First RSE community event at WSL Birmensdorf

With financial support from the Open Research Data (ORD) Program of the ETH Domain , we have also started to establish an RSE community at WSL, and link it with the communities already available at other institutions such as ETHZ, EPFL or EMPA.

On February 3rd, 2025, more than 40 people attended the first RSE@WSL in-person meetup at WSL Birmensdorf. The event started with several guest presentations from Empa and ETH Zurich.

From Empa, Anusch Bachofner described the “Build-up of Scientific IT @ Empa”, managing to grow the Scientific IT team from 2 people in 2018 to currently 7 people, and Aliaksandr (Sasha) Yakutovich shared more details about the “Data & Software Community @ Empa”.

From ETH Zurich, Uwe Schmitt presented an overview of “The RSE movement”, as “an initiative to emphasize the importance of software in research and academia”, and Tarun Chadha presented the progress towards an “RSE community buildup in Switzerland”, a community initiated by ETH Zurich and further developed in the frame of the ORD project RSE4ORD: building a research software engineering community to promote open science.

The open discussion that followed was energizing, covering many thought-provoking topics such as how to level the playing field and to improve the quality of coding for researchers (e.g. with guidelines and getting access to help and training from professional software engineers), boilerplate and standardized code being shared in the community (for certain generic purposes and applications), how to raise the value of produced research software and how to deal with long term software maintenance in a research institution with non-permanent contracts.