Our History

The Research Software and Systems Engineers of Africa (RSSE Africa) forum grew out of the experience of RSSEs (primarily at SANBI at the University of the Western Cape, in Cape Town, South Africa) in supporting colleagues across the continent. It was launched in November 2019 (at the ASBCB 2019 conference) as an informal skills sharing forum. Our aims are to raise awareness of the specific contributions that RSSEs make to research in Africa, to organise events for RSSEs on the continent and to provide a forum for sharing skills and opportunities within the community.

The forum founders were Peter van Heusden and Eugene de Beste from the SANBI, South Africa.

In 2022 ReSA commisioned a survey of research software organisations, projects, communities and funders in the Global South. The data and report is available on Zenodo. For this mapping exercise, a number of African RSE community members were recruited as consultants to ensure the project could build on local knowledge as RSE is not yet a term widely known on the continent.

To build on the momentum from the mapping project by ReSA and the consultants, and to incorporate additional knowledge of the local landscape, Talarify submitted another project to the Open Life Science programme, this time with a focus on finding local stakeholders and creating an interactive map where both ReSA data and the new information from the latest mapping exercise would be displayed.

Project title: Mapping the RSSE landscape in Africa

Project outcomes:

1. More than 150 additional African research software stakeholders were identified and included in the dataset;
2. A new form was developed to capture information from the African community;
3. An interactive R Shiny web app was developed to display the data on a map; and
4. A lot of new awareness was created about the global RSE movement and RSSE-Africa in particular. Talarify showcased the mapping project at the World Science Forum in December 2022 in Cape Town, South Africa.

The aims of this study are to provide useful information to the RSE Community on the subject of how to establish and develop RSE Groups, through comparing and contrasting the histories, strategies, and operational realities of a selection of UK-based RSE Groups.

This information will primarily be gathered by Dr Kim Martin during the course of the ‘RSE Roadtrip’ (from 5th May to 16th June 2023, with financial support from the Software Sustainability Institute) mainly via interviews with individual RSEs (as circumstances allow, given voluntary participation of RSEs).

Kimberly C. Martin. (2023). Research Software Engineering Groups in the UK; Origins, Organisational Context, and Practices - ‘RSE Roadtrip’ Planning Document (v0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7852661

This series of talks celebrated International Research Software Engineering (RSE) Day, declared to be on the second Thursday of October by the International RSE Society. The talks aimed to give the audience a comprehensive understanding of the RSE role and the value RSEs can offer to the research environment. It was aimed at new graduates and early-career researchers who may wish to consider RSE as a future career direction, as well as policy makers within research institutions and funding agencies who may wish to develop an understanding of the importance of RSE in the research context, and how and why RSEs should be developed and supported.

The mini-school was co-organised by Dr. Kim Martin from Stellenbosch.

More information: https://nithecs.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/NITheCS-Mini-school-Oct-23.pdf

Recordings: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE9Qrf4CJnRHQqxnnQDdS2nSs_XV5HoEG

Richard Dushime joined the RSSE Africa organising team in June and helped us to translate this month’s newsletter to French!

We hope this will greatly benefit our French-speaking African community members as well as the broader international French-speaking community!

Read our first newsletter available in English and French online.

The National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) partnered with the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) to launch a new category with two awards recognising outstanding SET and innovation contributions through research software as follows:

• Research Software Award – contribution that enables research through the development, maintenance or extension of research software in any scientific field, including the humanities and social sciences
• NSTF-SADiLaR Research Software Award: Human Language Technologies (HLT) – contribution that enables the processing, understanding, generation, or analysis of human language in written, spoken, or signed form.

The University of Cape Town’s UCT eResearch Centre played a leading role in shaping the awards category.

Read more: https://nstf.org.za/research-software-awards/

EVERSE, the UCT eResearch Centre and the Science for Africa Foundation co-hosted an online engagement event bringing together research software engineers from Europe and Africa to discuss challenges, best practices, and opportunities for improving research code quality. The event highlighted equity gaps in software development — data shared showed around 80% of contributors to common code-quality tools are male creators based in the EU and US, with less than 1% based in Africa.

Participants included Peter van Heusden (UWC/SANBI), Anelda van der Walt (UCT eResearch / Talarify), Stephen Potter (South African Astronomical Observatory), Gabriella Razzano (OpenUp), Barbara Ojur (SKAO/SARAO), and Paul Korir (CEMA, University of Nairobi), alongside colleagues from the National Research Foundation.

Watch the event recording, view the presentation slides, or explore EVERSE’s RSQKit and TechRadar tools.

Read the write-up: Exploring Research Software Quality Across Continents