We had a great first meetup of the NL-RSE community with around 40 participants! A big thanks everyone attending for making this such a great meeting!

The meetup was kicked-off by Niels Drost and Mateusz Kuzak with an introduction of the program for the day. This was followed by Ilian Todorov, who gave a keynote presentation about the RSE movement in the UK, how it was founded, and their plans for the future. Next, Ben van Werkhoven gave an overview of the current state of the NL-RSE community with an introduction of the NL-RSE Core team, and an overview of the RSE Survey results from 2017.

After the coffee break we broke off into different discussion groups on various topics, including:

• RSE as an official job title
• Education
• Talking to IT departments
• Enabling independent RSEs
• Software development best practices and RSE training
• Place in Science and within organisations

Each group presented the outcome of their discussions and how they plan to follow up on the topic. After this we reserved some time for taking a group picture, networking, and drinks. It was really great to see so many unfamiliar faces and meet fellow RSEs from all over the Netherlands!

We plan to organize another event in November 2019 and look forward to seeing everyone again at that time!