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South African RSE Survey 2017: Invitation to participate

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South African RSE Survey 2017: Invitation to participate

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Anelda van der Walt

Posted on 23 November 2017

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South African RSE Survey 2017: Invitation to participate

Posted by s.aragon on 23 November 2017 - 1:18pm

The Software Sustainability Institute and zaf-RSE invite anyone coding in and for academia in South Africa to complete this survey on research software. 

As of now there is not much knowledge about the community of those in research and science who develop software. This survey aims to gain valuable insights into this community in order to support research funders and other institutions to develop strategies and funding programs as well as policies.

Last and this years’ UK surveys [1, 2] allowed to gain valuable insights. We would like to build on the momentum gained in the UK RSE community and help to create a voice for the South African RSE community. Similar surveys will be conducted in Canada, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, the USA and again in the UK. For reasons of comparability, this survey was closely coordinated with the others. We thank Prof Ilani Loubser from the North-West University's Space Physics programme for working with the NWU eResearch Initiative to provide South African context to the survey.

This survey gives South African researchers and scientist the opportunity to make their point of view and experiences be heard, and thus be part of the development of this community. It would be also very helpful if you could spread the word to others who develop software in the South African research landscape, or anyone who employs software experts in the South African academic landscape.

There are ca. 65 questions in this survey. It takes about 10 - 15 minutes to complete. Please note that this research is not compulsory and even if you decide to participate you can withdraw at any moment.

The study is conducted by the University of Southampton on behalf of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) and complies with University of Southampton ethics guidelines (reference no.: ERGO/FPSE/30440). The investigators are Simon Hettrick and Olivier Philippe. The survey is hosted on Limesurvey servers in Germany and respects the provisions of the Data Protection Act. These records are anonymised and access is strictly protected and granted to the main researchers only. The results of the survey will be released publicly but only after they have been processed to ensure that individual respondents can not be identified.

The survey results will be published under a CC BY-NC license, and will be announced via this blog and the African Carpentries Google Group [3] and on the NWU eResearch News Site [4].

We look forward to your participation in the survey!

[1]: See RSE State of the Nation Report 2017, page 21. (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.495360) [2]: See UK-RSE Survey 2017: Invitation to participate (https://www.software.ac.uk/news/uk-rse-survey-2017-invitation-participate) [3]: See the African Carpentries Google Group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/swc-za) [4]: See the NWU eResearch Initiative News site (http://www.nwu.ac.za/eresearch)

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