Collecting up activity as we get stuck in to the year

(JW) It doesn’t feel like a month since I last remembered to write a weeknote - good habits can be hard to build!

So we’ve got quite a lot to cover. A member of our young team has moved on - Alba had been at UKCEH for a few years, previously as a dedicated developer in a group in the Biodiversity Science Area, mainly focused on the AMI (Automated Monitoring of Insects) project, a novel light/camera trap for moths (no harm to them!) that’s starting to add bioacoustics to its new version. I’ll miss working with Alba, but the pull of work with a flexible international base is strong!

It also feels like a busy time as people try to draw existing project work to a natural stopping point, while also engaging in discussions and background learning about new projects that need to call on the services of an RSE group.

Some of this already-funded work on ongoing projects - the “lightweight process” for making expressions of interest is in place, and it’s reassuring to see that approach has spread to approaches to the whole Environmental Data Science group where our team is based. The first of these is MAMBO - a Europe-wide project on “Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of Biodiversity” - which I’m likely to end up working on, looking forward to learning more about.

Some of this is discussion about speculative work - with so many active research groups looking at many different pools of funding, UKCEH has a “bid prioritisation” practise to make sure that groups aren’t accidentally competing, and that the organisation doesn’t suffer from too much success if it’s granted support for more work than its people can sustain! At the very early stages of that is a network of conversations within Groups (collections of teams, from 2-50 people in size) about what funding bids to make. As RSEs we get reached out to both for technical perspective and to find out if there’s a potential fit for our interests.

I’ve not been here a year yet, so this is my first experience of it. Even at ground level it means a lot more to think about than usual, and lots of potential for pleasant distraction - like learning about the almost 100 years of continuous monitoring of the condition of Lake Windermere.

What else has been on the stack, as if that wasn’t enough?

• The Scottish RSE community meeting this week offered an overview of EVERSE - a European initiative to lay the groundwork for what sounds like a distributed version of the Software Sustainability Institute. The meeting felt quiet, perhaps many people in that sphere are occupied by the same change-of-year conditions of extra planning and thinking while deadlines approach as we seem to be.

• We sat down as a team and worked through a shared todo list for the RSE activity that isn’t about projects, but cultural contribution: the “Four Pillars” of which software development is just one (Community, Training and Policy are the others). We’re trying to nominate someone to look after each pillar. Cue some discussion about the prevailing cultural forces ;)

• I’ve been in some intro meetings for the SSI Fellowship 2025 scheme, of which I’m happy to be a part. “Better Hardware, Better Research” is slowly taking shape over on Codeberg. The planning and writing is happening in my own time, not working hours, which is partly why it’s happening so slowly. But we’ve got a venue lined up and an Edinburgh workshop date - the day before Open Hardware Summit starts. I had a lightning talk proposal to the Summit accepted as a panel talk in a whole session about environmental monitoring, and am looking forward to that! And I’ve been able to put learning and development time towards going on a Field electronics and sensors 2-day course that runs occasionally out of our UKCEH site, develop my soldering muscles :)