Webinar 033: Discovering and Addressing Social Challenges in Scientific Software Projects
Channel: IDEAS Productivity
Date: 2019-09-20

Full title: Discovering and Addressing Social Challenges in the Evolution of Scientific Software Projects
Presented by: Rene Gassmoeller (UC Davis)
Presented on: 2019-09-11

In recent years scientific software projects have increasingly incorporated state-of-the-art technical best practices like continuous integration into their development cycle. However, many projects still struggle to create and maintain an active and welcoming user/developer community, and there exists little documentation on what makes a scientific software community successful. In this webinar I will introduce my work — as a Better Scientific Software Fellow — to collect typical social challenges and potential solutions that arise during the evolution of a scientific software project. Aimed at current and prospective software maintainers and community leaders, I will discuss topics such as building and maintaining a welcoming community atmosphere, overcoming skepticism of sharing science and software, mediating between users working on conflicting topics or publications, and providing credit and growth opportunities for community members. Finally, I hope to initiate a conversation among project and community leaders about what makes communities successful so that we can learn from each other and improve scientific software development together.

For more information about the HPC Best Practices webinars, including slides and Q&A archives for this presentation, other presentations in the series, and a mailing list for announcements of future webinars, please visit https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpc-best-practices-webinars/