What happens when collaborative organisations join forces to train the future of software sustainability?
This year, the OLS training team had a great opportunity to collaborate with the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) fellowship team to provide an all-round leadership training based on our Open Seeds programme. This is what happened:
SSI fellows are ambassadors of good computational and software practice. Moreover, it is very usual to find community builders and compulsive collaborators within this specific group of dRTPs (digital Research Technical Professionals). Our shared vision was that SSI Fellows emerge as adaptable, capable, ethical, and community-minded leaders in research software.
After an initial round of feedback, a specific and tailored curriculum was piloted for this cohort, drawing from 2 existent frameworks:
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Our Open Seeds Programme delivered by OLS (Open Life Science), which is a 16-week cohort-based mentorship and training programme focused on open science principles and community leadership.
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Research Community Management Training 101: Sessions delivered by the RCM Cooperative, which provide foundational and applied training in Research Community Management (RCM).
The results?
4 half day sessions combining training on tooling for open collaboration, Open science introduction, community mapping and open leadership among others. OLS and RCM teams delivered parts of the training, but we also brought in experts in Open tools and Open Infrastructure to give the best vision we could about these subjects.
These sessions had a steady and engaged group of participants who gave us a lot of food for thought to improve future iterations, while enjoying this pilot cohort and taking the most out of it:
Every career path is different. Fostering a community takes a lot of work and resilience.
Hearing from different perspectives of ppl who built careers/communities in different ways. the open ‘clinic’ discussion session to work thru community building difficulties was really helpful
Great discussion and framing - loved how license, readme, contributor guide and code of conduct all tied together.
Great speakers and topics all covering different facets in a really complimentary way
What’s next?
We have found that the training and support provided by RCM cooperative and OLS links very naturally with the ethos and activities of the SSI. Supporting SSI fellows, who are the emergent leaders of the dRTP community is a great way for all 3 organisations learn from each other and improve processes and materials to make the best research while nurture the community.
We also had great feedback on how to improve future iterations for these sessions: format of the sessions wasn’t very friendly to certain schedules, and fellows highlighted the need for more reflection and exercise discussion time. This feedback is also very useful to the ongoing work that we are doing to map our learning resources to the DIRECT framework skills for dRTPs roles.
If you want to have a full view of the curriculum, you can read our full report openly on Zenodo. You can find links to the learning resources and specifics about the sessions there.
We will definitely take all the feedback to keep improving future training cohorts and are looking forward to keeping collaborating with the SSI and RCM cooperative teams. Watch this space for news about the 2027 cohort!
The most important thing is to figure out what you want out of life, and follow the opportunities that lead to them
Mentorship is multiplication
Build so you can step back
This initiative has been supported by the DisCouRSE network + Flexible funds round 1 and the SSI fellowship team.