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Post summary image

Our friends at the DisCouRSE NetworkPlus, one of our fellow UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure projects, have published the end-of-project highlights from one of the projects funded in their first round. Led by Adrian D’Alessandro, Senior Research Software Engineer at Imperial College London, the eight-week project has taken the DIRECT Framework web app from a minimum viable product to a tool mature enough to be used in practice, and readied it for version 2.0.0 of the framework to be released.

A quick look at what DIRECT is, what the project delivered, and where to find out more.

What is DIRECT?

The DIRECT Framework is a framework of skills and competencies for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs). It classifies and describes the wide range of technical and non-technical skills used across digital research roles — researchers, research software engineers, data specialists, group leads, PIs, archivists, bioinformaticians and many more. The aim is a shared language for recognising expertise, planning training and mapping career pathways: helping individuals chart their professional growth, and helping organisations build stronger, more inclusive teams.

The accompanying web app makes the framework accessible to browse, and lets users generate and visualise their own skill profile as a skills wheel.

What the project delivered

Version 2.0.0 of the framework adds new tools, methodologies, programming languages and learning resources, all linked to updated skills and competencies, and the web app needed to catch up. Until this project, the app had been developed by volunteers spread across different institutions, which made progress and project management uneven.

DisCouRSE funding enabled dedicated professional time from the Imperial RSE Team, working alongside the existing volunteers. Run using an agile approach with two-week sprints and fortnightly reviews with the DIRECT community contributors and leadership committee, the project delivered:

  • A more robust infrastructure set-up for the web app
  • A thorough, well-structured database behind the framework
  • A clearer long-term roadmap and improved sustainability
  • A locked-down framework structure that makes future feature development much easier

Available now

The new version of the web app is live and has been released on Zenodo. The intention is for university RSE groups to adopt it as part of their annual review and staff development processes — so if you lead or sit in an RSE, data or research computing team, it is well worth a look.

As Adrian puts it, the project took the app from an MVP to something mature enough to be useful for dRTPs; it is not finished, but the groundwork is now in place for future projects to make DIRECT a really valuable resource.

Find out more

This is a great example of the kind of targeted investment that turns volunteer-driven community effort into sustainable infrastructure, and it sits squarely alongside the skills and career-pathway work happening across the DRI landscape. Congratulations to Adrian and the Imperial RSE team, and to DisCouRSE — you can browse the rest of the funded projects on their website.