Welcome

The RSE Association of Australia and New Zealand

This community aims to build awareness of the diverse Research Software Engineer (RSE) roles, to connect volunteers in the RSE domain, and to help build practical solutions for the RSE community.

This community is for:

researchers and academics
who develop and maintain code generalists
who bring communities together across the
research and technical domains
software engineers
who work in the research domain systems administrators
who maintain research systems

Join the community!

When you signup to the mailing list, please provide information including: Name, Affiliation, Role and a short description of what you do in relation to Research Software.

Meetups in 2023

In 2023 RSE-AUNZ restarted organising regular local meetups. You can fill out this form to express your interest in a local meetup or volunteer to be a coordinator. Currently, we have coordinators for Canberra, Brisbane, Parkville in Melbourne and Monash in Melbourne. Coordinator roles take about 2 hours a month, 1 hour for choosing a regular date/time/location to meet and emailing reminders to the mailing list, and 1 hour for going to the meetup itself.

About the RSE movement

The Society of Research Software Engineering, originally coined the term “Research Software Engineer”, says the following about RSEs:

“A growing number of people in academia combine expertise in programming with an intricate understanding of research. Although this combination of skills is extremely valuable, these people lack a formal place in the academic system.” (link).

Inspired by the success of the RSE Association in UK, we established the RSE Australia and New Zealand Association in 2017. Together with international bodies and support from our national organisations such as AeRO, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and research institutions, we aim to campaign for the recognition and wider adoption of the RSE role within the research ecosystem. We also want to advocate for appropriate recognition, reward and career opportunities for RSEs. We plan to organise regular events to allow RSEs to meet, exchange knowledge and collaborate on methods to create these opportunities.

We conducted an initial “Expression of Interest” survey in 2017 among Australian and New Zealand researchers and found that a majority of the respondents prioritised:

  1. Increased recognition of the RSE role,
  2. More appropriate, consistent and representative position descriptions and KPIs, and
  3. Community development through regular events and gatherings.

Please join us to actively work on growing this community and advocating for others. Together, we can build a sustainable community that benefits research software engineers, and ultimately contributes to more efficient and reproducible research.

Code of Conduct

We are committed to creating a welcoming and supportive environment for all of our members. All participants in our events and communications are expected to show respect and courtesy to others. This is why we have a Code of Conduct.

Sign up

When you signup to the mailing list, please provide information including: Name, Affiliation, Role and a short description of what you do in relation to Research Software. Join the community!