The WhitakerLab at CollabW21
At the end of March 2021, many members of the Whitaker Lab attended the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop. At the following lab meeting, those who attended shared their experiences with the rest of the lab. This is a blog post covering the event and the lab members' reflections from it.
What is the SSI?
The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI for short) is a network of UK universities, Research Software Engineering groups and policy makers dedicated to improving the quality, sustainability and recognition of research software. They help the members in their network learn software skills and best practices, and advocate for culture change in their organisations and institutions.
Many members of the lab (current and past) are also SSI Fellows. Can you spot them?
What is the Collaborations Workshop?
The Collaborations Workshop (often shortened to CollabW) is an annual, 3-day event focused around bringing together researchers, software developers, data librarians, managers, funders and anyone else who cares about research software to foster interdisciplinary collaborations and explore important ideas around software and research.
CollabW features a few keynotes but it is largely run as an unconference event with lightning talks, discussion sessions, mini workshops, and speed blogging events all relating to one or a few central themes. This feels radically different to traditional conference events as you are elevated from audience member to participant, giving you the opportunity to create something during the event and have discussions with a wide variety of other attendees.
The final day features a hack day where small teams can work on community-generated projects addressing a need they see in the research software community. Importantly, these do not have to be software projects to be eligible. Documentation and event planning projects, among others, have also featured at previous hack days. But most important of all, there are prizes up for grabs for the top 3 projects! 😉
CollabW21
The central themes of CollabW21, hosted online from 30th March to 1st April 2021, were FAIR Research Software, Diversity and Inclusion, and Software Sustainability.
Some of the highlights included an inspiring keynote on Diversity and Inclusion from Dr Chonnettia Jones and an unbelievably brave panel discussion on Disability and Accessibility in Research Software.
The Lab’s Reflections
At the lab meeting after the event, each member that attended was asked to produce a slide reflecting on their experience at CollabW21. They were asked to answer the following questions:
- What is something you really enjoyed, was unexpected, or completely different to past conference experiences? (signified by the 🚀 emoji below)
- Can you share a topic that resonated with you, got you thinking, that you’d like to share/discuss with the lab? (signified by the 🤔 emoji below) You can see their slides below.
_Source link: https://www.krysburnette.com/blog/2019/1/22/belonging-a-conversation-about-equity-diversity-amp-inclusion_
As you can see, themes around disability, diversity, inclusion and accessibility resonated particularly strongly within the group. We also found the unconference style very refreshing, if not a little exhausting!
Additionally on the third day of CollabW21, Sarah and Patricia’s hackday projects on Research Dugnads and Coding Confessions won 3rd and 2nd place, respectively! Well done Sarah and Patricia!