Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange: Everyone likes CAKE - How do we make it better?

Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange: Everyone likes CAKE - How do we make it better?

At the 2025 Collaboration Workshop (CW25) of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), the Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) team ran their very first miniworkshop. This event was organised in collaboration with members of the EDIA (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility) team of the Society of Research Software Engineering (SocRSE), namely Oscar Seip, Andy Gait and Stef Piatek, who are interested in outreach. Our aim was to present the plan for our brand-new knowledge exchange (KE) project, and to gather feedback and thoughts from an audience which has experience with community work, training, outreach and fellowships. And that is what we did!

While there was no consensus in the workshop group about the exact relationship of knowledge exchange and outreach, we agreed that they are not the same thing. Already in the preparation phase of the workshop, working with Oscar, Andy and Stef, we discussed how outreach is generally a one-directional activity (“I tell you something you don’t know”), while KE is bidirectional (“You know something, I know something – let’s share!”). We may assume that they also differ with respect to an unspecified audience addressed in a broadcast mode vs a targeted, specific, reasonably known audience.

In that sense, our workshop was already knowledge exchange: We shared ideas for KE fellowship, retreats and placements programmes, and the CAKE team received valuable input on making those work, and making them more accessible.

It became clear that one of our first activities will need to be to map our community, not only to see who is on board and who we need to reach out to, but also to provide an overview and the opportunity for people to discover adjacent and distant subcommunities and to connect. We will need to be clear about our expectations and commitments, but not too prescriptive, inclusive without trying to be everything to everyone – finding the balance will be one of our challenges for the coming years.

Developing a close relationship with our various partners will not only enable us to swap notes, avoid reinventing the wheel and extend our collective knowledge base. It will also mean that we can signpost and bring people together. A strong network is the core and the basis of knowledge exchange.

The workshop was really helpful to start off our project, and we want to thank all the participants for their input. We hope that people will stay interested and invested in CAKE and will join our activities - maybe it helped that we brought cake to the workshop….