RSE worldwide session at RSECon25 - taking inspiration back to the Nordics

In September 2025 I visited the RSECon 2025, the RSE conference in the UK with my colleague Ruslan Zhuravchak as representatives from the Nordics. We had earlier been invited by Claire Wyatt, the leader of the RSE worldwide session to present about Nordic-RSE.

So we undusted our old Nordic-RSE presentation and went to work. What have we been up to in the last year (since the last RSE worldwide session)? And what a joy it was to look back at our achievements!

Greetings from the North

We had a successful in-person conference in Gothenburg this year with 43 participants, 23 contributions and a lot of networking. Read more about it in our conference blog post.

Some members of the community worked on getting the Journal of Open Source Software acknowledged and ranked in the Finnish Publication Forum. This makes it possible for PhD students to include a software paper into their PhD. Read more about that accomplishment in our news post.

Of course, we also have our challenges and shared about them in order to spark the discussion with other associations.

Our main challenges these days is to come up with some membership benefits, retaining momentum and grow the group that "does stuff".

We concluded with our next steps: Our next Nordic-RSE conference will take place in June 2026 in Tromsø, Norway. Apart from that we had a lunch meetup of RSEs in the capital region of Finland to celebrate international RSE day. And in February 2026 we will gather Finnish RSEs and friends as well as other people working around and supporting researchers (data stewards, infrastructure support etc.) in Espoo for No-BS Computing (Nordic Basic Scientific Computing) meetup.

We are also taking up or continuing our involvement with the international RSE council, survey and conference committee.

Presentation slides: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17381047

But now, what have we learned from other presentations in the RSE worldwide sessions?

Shared challenges, inspiring solutions

It was inspiring to see how active and diverse the global RSE community has become - from volunteer-led networks to nationally funded organizations. Despite the differences, we all seem to face similar challenges: keeping the community alive over time, getting proper recognition for RSE work, finding sustainable funding, and reaching new people. It was comforting (and motivating!) to realize that we’re not alone in this.

Many groups shared creative ways to tackle these issues. In France, RSE roles are formally recognized through the REFERENS job framework - a great step towards visibility. The Dutch community runs mentoring and onboarding programs to help new RSEs grow. In Canada, the Digital Research Alliance connects RSE work directly with national research infrastructure. And I loved the grassroots energy from RSE Asia and RSE Chile, showing how much can be achieved through passion and persistence.

The Society of RSE in the UK continues to impress with its scale and impact — 400 participants at their annual conference and multiple ways to engage, from mentoring to grants and surveys.

Taking inspiration back home

We came back from RSECon'25 full of ideas and motivation. For Nordic-RSE, we’ll start or keep exploring how to make RSE roles and work more visible, look into the necessity of supporting local and national subcommunities, and how to secure stable support for our activities.

Thanks to the Software Sustainability Institute for funding my visit to RSECon this year via my fellowship on community building within Finland and the Nordics. It enabled a lot of new connections and deepened existing ones, as well as learning from the more experienced community builders and associations and of course all the great talks!