Summary of first meeting march 2024

We held our first meeting March 7th and it was a great success. There were over 40 attendees (total in person and on line) with many coming in person. I want to thank all who spoke up, and who let me put them on the spot!

Many attendees mentioned a strong desire to meet other software developers on campus, to network, to understand the environment in which we work.
I had to speak up and say that this was one the main drivers for creating this group, so that other MSU devs did not have to feel alone (as a dev) as I did for many years programming for various biology labs.

There seemed to be significant excitement for learning from one another and we hope to put some things in place to help facilitate that. One suggestion that was supported was for members of the MSU research community to come to our meetings, describe their projects and get feedback and suggestions from this group. We are of course limited to doing during our meetings, but our hope is that we can foster collaborations.

Andrew sent out a follow up survey to see who would be willing to talk about projects and who could help us.

We have 4 volunteers and we want to thank them!

• Jeff Siarto, faculty in Communications
• Claire Kopenhafer, ICER Research Facilitator and programmer for Physics
• Scott Teresi, PhD student and research assistant in Horticulture
• Jorge Martinez-Ortis, PhD student in the Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering department

We had a few others volunteer to describe their projects at the next meeting and look forward to that.