By Mike Jackson, Software Architect.

My EPCC colleague, George Beckett, recently e-mailed me to comment that "I'm conscious that wikis typically deteriorate into a mess of conflicting/out-dated materials, if not managed closely". George asked whether the Institute had advice on good practices for using a wiki. So, for George and others with wiki worries, here are our top tips on using a wiki for a software project...

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By Mike Jackson, Software Architect.

We're helping EPCC and the Met Office promote the uptake, and ongoing development, of the Met Office NERC cloud (MONC) model within the atmospheric sciences community. We're assessing how easy it is to deploy MONC, helping set up a MONC virtual machine and advising on setting up resources for engaging with and supporting researchers.

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By Kenji Takeda, Microsoft Research

One thing that most of us never have enough of is time. Developing skills through Software Carpentry, software reusability, open data, open research, and growing the cohort of Research Software Engineers can really help reduce the time taken for us to do our research. The Software Sustainability Institute is leading the charge with this, and increasing people’s capabilities is a recipe for success. But when it comes down to it, eventually we have to run some code, a processing pipeline, big data computation, or share massive amounts of data.

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By Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director.

I’ve attended a lot of events during my time in academia, but I can think of only one where women outnumbered men (one of the BSA’s Science Communication Conferences). This is not a revelation, of course. It's well known that women are poorly represented at events: as keynote speakers, on expert panels, or just as attendees in general. When I've discussed this issue in the past, I've often been asked "How many women do you expect to see?". It’s a practical question, but not one I've yet seen answered.

Should the first target for an academic event be to simply mirror the population within the event's discipline? I’ve written this blog post with this principle in mind, but also to start a discussion about whether this is indeed a helpful target.​ It occurs to me that people must have already tried this, so I'd also welcome any data on these attempts and whether they successfully improved representation.

We're looking for equality of opportunity throughout academia, but this is a distant proposition in some disciplines. If we aim for representation as a first step, we provide a target that's easy to measure and possible to achieve. If an organiser can prove success at this first target - in other words, that they are representing the gender split in their community - it would help raise awareness of the event and this could help to further improve representation at later events. I realise that targets are fraught with complication, but they also give you something simple and quantitative to aim for. It's all too easy to lose sight of the bigger picture​ during the nerve-jangling panic of event organisation.

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The Institute's training activities have received a lot of interest from various international projects and institutions focusing on supporting research.

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This Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training workshop was the first one from a series of three workshops run in Australia and New Zealand. In both countries the growing demand for Software and Data Carpentry training meant that there was a need to grow instructor pool on the Southern Hemisphere. Aleksandra Pawlik who is one of the instructor trainers was invited to run these workshops in January 2016.

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This is my first week working with the Software Sustainability Institute at the University of Manchester.

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This Instructor Training was a part of an ELIXIR pilot project for rolling out Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry within ELIXIR Nodes. 20 new instructors based in 7 different countries were trained during this two day event which took place 13-14th January 2016. 

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By Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Institute Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford.

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by Vincent Knight, Institute Fellow and Lecturer in Operational Research, School of Mathematics, Cardiff University

From the 25th till the 29th of January the University of Namibia (UNAM) hosted PyCon Namibia. This brought together more than 100 delegates from a variety of backgrounds and countries: USA, UK, Canada, Holland, Brazil, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and of course Namibia were all represented with 63 UNAM students and 30 local DjangoGirls attendees.

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