On Thursday, August 6th, we were delighted to welcome 36 participants from eight Hopkins divisions to the first convening of service providers for the Research Software Support Network. During our full-day workshop, we began to build an engaged community to design, launch, and sustain a coordinated support network for research software at Hopkins.
Our guest list brought together support providers with a wide range of perspectives. We had groups joining us from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Carey Business School, Data Science and AI Institute, Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Research IT, the School of Medicine, the Sheridan Libraries, and the Whiting School of Engineering, and we’re looking forward to expanding participation to additional schools and divisions in the future. It was an intentionally diverse mix of people and perspectives: small teams and large providers, teams focused on data, software, HPC, and AI, providers who serve a single school, others who support the whole university, and even some who just support a single lab. We hoped to build the foundations for a strong community, and based on our notes from the day and the constant conversations during our breaks, we feel that work is well begun.
We structured the day around a set of collaborative activities: participants introduced their units, worked through the issues around supporting research software, drafted value propositions laying out what they need from the Network and what they can offer it, designed services to match those needs, worked together to identify risks and brainstorm mitigation strategies, and closed the day by sorting into working groups ready to get to work.
What’s next for the RSSN? We plan to launch the first iteration of the Network this fall. Our newly formed working groups will be hard at work in the next few months to get us there by planning project governance, shaping outreach and communications, building an inventory of service providers, drafting an assessment to help identify project needs and match them with the right providers, and identifying metrics to help us measure what’s working as we go. Want to get involved? Email Project Administrator Rosemary Pauley and she can help match you up with a working group so you can jump in. Just want to stay in the loop? Sign up for our mailing list to hear more about our activities.