs.
• Add a short description

The community will review your pull request and may ask you for additional changes. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask (we are trying to be as helpful as possible).

How to review existing pull requests

• Go to the pull requests page of this repository
• Click on any of the open pull requests
• Leave comments under Conversation or do a full review under Files changed

How to get credit

If you've contributed to this paper in any way, please add your name to contributors.yml using the template at the bottom of the file. Make sure the name provided in the "author:" field matches exactly with the name in the Markdown preamble author list.

Publication

We currently have split the topic of teaching RSEs in Germany across four papers. We aim for a publication of most of these papers. All people that have participated in discussions with us, e.g. at deRSE23 or undeRSE23 are at least eligible for contributor status. If you have participated regularly at our weekly working meetings you are eligible for authorship.

The first paper, Foundational Competencies and Responsibilities of a Research Software Engineer, is now available as a pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11457 Feedback is welcome as an issue on this repository.

License

Each file in this repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

When re-using material from this repository, please attribute it with the information given in the file attribution.md.