In the third of our series of guest posts about the SSI Collaboration Workshop, we hear from freelance web developer Anna Powell-Smith, who shares her tips following the workshop.
_______________

I recently attended the Collaborations Workshop as a supported developer: thanks to SSI for organising a very interesting two days.

I’m a freelance web developer, and I came to the Collaborations Workshop partly to show off my Open Domesday project, the first free online copy of Domesday Book. But I also came to learn about the cutting edge of software in British academia, and observe the challenges that academics face when producing open data and open source code.

After a thought-provoking series of workshops, discussions and lightning talks, I could write a long, reflective post about the nature of programming within academia, and how to create the incentives needed for research to produce great software as well as great papers.

However, I found that the most productive discussions I had over the course of the workshop were highly practical. So I thought I would share some services that I use as a developer, and that – based on my observations over the workshop – might provide simple, tangible benefits for technically-minded academics too.

Tip 1: Sharing knowledge though QA

I use the question-answering StackOverflow day in, day out to help me code. I couldn’t be a developer without it. It struck me that many academic disciplines might like a similar community question-answering board – where users can ask questions, vote for the best answer, and award other users points for helping out.

Luckily, setting up your own system is straightforward. One option is StackExchange, the software that powers StackOverflow. StackExchange is already setting up a bunch of communities based on its software – there’s an active maths site, and proposals for others ranging from neuroinformatics to paleontology that you can support.

If you’d rather roll your own site, there’s OSQA. This is a free, open-source clone of the StackExchange software, easy for any sysadmin to set up.

Tip 2: Productivity and collaboration

Just three small, but hopefully useful, recommendations:

• If This Then That lets you glue web services together. Say you want to post your group’s Twitter updates automatically to Facebook: it can do that. Or get an email or SMS update whenever an RSS feed updates: it can do that too. It’s simple and brilliant.
• People think GitHub is for managing code, which it is, but you can use its issue-tracker to manage any kind of collaborative project, not just software. Try Unfuddle or Sifter.
• Doodle helps organise meetings at a time to suit everyone. Do not underestimate its power.

Tip 3: Becoming a coder

Workshop participants talked about the importance of teaching everyone to code. (Hear hear!) I recommend the white-hot Codecademy, which offers a series of browser-based JavaScript lessons. I also like CodeSchool for more experienced developers.

If you already have HTML and CSS skills but struggle to get sites looking professional, the new and very exciting Twitter Bootstrap is your friend. It’s a collection of flexible, adaptable design elements that massively simplify the process of putting a site together.

Tip 4: The open data community

Finally, academics interested in collaboration and open data might like to know about the Open Knowledge Foundation and its work promoting open science:

• The Science Code Manifesto calls for better credit and citation systems for code created during research.
• The Panton Principles are a manifesto for open scientific data.
• The Panton Fellowships support scientists who actively promote open data (this year’s applications now closed).

The Open Science Working Group is the starting point for all the OKFN’s campaigns on open data, open access and open research: join us there.

In the second of our series of guest posts from the SSI Collaboration Workshop, we hear from Mark Woodbridge of Imperial College, who reflects on his own career and his personal experiences of many of the issues raised by the workshop.

_______________

This year will mark my tenth anniversary as a software developer, most of which I have spent in academia. I started out developing a web application in Java using Eclipse on Linux. This much hasn’t changed, despite the rise of Android, NoSQL, HTML5, DVCS and many other technologies and tools. Neither have the basic principles of software architecture, testing, and usability. So I’m lucky that I was encouraged to pick up good habits at the start of my career.

But there have been other invariants. I’m still not sure whether I’m really a post-doc or a member of staff, whether I’m a researcher, an engineer or a programmer, and how my career should develop accordingly. As a computer scientist, I still often feel completely unqualified to communicate effectively with specialists in the department in which I work. And I still do a bad job of explaining my job to friends and family, who assume that all IT people in universities either lecture on programming or fix computers.

Initiatives such as the Software Sustainability Institute and DevCSI (thanks to JISC and the EPSRC) cannot by themselves solve these problems, but they can make a huge difference not only in pursuing their stated goals (such as promoting best practice, building communities around software and promoting the use of local developers) but, as part of this process, providing developers with the tools and resources necessary to advance their own work and careers. This must involve taking the initiative and proving to their institutions that they can cost-effectively develop flexible, high-quality software that exceeds users’ expectations. Having achieved this the results must be shared and promoted to build a positive feedback loop that inspires more faith from universities and funding bodies.

The Collaborations Workshop, which I attended with the generous support of the DevCSI project, is a unique event in providing a discussion forum for all these issues. It’s a developer event that importantly isn’t a hackfest – instead its objective is to encourage collaborative funding applications. However, for me it was about meeting people (invariably experienced, knowledgeable and inspiring) and finding that they struggle with the same things, namely job security, promoting their software, keeping up to date and getting recognition. And I think the best thing we can do, in the spirit of the workshop, is at least try to form longstanding, informal collaborations where we begin to work on solutions to these issues.

For me the foundation of these collaborations are built through discussion (and some serendipity), and the best way to enable this is by getting people together with diverse backgrounds but the same interests, and to let them set the agenda. This was definitely the case in Oxford. The Collaborative Ideas and Break-out sessions were the perfect format: the Five Important Things list generated by the groups should be valuable to anyone working on academic software, and the Lightning Talks slides are a really interesting snapshot of the varied research and backgrounds of the attendees. This is the best reason for attending again next year – the workshop provides an opportunity to learn a huge amount in a very short time about relevant projects, technologies, initiatives, and, most importantly, other developers. This is the knowledge that enables developers to work more productively and justify their role in enabling and supporting research in academia and beyond.

In this guest post, Quanbin Sun from the University of Salford discusses his experience at the Collaborations Workshop 12. Quanbin was one of five developers who received support from DevCSI to attend this event and report back for the community.
_______________

During 21st and 22nd March, the Collaboration Workshop 12 was taking place at Queen’s College of Oxford University. The workshop mainly focused on software development in academic projects and attracted more than fifteen researchers and developers. Thirty two topics were raised and discussed during the two day event and more than twenty lightning talks were presented.
 
 
Among these discussions and topics, I enjoyed the ones that were related to the collaboration between scientific researchers and software developers, and a possible new species for academic research projects – the scientific software developer – who acts between the two or plays a dual role in the research.
 

Who/What is a Scientific Software Developer

 
Alongside the rapid development of computer and computer technology, most recent scientific research will have involved computer software or software development. In the workshop someone mentioned that 40% of research projects were linked to software. We heard about topics such as “Teaching programming to scientist” and “Successful collaboration with computer scientists”, which provided some nice suggestions. However, there are some natural limitations with these approaches. For example, the strength of a scientist relies on their research ability and if they start to care about programming they may lost focus. The computer scientists (referred to as to software developers, for clarification during the discussions) usually care about the quality of the software and cannot be fully aware of the research process.

So we need someone who can act the both roles and carry a software project toward success. Someone who knows the nature of the research and also is familiar with principles of software development.
 

Current status of Scientific Software Developer

 
It is quite common that researchers do programming themselves and as we know this usually result in a poor, non-reusable, non-maintainable software.

EPSRC only invested £9 million per annum in software during the past five years. Compared to the budget of £950M for the year 2012/2013, software seems definitely ignored.

A similar role does exist, but unfortunately there is a lack of identification and the person who does this job has usually not been recognised properly. Such a person may be treated as a RA or RF, although they do a different job. There are some groups (Scientific Software Development and Management, Computational Science, and Computational Scientists and Engineers) on LinkedIn, but we still lack a formal name for whatever we called new species.

Gorissen from University of Southampton mentioned they now have some posts for specialised scientific software developers. There was one workshop participant from Imperial University who has similar job. But the we have not heard much of these from other universities. Henji from Microsoft also mentioned that Microsoft Research (Cambridge) has “Research Software Development Engineers”, although this is not an academic position.
 

Where does a Scientific Software Developer go?

 
The main problem with the role of the scientific software developer is not the lack of a proper name, but the lack of career track and path. There isn’t a senior position for such a role. Eventually, you have to follow the route of Research Assistant –> (Research Fellow) –> Lecturer –> Senior Lecturer –> (Reader) –> Professor if you want to develop your career further. But as a scientific software developer you may lack publications or project grants, which are essential in climbing the academic ladder. If you decided to opt for a career in industry, they may consider you to have no practical experience. So basically, you have wasted your time in such a role, as it cannot provide you with a strong portfolio.

Another problem identified in the workshop is that in bids for academic research projects, the labour of software developer is usually under-estimated, so there may not be enough funding for another developer. From the university’s point of view, having a pure scientific software developer on staff who is not subject to any project is a waste and risk in finance, especially in the current situation of government funding cuts.
 

What is the future of the Scientific Software Developer?

 
Now, and in the near future, scientific software developers will still be a minority in academia. But things are getting better, as Dan Emmerson from EPSRC introduced the Action Plan of “Software as an Infrastructure”. We will expect more funding and job posts in the coming years.