Dear Colleagues,
The final presentation of the 2019-2020 CIG webinar series will be held next Thursday, May 14 from 2-3 PM Pacific Time.
The webinar on May 14 will be presented by Rene Gassmoeller (CIG, UC Davis) on Discovering and addressing social challenges during the evolution of scientific software projects. For additional details, please see the abstract below.
To join the webinar, please connect at: https://zoom.us/j/955605274
For additional information, please visit https://geodynamics.org/cig/events/webinars.
As this webinar may be of interest to the broader Earth Sciences community, we encourage forwarding this announcement on to additional mailing lists or colleagues that may not normally receive CIG announcements.
We look forward to your attendance and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!
Sincerely,
John Naliboff
Discovering and addressing social challenges during the evolution of scientific software projects
(Rene Gassmoeller, CIG)
In the last decade geodynamic software projects have increasingly incorporated state-of-the-art technical best practices like version control, documentation, and continuous integration into their development cycle. However, many projects still struggle to create and grow an active and welcoming user/developer community, and there exists little documentation on what makes a scientific software community successful.
In this CIG webinar I will summarize the work of my Better Scientific Software fellowship (https://bssw.io/), which collects typical social challenges and potential solutions that arise during the evolution of a scientific software project. Aimed at current and prospective software maintainers and community leaders, I will discuss topics such as building and maintaining a welcoming community atmosphere, overcoming skepticism of sharing science and software, mediating between users working on conflicting topics or publications, and providing credit and growth opportunities for community members. Finally, I hope to initiate a conversation about what makes communities successful so that we can earn from each other and improve scientific software together. CIG has promoted best software practices for years (https://github.com/geodynamics/best_practices), and can act as a discussion forum for what we think the future of scientific software development should look like.