Outreach material

This page contains material useful for reaching out to potential users. It isn’t an playbook that must be followed, but ideas for you to build on.

Our message

This section tells what messages work and don’t work, and how we usually present ourselves. It can be adapted group-to-group.

For general outreach, we don’t recommend going and talking about HPC cluster usage, allocations, etc. We shouldn’t focus on “we can do projects for you”. These are important parts of what we do, but not the thing that catches people’s ears.

It’s good to talk about how we are support for scientific computing of all types. You can ask us any questions, and we can give anything from small answers to working with you for a longer time. If computing isn’t your thing, we can take on a large part of it. There should be some attention to why someone should ask us, how research is much more involved than before and we don’t expect everyone to be an expert in everything about computing and data. It’s OK to ask for help.

We recommend not focusing on “Research Software Engineer” or “RSE”. These terms aren’t well known to others (though they are a good brand name towards Aalto management and are well-known there). Instead, focus on being the “Triton team”, “Aalto Scientific Computing”, or “Science-IT”, but now we do even more than before.

When talking to management, we are “Science-IT”, not “ASC”.

Posters and printable material

  • Scientific-looking poster (A0-A1 size, printable A3 for posting in hallways.)

    • Look for updates. Source in aaltoscicomp-marketing.git.

  • Many more posters have a PDF in aaltoscicomp-graphics. The sources are either in Google Drive (ASC -> outreach and marketing -> posters) or aaltoscicomp-marketing.git

    • ASC data management flyer: A4 summary of data storage considerations and locations.

    • ASC flyer for group leaders: A4 that summarizes what we do (HPC, coding, data, other). Can be handed out when talking to people.

    • ASC general audience poster: Very non-technical description of why we help computing. Printable A4.

    • Science-IT_A0_Poster_blue_v2: Pretty non-technical overview of what we do. Usable A4 and higher.

    • garage-poster: Dry poster of garge. Printable A4 or A3 for use in your corridors.

    • garage-poster-actual-intelligence: Like above but calls us the “actual intelligence assistants”.

Presentations

RSE presentations can be found (team members only) under Shared drives –> AaltoRSE –> presentations, marketing, and outreach. It can be good to check there to see if there are updates or more specific ones relevant to your needs:

Figures and graphics

  • aaltoscicomp-graphics/figures has lots of figures that explain our work. Good for presentations.

  • aaltoscicomp-marketing.git (internal repo, search chat) has photos (people, hardware, events, projects).

Events

Checklist for visiting events:

  • Flyers and stickers (livestreaming room, ask rkdarst)

  • Posters (some printed and are in the livestreaming room, ask rkdarst)

  • dgx04 can be brought as a demo (laminated signs for it, tape, screwdriver (not hex key)).

Group visits

“Group visits” refer to visiting a research group, or other similar small group, to hear their needs. rkdarst finds a good model is to introduce ourselves then ask “what are your problems? Consider this a gripe session where you just complain about things. We see what we can do now, and also can work on it later.”.

  • Group meetings is a generic plan. Usually this is only used if there are no spontaneous questions, and it’s only used as a “show this list to inspire questions”, not going over it in-depth.

  • Document group visits in the Data Agents google drive - there are spreadsheets for each department. Search RG visits and ask in chat for the link or to be added. (internal only).