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Living History of DIRECT

DIRECT project and its repositories were created from the work that originally happened at the Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2023 Hack Day.

The idea was to construct a resource on technical skills that is for the RSE community and curated by the RSE community, along with training materials that can help people gain a particular skill, and visualise people's individual skill profiles as "competency wheels".

Screenshot of competency visualisations

The project was added to the RSE Competencies Toolkit organisation and as a resource to support RSEs (Research Software Engineers) in tracking and managing their professional development. We have now extracted the work into its own separate GitHub organisation.

Note that, while we've focussed on RSEs during the early stages of development, this tool could be used for any roles that used digital skills for research (and we have now expanded the framework to reflect that).

The project comprised:

  1. An RSE competency framework, outlining a structured set of skills that are useful when working as an RSE, with examples of how these skills can be demonstrated at different levels of experience. Not all RSEs will or need to have all skills at all levels.
  2. A curated set of training resources, linked to the skills and levels from the competency framework.
  3. A tool to visualise and compare different competency profiles.

The project aimed to support the following uses:

  1. Recording and visualising your competency profile as an individual RSE.
  2. Comparing competency profiles across a group of RSEs (e.g. to show the commonalities and variety across RSEs doing the same role at the same level at the same organisation, or comparing across organisations).
  3. Find high-quality training resources to improve skills in a particular competency.
  4. Define aspirational competency profiles, illustrate the gap to your current profile and highlight training resources that could help bridge that gap.

The project won the 3rd prize at CW23 and we have carried on with the work on this project after the initial prototype. Since then, we have compared our work with many related skill frameworks to make sure they are aligned and skills are not missed.

We have also consulted the wider RSE community at RSECon24 about the skills they use, where loads of non-technical/professional skills emerged.

We have now expanded the remit of the framework to include non-technical as well as technical skills that are used in a wide variety of digital professional roles (and not just RSEs) such as researchers, data specialists (stewards, archivists, etc.), RSE group leads, PIs, etc.