Events

First URSSI Workshop

US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI)

Conference

April 10, 2018 to April 12, 2018
9:00am to 5:00pm
UC Berkeley

The First Software Sustainability Institute Workshop was held in Berkeley, CA, on April 10-12, 2018.  The goals of this workshop were the following:

  • Introduce URSSI
  • Help attendees meet each other and understand their goals
  • Pilot some initial survey questions, and gather inputs about where our survey should be distributed
  • Talk about the idea of ethnographic studies, and gather ideas on specific people and projects to study
  • Present a set of topics that we think will be potential areas of work in a future institute
  • Identify a subset of these, plus additional topics that are potentially important to the community, to discuss further
  • Refine, merge, discard topics
  • Find who among the attendees might lead discussion on them
  • Document the workshop’s results

Participants will leave this workshop with:

  • An informed and enthused set of attendees
  • An improved survey, and a set of survey distribution mechanism
  • Potential ethnographic study subjects
  • An initial list of candidate topics for an institute, some of which may be well-understood
  • A set of topics that should be further discussed in smaller follow-on workshops
  • Initial thoughts on institute roles - what could an institute do to address the topics?
  • Initial thoughts on institute organization - how could an institute be organized to do this?

Download the workshop report and the full agenda.​

Speaker(s)

Karthik Ram

Senior Research Data Scientist

Karthik Ram’s interests are focused on reproducible research, especially as it applies to global change.  Much of his recent work focuses on building tools and services around open data and growing diverse data science communities.  He contributes regularly to various projects including Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, and occasional blogs at Inundata.  He leads rOpenSci, a non-profit initiative founded in 2011 (with Scott Chamberlain and Carl Boettiger) to make scientific data retrieval reproducible through an ecosystem of open source tools, annual unconferences, and community developed software.  Dr. Ram graduated with a PhD in Ecology and Evolution from UC Davis and has since held postdoc positions at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.