Enabling Research Software Excellence through RSEng Community Conversations

A six-month-long online community conversation series titled "Enabling Open Science Through Research Code" (https://rse-asia.github.io/RSE_Asia/events.html) was organised jointly by the RSE Asia and RSSE Africa communities from October 2024 to March 2025. Drawing inspiration from CodeRefinery’s (https://coderefinery.org/) training materials, the series was contextualised for the communities in the Global South. Since, in the Global South, the open science movement is comparatively more recognised than the research software engineering (RSE) movement, the message was anchored in the language of open science to broaden reach and engagement among researchers who code.

Each episode featured an open panel discussion on a topic critical to sustainable and reproducible research software practices, such as reproducibility, documentation, and testing. People working in the Asian and African regions or those who had experience working/collaborating with researchers from these regions were invited as panellists. To enhance accessibility,  the sessions were recorded and shared with the communities. Each episode was also accompanied by a summary blog post and a curated resource sheet publicly available on Zenodo.

The impact of the series was visible in community engagement, with RSE Asia’s social media (https://www.linkedin.com/company/rse-asia-association/?viewAsMember=true) engagement rate increasing by 71% during the process. The series also enjoyed popularity with a globally distributed audience across varied time zones.

This poster presents the model that was used for organising this Global South focused community initiative, the strategies that were adopted to increase participation and accessibility, and the types of openly licensed outputs that were co-created. Overall, this series is a testament to how cross-regional collaboration and community-driven efforts can effectively promote research software excellence.

I would like to acknowledge the following individuals and organisations for their contribution towards conceptualising, planning, and organising this Community Conversation series on ‘Enabling Open Science Through Research Code’:

1. Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal, Co-Founder and Co-Lead, RSE Asia Association (https://www.linkedin.com/in/saranjeet-kaur-b-48ab769b/)
2. Anelda van der Walt, Co-Lead at RSSE Africa, Director and Founder at Talarify (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneldavanderwalt/?originalSubdomain=za)
3. Mireille Grobbelaar, Independent Researcher (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mireille-grobbelaar/)