This is a starter pack for bringing together your community of research software engineers (RSEs) at your institution. Specifically, this is geared toward individuals that consider themselves Research Software Engineers (but not managers) and want to create a community. If you are a manager and are looking to create/hire an RSE community, see this article. The starter pack here is presented in sections, where each corresponds with a markdown file in this folder.
To make your case, you will need to have a solid understanding of what an RSE is, different subtypes, and where they might be hiding at your institution. You can read brief bios for RSEs in the stories folder to support these definitions with actual examples. You can also browse the rseng community templates to get a sense of what RSEs are working on.
It's helpful to write a short abstract and longer specific aims to summarize the problems and needs you see at your institution, how establishing an RSE group can help, and broadly how you plan to do it. This is primarily for you and your team's benefit, but can be helpful to share with others interested in your initiative.
Once you have a proposal, you need to build a plan around it. An initiative is nothing without a plan for engaging with researchers, and providing support.
We have a community portal template ready to go, to start you on your journey.
How do you find your community? What do you tell them? After you find them, you might even take extra steps like creating a Github organization to collaborate on code, or having meetings and/or video chat.