Organizing software community workshops: Experiences from three independent simulation software projects

You have developed an open source scientific software package and it has now become popular. Congratulations! Your software has entered a new phase of its life cycle, and you have an opportunity to steer your academic career in a new direction. Your new responsibilities include: training the next generation of users, identifying and converting power users into contributors, making your software visible to a wider audience, and creating spaces for your community to meet and collaborate on joint projects.

Organizing a short workshop, summer school or user meeting is an efficient and highly rewarding way to work towards these goals. By gathering your community in a physical location, you can help them engage in collaborative work, learn about emerging research topics, discover new applications for the software, and develop new features to meet user needs. But how much effort is it? How do you fund this event? How do you advertise it? How do you provide incentives for people to attend? How do you strike the right balance between training, research talks, and collaborative sessions?

We answer these questions through the lens of the ESPResSo summer school, the preCICE workshop, and the DuMuX course, three events organized annually in Stuttgart, each one attracting 20–50 people every year. They combine talks, training, poster sessions and user support sessions for newcomers and seasoned users alike. Common strategies are summarized in a list of good practices with an intended audience of early-career researchers and junior Research Software Engineers (RSEs).