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http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

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http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

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Schedule & conveners

Introduction statements

Debate

pre-submitted questions

audience questions

audience polls

After the debate�#DataHelpDesk, vEGU chat, materials page on website, permanent discussion forum: http://bit.ly/vegu21-software-discuss

Daniel S. Katz�(moderator)

Daniel Nüst

Niels Drost

Lesley Wyborn

David Topping

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

During the next 90 minutes, we will talk about everything related to creation, use, and sharing of research software across all geoscience research disciplines. We will start by hearing short introduction statements by our debaters before continueing to answer and debate your questions. We will also run a couple of polls with the audience. Already now I want to point out that we hope this debate will be a starter of many discussions, and there are multiple options to stay engaged after this event. You can find them all on the great debate’s website which you can find in the chat or at bit dot ly slash v e g u 2 1 minus debate. Now let me briefly introduce the team behind the debate and the debaters.

My name is Daniel Nüst, and I’m with the University of Münster. The co-conveners are Niels Drost from the Netherlands eScience Center, David Topping from the University of Manchester, and Lesley Wyborn from the Australian National University. Our moderator today is Daniel Katz. Dan is an expert in research software himself and we are very happy to have him guide us through the discussion towards the really hard questions. He is chief scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the US and Research Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also founding editor of the Journal of Open Source Software and an active member of the research software community, not the least known for his work on software citation and software sustainability.

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Housekeeping/announcements

Ask your questions through Zoom Q&A and use the upvoting 👍 button.

We’ll try to transfer questions from the chat on the vEGU website’s stream, but no voting or polls there.

Twitter: #vegu21 #gdb3

https://blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2021/04/06/�how-to-vegu-the-egu-code-of-conduct/

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

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Debaters

Carina Haupt

German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Kim Serradell

Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain

Patrick Sanan

ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Rolf Hut

MacGyver scientist, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Susanne Buiter

Tectonics and Geodynamics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

And now, please meet our debaters.

Carina Haupt is is head of the Software Engineering group in the Intelligent and Distributed Systems department of the Institute for Software Technology of the German Aerospace Center DLR. Carina and her team aim to support domain scientists by creating high quality software for their day to day problems. Carina is an active member of the german research software engineers community and conducts her own research in scientific software engineering, opensource, and knowledge and data management.

Kim Serradell is the manager of the Computational Earth Sciences group at the Earth Sciences department in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Kim’s group guides scientists around the technical challenges in using high performance computing. He is responsible for the operation of model runs such as MONARCH and the CALIOPE Air Quality System and contributes to the HPC community on an international strategic level, as a teacher, as well as in making HPC software stacks more efficient.

Patrick Sanan [canon] is a computational mathematician and scientific software developer in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics group in the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich. Patrick pursues cross-disciplinary research combining applied mathematics, computational geometry, parallel algorithms, and physical simulation. His interests lead to diverse activities for example in electroacoustic and computer music, software for large parallel geodynamic simulations, or scientific application testing.

Rolf Hut is an assistant professor at the Water Resources Engineering department of Delft University of Technology. Rolf is an advocate for open science and principal investigator on the eWaterCycle project, where the team is building a platform that makes computational experiments easier for hydrologists and offers easy access to models made by other hydrologists as well as to commonly used input data sources through open standards and containers. His interests also include geoscientific science communication, for example using games.

And last but not least, Susanne Buiter [Bautah]. She is newly appointed professor in Tectonics and Geodynamics at RWTH Aachen University where she teaches and researches in deformation processes from outcrop to plate scale. Susanne’s tools are numerical finite-element and analogue sandbox techniques. Before coming to Aachen, she worked for the Geological Survey of Norway. Susanne also was Programme Committee Chair for EGU for the 2018, 2019 and 2020 General Assemblies and served as president for the Tectonics and Structural Geology Division from 2013 to 2017.

Please do check out the detailed speaker profiles on our website and take a look at their excellent work. I apologise to the speakers for not including much of their great outputs because they were too numerous or too hard to pronounce.

Carina, Kim, Patrick, Rolf and Susanne - thank you very much for joining us today!

Dan - let’s get started with the debate!

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Live poll results no. 1 - “the audience”

👍

😞

👍

✍️

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

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Live poll results no. 2 - “the way forward”

‼️

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

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Research software should be like infrastructure. Let RSEs build highways and scientists be pathfinders, don’t force one to be the other.

We need to make sure that work is reproducible, and it has to be open for that. Diversity of geoscience topics and edge cases prohibit mandatory sharing of all code, but foundational ethic of sharing is important.

Context of software matters. A clear scope statement and simple quick start documentation manage expectations and reduce fear of sharing.

If reproducibility is impossible (HPC, months), ensure interpretability and follow ethics of sharing (logs etc.) so that reviewers can inspect, give access to infrastructure, and clearly document the used software stacks.

Journal papers to credit software are a placeholder. We need to find ways to acknowledge software for what it is, e.g., software citation.

Amount of basic training vs. sticking to specialities is an open questions with different opinions.

It is possible for publishers to demand checking of workflows before sent out to review and scientific quality is evaluated.�Reproducible != Reusable != software quality.

Exciting technology exists but communication, community aspects, and broad basic software literacy are crucial.

Culture change is hard and senior scientists must drive it, and all aspects of science are touched (publishers, funders, …)

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

Opening statements:

Carina Haupt: We don’t share and reuse research software enough.

Kim: Give credit to authors and contributors of research software. Make RSEs coauthors of papers, it is important for their careers as well.

Patrick: We need to teach fundamentals of software development and its ethics of openness and collaboration to scientists, and discuss what tools we use in training. Scientists as a very special kind of users.

Rolf: Any effort aimed at teaching scientist to write better code is wasted. Scientists should focus on their science and good RSEs and good research software are invisible - like roads, they are infrastructure. If there is no road, scientists will find their own path but it will not be efficient or sustainable. Instead, you want RSEs to build the highway for the entire community, while scientists are great pathfinders.

Susanne: Software should be FAIR - assumes that software is open, and it should be, but my own software is not! Ideal is clear, but there are pragmatic reasons why it is not.

Closing statements:

Carina: Need structured roles and RSE expertise for big projects.

Kim: We’re on a good way to apply better practices, this debate is a sign for that.

Patrick: Community aspect is crucial. RSE should be written into grants.

Rolf: We’re building the system for hydrology! Be careful with statements what PhDs and RSEs _should_ do, but worry about the challenges (academic structure and culture) - culture change is hard. Senior scientists should be the ones driving the change.

Susanne: What does extra load on the publisher mean for the costs.

...

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Thanks

to the 140+ participants in the session!

Stay connected, improve research software: #DataHelpDesk, vEGU chat (few weeks),�materials page on website, permanent discussion forum: http://bit.ly/vegu21-software-discuss

http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate

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http://bit.ly/vegu21-debate