The N8CIR RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders Day is a 2-part in-person workshop. The morning will be dedicated to discussions between RSE team leaders to share approaches to issues related to RSE teams. The afternoon will be an opportunity for aspiring and future leaders to hear from current RSE leaders, join the discussion and collaborate on some of the challenges faced by RSEs. We will be joined by Kate Jennings who will facilitate a workshop on Increasing Influence and Impact for RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders and Martin Callaghan who will facilitate a workshop on how AI will impact our skills, competencies and team structures.
Increasing Influence and Impact for RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders Kate Jennings
A practical, interactive workshop that helps RSE leaders and aspiring leaders strengthen their influence, engage key stakeholders with confidence, and increase their impact without relying on formal authority.
Participants will learn to:
- Engage group leaders and key stakeholders effectively to
- Communicate the benefits of what the RSE Leader role can offer
- Identify the different factors that motivate others
- Understand the characteristics of their natural influencing style (informed by a brief pre-session questionnaire)
- Recognise how their natural influencing style helps and hinders their influence and impact
- Use WIIFM to shape more effective conversations with key stakeholders
- Flex their influencing style to better connect with others
- Develop an effective influencing strategy for their work
- Identify key actions to take forward
Kate Jennings is an internationally accredited executive coach and facilitator with over 15 years’ experience helping leaders and technical teams in academic, research, and technology environments increase their influence, confidence, and impact. She has worked extensively with universities, academic institutes, and research-intensive organisations, supporting research software engineers and technical specialists to step into leadership with clarity, credibility, and practical insight.
The "Post-Boilerplate" RSE Team: Balancing Structure, Skills, and Integrity in the Age of AI Martin Callaghan
As a community, we have successfully documented (if not solved) the challenges (career progression, funding, project acquisition) to the RSE community. One of our next steps is to agree on the solutions in a landscape that is being shifted by Generative AI.
We are currently facing two new pressures:
- Code Quality: Researchers using consumer-grade chatbots ("Shadow AI") are sometimes generating code that is plausible but often flawed which increases the cleanup time that RSE teams need to do.
- Internal Politics: RSE teams need to navigate the divide between "Accelerationist/Tech Bro" hype (which many academics reject) and "Sovereign/Open Science" tooling (which fits much better with our values).
In this session, we will look at how we might restructure our teams to become Technical Curators; how we might move on from writing boilerplate code to validating, curating, and architecting robust scientific software.