Summary of the first Finnish RSE meetup

Samantha Wittke, Richard Darst
June 12, 2023

The first Finnish RSE meetup was held on 30. May 2023 at Dipoli, Otaniemi. About 15 RSEs and RSE interested people joined in person and online.

We started with an introduction round, where everyone could tell about their background and vision for RSE in Finland. The consensus for the future of RSE in Finland was to build a community for experience exchange and collaboration, and the meetup was a great first step into that direction.

We then tried to define what is an RSE by discussing what it would mean to leave out either of the letters in the term RSE.

Aalto RSE group and RSE activities at CSC were introduced, as well as the activities of Nordic-RSE and the CodeRefinery project. Presentation material can be found behind the links at each name.

The vision of a community based RSE support was introduced and discussed. Many places/services nowadays have their own virtual office hours / garage session / user support coffee breaks. How would a RSE garage look like, would it be useful and how could it be realized?

You can find the full event notes here: https://hackmd.io/@nordic-rse/fin_rse_meetup

We concluded the day by summarizing our goals and needs for the future of RSE in Finland:

What would we need from management levels?

  • Cost object with funding for future RSE development activities
  • Enable cross-organization RSE collaboration, that allows sharing work-time

What could RSE-RSE collaboration and support look like?

  • Occasional consultations on a technology you happen to know
    • Cross-organization garage pings
    • Consider joining CodeRefinery chat and talk about cool stuff you do / ask questions to other RSEs
      • #nordic-rse (about the org and RSE life), #TIL (cool stuff you do/build), #help (asking for help/answering), #general (misc), #finland, streams
    • Submit ideas to and attend the Nordic-RSE seminar series (self-development)
    • Low barrier to sending messages

Things that we can do ourselves:

  • Update Nordic-RSE page to make it clear why / what activities someone should join (e.g. seminar series, chat).
  • Talk to others about how cool this meeting was
  • Work on spreading the info from our chats a bit more (dedicated channels in internal chats)
  • Local FI meetup around the time of the Nordic-RSE unconference in October '23 (more info to follow)