- What in your experience has destroyed trust between DRI & researchers? What can we learn from this?
- What challenges have you experienced in day-to-day communication between DRI professionals and researchers?
- How can organizations maintain employee trust in their EDI/DEI commitments amidst the rise of 'tech bro' cultures?
- Does embedding RSEs etc within academic groups increase trust - or just reduce cross-communication?
- Are there any good strategies to build trust with researchers as a junior SSE embedded in a research group?
- Why should there be only one way of doing things when the groups have different remits?
- Do you have any horror stories of where communication between DRI/academia broke down? What did you learn?
- Why would there be a lack of trust?
- Removing camps is good, but not every DRI professional wants to or gets paid well enough to become a kind of pseudo-academic.
- More of a comment, but this might be of interest: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bAffqnAKHYcLGqqtlrSxg
Provision of training materials and digital support networks for academics
- Should the training materials be written by a technical writer rather than someone from the research computing team
- How do you understand training needs?
- How do you train your trainers?
- How do you make your training accessible to people from all backgrounds? (I’m thinking there’s a problem around jargon - hate the word carpentries!)
- What role do academic peer support networks play in your institution? Do IT teams run them or do academics run them themselves?
- Is your training included in the central doctoral training provision?
- What makes self-guided training work well?
- To what extent do you think training should be developed within an institution vs training that could be developed to serve multiple institutions?
- How do you deal with no-shows?
- What form does your training take? Lecture, practical, self-paced?
- For advanced content how do you ensure material is broad enough to get sufficient interest to be worthwhile running, but also specific enough to be relevant?
- What about training beyond basic programming? What other areas do we need to cover?
- Is a different approach required for students and postdocs?
- Where is training delivered from? Library? IT? Central institute-wide training team? Another area?
- How do we ensure that the importance of training is recognised by line managers etc?
- Creating training materials and keeping them up to date takes an awful amount of time. Should it be a dedicated role within the DRI professionals family?
- How do you assess the value of training; what questions do you ask and how long after the training has been run?
Making connections as the ‘lone’ DRI professional in your workspace and hybrid working solutions
- Do you think your job could be done well fully in person or fully online, or is some hybrid balance necessary for your role?
- How have you or your managers built in residence for your role if you’re absent for illness / annual leave?
- Does your line manager insist on a minimum number of in-person days/week? Does it depend on seniority? Or the length of employment?
- What are the mental health issues of remote working?
- Have you found the experience varies if the staff member is new to the team? E.g. asking questions during onboarding and developing relationships?
- You always hear about what works well for "me" in regards to hybrid working. How do you take into account others' preferences so everyone can thrive?
- How do you balance the need to go and physically fix systems / go to the data center against hybrid working? Or should systems wait until you're in the office
- How could you balance hybrid work when F2F works better for those you work with vs home/online that works better for you?