Notices by Jez 🍞🌹 (petrichor@digipres.club)

@clacke No worries! In any case your point that they're cool and interesting things stands, and the analogy with software systems is thought-provoking

@clacke not exactly that, but more a piece parchment (usually) that has been scraped/washed clean and reused in whole, and where sometimes the previous writings can still be discerned (by eye, or by scientific analysis)

I guess this is where the truism about every overnight success being a decade in the making comes from. We saw it with Open Access: a lot of folks perceived it as arriving very suddenly, but a number of dedicated people had been working towards that for well over ten years.

One thing I've learned from #SystemsThinking so far is that systems tend to be extremely robust and able to absorb a wide range of variation in their parameters. In some ways that's pretty depressing because that's why it's so hard to make systemic change.

The silver lining is that you can actually be moving a lot of parameters in the right direction and it won't seem like it's having any effect, but then it will flip to a new state seemingly overnight.

@clacke I haven't listened to Ranarim for ages, thanks for the prompt to go and look them up again!

@clacke Also check out Hoven Droven, Tsuumi Sound System, Fru Skagerrak, Groupa, JPP, Nordic Fiddlers Block, Trolska Polska...

@clacke @n8 @liw @mlinksva But yes, this is 100% essential to solving this: building a sustainable base of skills within the institution instead of always employing research software engineers on soft money fixed-term contracts and throwing their expertise away every 2-3 years.

Changing the research culture as suggested is the other part of the equation. So many researchers hate admitting that they are anything less than expert in anything they do.

@clacke @n8 @liw @mlinksva Plenty of examples of this in the UK: Sheffield, Manchester, UCL, Edinburgh, Imperial College to name a few https://ukrse.github.io/groups.html

Worth checking out https://society-rse.org/ and https://software.ac.uk/ for the growing body of evidence of the benefits of these roles and groups. Several other countries have Research Software Engineer associations too, including Germany and USA

If anyone wants to learn more about #Threads, the best place to start is probably the original trilogy, starting with Dragonflight (first published in 1968). https://bookwyrm.social/book/61702/s/dragonflight

Anne McCaffrey's worldbuilding is incredible, and the background hints about the world that slowly build over the course of the series are wonderfully well done.