About

Organizers

  • Richard Darst, Aalto University (co-lead, RC/SciComp part)

  • Samantha Wittke, CSC - IT Center for Science (co-lead, RSE-FI)

  • Local volunteers: open

The organizers welcome others to take part in planning, either in short or long term. We communicate via the CodeRefinery chat, #NoBSC channel. This is the same place that Nordic-RSE people hang out.

Supported by

  • Aalto Scientific Computing (Science-IT): (Staff time, sponsoring all facilities)

  • CSC - IT Center for Science (EuroCC2 project) : (Staff time)

  • Software Sustainability Institute (through fellowship of Samantha Wittke): (Travel funding, planning support)

History of NoBSC

You could say this event was first inspired when Richard Darst went to the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration conference in 2017. This event had a variety of infrastructure and open science people not advertising why their stuff was so good, but discussion how to make things better. (At least that’s what it looks like with rose-colored glasses looking back.) This also kicked off the collaboration between ASC and CodeRefinery (a NeIC project dedicated to teaching basic software tools for researchers), which continues to this day.

CodeRefinery didn’t feel like a collaboration not between organizations, but between the people in the trenches directly helping or users. This was an extremely productive collaboration, not just in the main teaching but in connecting people together to talk about their other jobs besides teaching.

In 2019, we had a meeting it Helsinki called Nordic HPC, basically a lot of the CodeRefinery staff who were supporters of smaller university-based computing clusters. We enjoyed talking and sharing ideas, but soon we became closer together because we were all working online, and our collaboration was focused on online events.

Now, in 2025, we are trying to meet again in person. Hopefully there are the best parts from NeIC conferences, NeIC all-hands meetings, and NordicHPC, with even more people welcome to attend.

In addition to the SciComp team meetup, we have noticed that Research Software Engineering community, or “researchers who code” appreciate the connection to each other too - and there is a lot of connections and career movement between the two groups. Samantha’s fellowship with the Software Sustainability Institute looks at exactly that. Part of the fellowship is the contribution to the international RSE survey to get to know the Finnish and Nordic community needs a bit better. A short lunch meeting of RSE enthusiasts in Espoo to celebrate the international RSE day on October 9th 2025 was a good start to connect. For the Finnish RSE meetup, we aim to also get together RSE enthusiasts from all over the country, share what we do, learn from each other and also learn about the needs and wishes of the community.