The first Nordic-RSE conference in May 2024

On May 30th and 31st of 202, the Nordic-RSE community met for the first time in person on the Otaniemi campus of Aalto university in Espoo, Finland. After we had originally planned to meet in Stockholm in 2020, we were happy to finally get together in the same space as a community. While Nordic-RSE has continued evolving in the last 4 years, this conference in many ways felt like an official kick-off for the association.

The team behind the scenes consisted of Nordic-RSE members from Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Together, they have been planning and preparing the conference for about six months. We were incredibly lucky to receive sponsoring from the Software Sustainability Institute and Aalto Universtiy. This event would not have taken place without their support, and we are forever grateful. Furthermore, discussions with organizers from other RSE conferences, such as RSECon and US-RSE, helped us a lot to prepare for this event. Thank you so much!

Participants to the conference came from seven countries (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom) and from a number of scientific backgrounds. They were employed at all levels ranging from students to researchers, from junior RSEs to RSE leaders.

The event started on Thursday with an informal introduction session where each one of the 28 participants could create their own name tag and get to know each other in relaxed and loosly led group conversations. The first Nordic-RSE in-person conference program officially started after a lunch break, but lively discussions among the participants had already started before and during lunch.

In the opnening session, Nordic-RSE was presented in detail, describing the long path that led from its conception, through its foundation, to finally meeting physically in the same room for this conference. At the end of the first day, we met for dinner at a restaurant on campus, and afterwards- in true Finnish fashion - we moved across the street to the sauna where the bright summer evening continued.

Martin O'Reilly from the Alan Turing Institute in the UK, representing the Software Sustainability Institute, opened Friday morning with a keynote talk. He talked about the growth of Research Software Engineering and its vital role in research.

Eirini Koutsaniti from the Swiss National Supercomputing Center followed with a second keynote talk about enhancing HPC service management.

The submitted conference talks ranged from experience reports to tool presentations and demos. You can find all abstracts of the conference in the Nordic-RSE conference 2024 book of abstracts, and the few public notes that were taken at the conference, along with some slides, on the event HackMD.

As this was the first such conference that we held, we had the chance to hear a lot about how the creation and leadership of RSE groups from Aalto University, the Arctic university in Tromsø and NTNU in Trondheim, and about infrastructures such as InfraVis in Sweden and CSC in Finland.

In the afternoon of Friday we dedicated time to workshops and discussions: the first discussion started with another introduction round, this time focusing on the relation to RSE and how supported everyone feels in their organization. After that we split into groups and discussed around the question "why should an organization have RSEs?". The results of these discussions were summarized in another blogpost titled "Small steps towards sustainable and open research". In the last discussion of the conference we started collecting feedback and planning the next conference.

Nordic-RSE conference 2025 will be arranged in Gothenburg and you can be part of the planning team by joining the discussion in the Nordic-RSE-2025 repository.

During the whole conference we had an open board to collect ideas for logos for Nordic-RSE. Currently the Nordic-RSE association uses the general RSE society logo with Nordic added before it. However, the community agrees that it would be nice to have something of our own.

We would like to thank all participants and organizers of the conference for a successful event and hope to see many of you in 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden!