What's in it for me? Convince your colleague on why an SMP is important (10 minutes)

Pair up with two other participants and pick one of three roles.

1. Support staff

Tries to explain the benefits of an SMP

2. Researcher

Indifferent about SMPs and very busy

3. Moderator

Checks if good arguments were used, suggests alternatives

Pick a piece of software from the following examples:

• A software package you yourself have been involved in, if any.
• A Jupyter notebook to get the average length of everyone in this classroom.
• NEMO, a state of the art modelling framework, used for research and forecasting in ocean and climate sciences.
• WORCS, an RStudio project template to ensure a research project meets the requirements of Open Science.
• AlphaFold, an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

Assume that the researcher is nudged by their supervisor to create an SMP. Find out in the discussion whether it's a good idea to create an SMP and what benefits it would bring. Also be open to the idea that creating an SMP might not be applicable in the current state of the project.

What arguments could you collect in favor of SMPs?

What arguments against its use?

Was the researcher convinced by the arguments?