Supporting Community Building through regular Knowledge Exchange Workshops

Abstract

Regular community events are important to bring and keep relevant people of the community together. At the German Aerospace Center (DLR), this aspect is particularly important because the DLR RSE community members are distributed across many locations and different organizational units. For that reason, we perform knowledge exchange workshops on a yearly basis. These events are usually organized as in person meetings and allow the DLR RSE community to come together, to exchange new ideas and to develop a sense of belonging.

In this talk, we introduce the concept of knowledge exchange workshops and reflect upon our ten years of experience of organizing these workshops at DLR. In addition, we present the initial findings of our evaluation about the effects on the DLR RSE community in which we surveyed the former participants of these workshops. The results show that the knowledge exchange workshops help to increase the sense of community and the number of community interaction. Finally, we want to share our lessons learnt organizing such community events with the broader RSE community.