Organizing software community workshops: Experiences from three independent simulation software projects

Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume 85 Year 2025 deRSE25 - Selected Contributions of the 5th Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany Edited by: Ren´e Caspart, Florian Goth, Oliver Karras, Jan Linxweiler, Florian Thiery, Joachim Wuttke Organizing software community workshops: Experiences from three independent simulation software projects Jean-No¨el Grad, Gerasimos Chourdakis, Bernd Flemisch, Christian Holm, Leon Keim, Benjamin Uekermann, Rudolf Weeber DOI: 10.14279/eceasst.v85.2700 License: L M This article is licensed under a CC-BY 4.0 License. Electronic Communications of the EASST (https://eceasst.org). Published by Berlin Universities Publishing (https://www.berlin-universities-publishing.de/) ECEASST Organizing software community workshops: Experiences from three independent simulation software projects Jean-Noël Grad 1,∗, Gerasimos Chourdakis 2,∗, Bernd Flemisch 3, Christian Holm 1, Leon Keim 3, Benjamin Uekermann 2and Rudolf Weeber 1 1[email protected],[email protected], [email protected] Institute for Computational Physics University of Stuttgart, Germany 2[email protected],[email protected]art.de Institute for Parallel and Distributed Systems University of Stuttgart, Germany 3[email protected],[email protected]art.de Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems University of Stuttgart, Germany ∗These authors contributed equally Abstract: You have developed an open source scientific software package and it has now become popular. Congratulations! Your software has entered a new phase of its life cycle, and you have an opportunity to steer your academic career in a new direction. Your new responsibilities include: training the next generation of users, identifying and converting power users into contributors, making your software visible to a wider audience, and creating spaces for your community to meet and collaborate on joint projects. Organizing a short workshop, summer school or user meeting is an efficient and highly rewarding way to work towards these goals. By gathering your community in a physical location, you can help them engage in collaborative work, learn about emerging research topics, discover new applications for the software, and develop new features to meet user needs. But how much effort is it? How do you fund this event? How do you advertise it? How do you provide incentives for people to attend? How do you strike the right balance between training, research talks, and collaborative sessions? We answer these questions through the lens of the ESPResSo summer school, the preCICE workshop, and the DuMuxcourse, three events organized annually in Stuttgart, each one attracting 20–50 people every year. They combine talks, training, poster sessions and user support sessions for newcomers and seasoned users alike. Common strategies are summarized in a list of good practices with an intended audience of early-career researchers and junior Research Software Engineers (RSEs). Keywords: community, event, workshop, summer school, training 1 / 21 Organizing software community workshops 1 Introduction As a software maintainer, user–developer meetings are an important instrument to grow your user base, identify and convert power users into contributors, foster knowledge exchange, and learn which direction the developers should take to meet rapidly-evolving user needs. While there is no “standard” recipe on how to conduct an event, we can tell you about time-proven, battle-tested event formats that have been conducted annually for the past decade. Our hope is to convince early-career researchers and junior RSEs that such events are not only beneficial to their career development and to the software, but also that the event organization is within their reach in terms of financing and effort. In this work, we refer to “event” to describe any space for a software community to meet and form meaningful connections. We specifically concern ourselves with events where users and developers are the main target audience. We focus on on-site formats and will keep our feedback on online and hybrid formats brief, since those have been discussed at length in the literature [PK21,Oru21,MLD+21,GFN+10,MGH+20,AEGM20]. Resources on on-site formats are less abundant and tend to focus on a single (and often large) event; we can mention short guides [Pot83,BDC+15,CGJB08] as well as the book by Devney [Dev01]. Although the best practices outlined in the present work do not significantly deviate from these sources, we explore aspects that are specific to software-centered events, and provide insights to better understand the RSE role and impact on communities [LMB+22]. We also note the German Aerospace Center organizes annual RSE workshops for community building and knowledge exchange [SHMS19], and has recently taken steps to quantify the impact of these events [DS25]. However, the present work isn’t attempting to carry out systematic research on event organization, and we will refer the reader to the relevant literature when available. We reflect on experiences from three event series organized by different departments that independently converged to the same overall structure thanks to community feedback. All three events are targeting the distributed communities of the departments’ respective simulation software projects, and are organized by academic teams with limited resources. The techniques we employ to prepare and run our events are surprisingly similar, and our approach to event design can be summarized as learn–create–connect: Learn Lectures provide an introduction to the science and open problems in our fields, as well as an overview of the mathematical principles and simulation algorithms used in our software. In hands-on sessions tutored by software experts, participants learn how to reproduce published results using the software and hone their coding skills. Research talks and poster sessions show current applications of the software. Create Users and developers can join world cafés [And12,SKHK22] and birds-of-a-feather sessions [Nar09] to draft white papers, find collaboration opportunities, or contribute to software governance. In coding sessions, users and developers can work together on the continuous improvement of the software, for example, to include a new feature or implement a bug fix. Connect Software meetings are a place where users can get guidance on their specific research projects from the combined expertise of researchers in their field and software developers. It is also a place for developers to inform users about upcoming features and receive feedback to direct future developments. Social events allow people to network and join new collaborations. 2 / 21 ECEASST 2 Success stories The following sections will focus on three events that started as grassroots efforts and have been organized on an annual or semi-annual basis for several iterations in Stuttgart: the ESPResSo summer school, the preCICE workshop, and the DuMuxcourse. This longevity allows us to reflect on the factors that contribute to their success, and the lessons learned along the way. All of these events have been organized (at least partially) at the University of Stuttgart, by different groups. Although these events grew isolated from each other, the organizers later discovered the overlap in the context of the local RSE community chapter [FHH+20], which led to this collaborative work. These efforts are often sponsored by the Stuttgart Center for Simulation Science – Cluster of Excellence EXC 2075 “Data-Integrated Simulation Science (SimTech)”1. 2.1 ESPResSo summer school ESPResSo is an open-source simulation package that combines molecular dynamics and fluid dynamics to simulate soft matter at different scales, with applications in process engineering, responsive materials design, polymer science, charged and magnetic soft matter, biophysics, and nanomaterials. It is developed mainly at the University of Stuttgart, with occasional contributions from collaborating groups, as well as from power users in the ESPResSo community who are not formally affiliated with the ESPResSo home institution. The goal of the ESPResSo summer school, held annually since 2010, is to provide a platform to train newcomers to the soft matter community, upskill experienced users in adopting new software features, advance the state of the software through coding sprints, and learn about new applications of the software in our field of research. The school is organized as a five-day event with four half-days of scientific lectures in the morning, four half-days of hands-on sessions in a computer lab in the afternoon, and one halfday of research talks (Table 2). In parallel to the hands-on session, impromptu birds-of-a-feather meetings are flexibly scheduled between invited speakers and available Ph.D. students to explore scientific collaborations, discuss recently published papers, implement new features or fix bugs in coding sprints, and plan future meetups. The event format therefore encourages full attendance for speakers and participants. It is part of several University of Stuttgart M.Sc. curricula2and yields ECTS credit points. Many collaborating groups send their newly hired Ph.D. students to the school for rapid onboarding with the software and networking with the developers. The summer school is currently carried out as a CECAM Flagship School, located at the home institution in Stuttgart, and hosted by the Soft Matter and Statistical Mechanics3CECAM node, a consortium formed by the University of Stuttgart, the Technical University of Darmstadt, the University of Mainz, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research Mainz, Germany. Like all other flagship schools, the event is primarily science-oriented. In this case, the focus is on soft matter physics, algorithms, and molecular simulation techniques. Yet, hands-on sessions are mostly done with ESPResSo. One half-day is often reserved for codes that use ESPResSo as a library, or that ESPResSo uses to provide specific algorithms or features. 1https://www.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/exc/ 2https://campus.uni-stuttgart.de/cusonline/pl/ui/$ctx/wbLv.wbShowLVDetail?pStpSpNr=392232 3https://www.cecam.org/cecam-de-smsm 3 / 21 Organizing software community workshops Participation fees are fully waived thanks to an RSE grant [KMMK24] and SimTech. While the basic structure of the school is well established and proven, different topics are emphasized each year4, such as systematic coarse-graining and machine learning (2025), multi-scale simulations (2024), or energy materials (2023) to name a few. Several people attend the school repeatedly, indicating that enough novelty is provided in new installments. The broad scope of the ESPResSo package results in a sizable audience, typically more than 40 participants on-site. Attendees come from all stages of their academic or professional career, with home institutions mostly located in Europe (Figure 1). Germany’s overrepresentation is due to M.Sc. and Ph.D. students from Stuttgart, and speakers and tutors from the software’s home institution. The poster session is preceded by a round of lightning talks, during which every presenter has 1 min to convince the audience to visit their poster, with the help of a single slide. There are more opportunities for one-to-one informal discussions between participants, the speakers, and software developers, thanks to the 30 min-long coffee breaks and the conference dinner. A book of abstracts of the lectures, scientific talks and posters is published under an opensource license on Zenodo to make contributions citable. Teaching material is available online: slides are hosted on the CECAM platform, recorded lectures are available on YouTube5, and Jupyter notebooks [KRP+16] are remotely executable on the Binder platform [PBF+18]. Germany 28 Switzerland 3United Kingdom 2 Turkey 2 France 2 Italy 1 United States 1 Czech Republic 1 Slovenia 1 Spain 1 Norway 1 Austria 1 PhD Student 11 Professor 7 Post Doctorate 9 Master Student 5 Student 2 Graduate Student 1 Research Intern 1 Research Assistant 1 Industrial Researcher 1 N/A 6 Figure 1: Demographics of the 44 attendees (participants + speakers + organizers) of the 2024 ESPResSo summer school. Left: home institution country. Right: role in academia and industry. 2.2 preCICE workshop preCICE is an open-source coupling library for partitioned multi-physics simulations, with applications in aeroelasticity, biomechanics, reactor safety, climate simulations, and more. It is developed at the University of Stuttgart and the Technical University of Munich, with occasional external contributions on GitHub by collaborators, users, or sometimes contributors without any clear connection to the project. The community meets online in the preCICE forum6, which 4https://espressomd.org/wordpress/community-and-support/espresso-summer-school/#past-summer-schools 5https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6yzqhq2KrT-aDhPjcL-VNw 6https://precice.discourse.group/ 4 / 21 ECEASST started in 2019 and currently has 600+ members. Known users and contributors are based primarily in Germany and the EU, with several users also based in China, USA, Japan, UK, India, and more. The preCICE Workshop7is running annually since 2020 and is aimed at potential, new, and experienced users, and with a schedule that allows partial attendance (Table 3). It complements the preCICE Coding Days, a more frequent, informal event aimed specifically at developers. This week-long workshop starts with a hands-on training course for new users, which is regularly updated and extended to be more appealing to returning attendees. The main part of the workshop starts with a round of introductions, in which every participant gets one slide to talk about their research, optionally referring to posts in the preCICE forum for more details. The schedule continues with user and developer talks and posters on methods, applications, and project updates, as well as interactive components (notably a world café [And12,SKHK22]) to discuss broader issues, upcoming features, or future directions. The event concludes with hands-on user support sessions, where developers work together with users to resolve issues and explore potential collaborations. An additional support session is scheduled for a few weeks after the workshop, to encourage continuation of the work. Talks are recorded and gradually published on YouTube8, while the rest of the content is internally documented and distributed. Planning the event starts one year ahead, with finding a date and potential venue. The date is then announced at the end of the running workshop and advertised on all channels (including the preCICE forum, LinkedIn, various mailing lists, and direct contacts). Most of the iterations of the workshop have been on-site in German universities and supported by local scientific and science-supporting organizations and user groups, such as SimTech and the Informatik-Forum Stuttgart9. The planning involves the complete preCICE team, who collects and evaluates scientific contributions from the community and designs the program. A public organizing guide provides more details on how to organize a preCICE Workshop10. Financing of the workshop is based primarily on registration fees, with varying additional funding every year, depending on availability. Ticket prices differ for academia and industry, including or excluding the training course component, and early/late registration. Note that a workshop involves different kinds of costs (catering, travel grants, advertising material), which might not be possible to cover by all different kinds of available funding. A registration fee provides a sustainable funding scheme in the long run. The fee collection is typically managed by the local organization supporting the workshop. No special event management system is currently used, besides a static webpage on the project’s website and conventional survey forms. Most of the participants come from academic institutions in Germany, while further research institutions and a few industries are also represented. In 2024, 27 out of 37 participants (73%) worked in Germany, and further countries included China, France, India, Italy, South Korea, Sweden, and The Netherlands. 5 out of 37 participants (14%) worked for a non-publicly funded organization. In 2023, the share of participants from industry was 2 out of 49 (4%), while again most of the participants worked in Germany (27 out of 49, or 55%). In both iterations, the vast majority of participants were Ph.D. students and post-doctoral researchers. 7https://precice.org/precice-workshop.html 8https://www.youtube.com/c/preCICECoupling/ 9https://www.informatik-forum.org 10 https://precice.org/precice-workshop-organizing.html 5 / 21 Organizing software community workshops 2.3 DuMuxcourse DuMuxis an open-source simulator for flow and transport processes in porous media, based on the Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment (DUNE)11. Its core developers and resources are tightly coupled to two major German research consortia: the Collaborative Research Center 1313 (SFB 1313)12 and the Cluster of Excellence SimTech (EXC 2075 SimTech)13, as well as the Department of Hydromechanics and Modelling of Hydrosystems. This institutional connection is reflected in the community, where most users have ties to either the SFB 1313, SimTech, or the department. Consequently, DuMuxis primarily used in Germany, with worldwide users mainly through collaborations with these institutions. The DuMuxcourse participants demographics is similar to that of the ESPResSo summer school, with the majority originating from the aforementioned German research networks, while international attendees typically arrive through established collaborative partnerships. The course is organized as a three-day training event, comprising six half-days that combine theoretical lectures with hands-on sessions. The event consistently attracts 15–20 participants per year, while being limited to 20 from the host side. Most of the participants are within close reach of the developers, mainly within the SFB 1313 and the EXC 2075 SimTech. The first instances of the course have been run in 2018 and, in a short version, in 2019. After the pandemic, the course has been offered annually since 2023, with continuous refinements based on participant feedback. The first five half-days follow a progression starting with basics and building toward advanced concepts. The ultimate goal is to enable participants to create their own applications by the end of the course. This is achieved through a step-by-step approach: starting with how to set up a DuMuxapplication, then moving on to making runtime changes such as simulation parameters and different grid resolutions. As participants get more comfortable with the software, they move on to modify encapsulated parts of the source code, such as boundary conditions. Finally, they learn to alter the structure of the source code itself. This progression guides participants from using DuMuxas a black-box application to get an understanding of its internal architecture. The last half-day focuses on user-specific problems, where participants work on their research questions. Participants without a definite use case can work with readily available applications from the SFB 1313 showcasing DuMuxcapabilities. Most DuMuxdevelopers remain on-site throughout the 3-day event, providing continuous support. The 2023 course was offered free to all participants regardless of affiliation, funded entirely by the SFB 1313. In 2024, a three-tier payment model was introduced: free access for SFB 1313 and SimTech affiliates, a 150 efee for academic participants, and a 500 efee for industry partners. This model maintains accessibility for the core research community while providing sustainable funding for course development. Preparation follows a structured timeline, with comprehensive checklists for instructors and tailored pre-course materials for participants. Participant skills are analyzed across four domains (command-line interface, Git, C++, and DuMux) to customize content delivery. Pre-course materials include curated resources on C++ programming concepts, version control, and command11 https://www.dune-project.org/ 12 https://www.sfb1313.uni-stuttgart.de/ 13 https://www.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/exc/ 6 / 21 ECEASST line interfaces. However, participant feedback revealed these resources were often overlooked, resulting in prerequisite knowledge gaps. Evaluations consistently identified C++ proficiency as the primary obstacle to course progression. In addition, participants were asked to prepare flash presentations which were held on the first two days. This allowed instructors to consider each problem in advance and provide targeted help during the final half-day. Furthermore, these presentations enabled participants to discover others working on similar problems, facilitating potential collaboration during and after the course. Course materials are hosted on a dedicated GitLab repository14, with installation scripts to facilitate setup across different operating systems. While this repository is permanently available, the on-site course provides supervised instruction specifically designed to elevate participants beyond self-study of the repository materials. In 2024, participants rated the overall course quality as “Very good” to “Excellent” (average 4.6/5), with 91% indicating that they would recommend it to colleagues. Survey results highlighted several important findings: participants particularly valued the flash presentation format for networking opportunities; they reported significantly improved confidence in adapting existing models (average rating 3.6/5) but less confidence in creating entirely new models (3.2/5). The goal has therefore been partially reached, but understanding an open-source grown codebase in three days is obviously an ambitious goal. The most frequently requested improvement was additional time dedicated to working on personal problems with expert guidance, which can be attributed more to a wish for an advanced course. 3 Organizational aspects 3.1 Financing options Events can be supported by research funding agencies, such as the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of RSE grants [KMMK24] via forms 52.06 “Project-Specific Workshops” [DFG22] and 52.07 “Module Public Relations” [DFG11], or indirectly through the DFG Overhead Allowance. Local organizations and collaborative research centers may be able to offer small grants to cover travel costs or catering. Support can also be sought from field-specific funding programs, such as the annual CECAM Flagship program and the semi-regular CECAM joint programs15, or from programming language-specific grants, notably numFOCUS16 for Python software. Co-location of the event within a larger conference can also help reduce the administrative burden and operational costs, since the venue is already selected and a registration system is provided, with tickets for the full event or just for the co-located event. For illustration purposes, the ESPResSo summer school costs are summarized in Table 1. Another funding option is charging a conference fee. Unless the academic institution hosting the event is a business entity, organizers have to find a third party to handle conference fees and sales tax on behalf of the institution, pay for costs not covered by other funding sources, as well as manage secure payment options. 14 https://git.iws.uni-stuttgart.de/dumux-repositories/dumux-course 15 https://www.cecam.org/#cecam-news2 16 https://numfocus.org/programs/small-development-grants 7 / 21 Organizing software community workshops Item Cost catering: lunch, coffee breaks, soft drinks, barbecue 2925 e invited speakers’ travel and accommodation costs 2930 e conference dinner 470 e student contracts 320 e supplies and software licenses 100 e total 6745 e Table 1: Operational expenses of the 2023 ESPResSo summer school (44 participants). 3.2 Advertising The specialized codes represented in a software-centric event have, by definition, a limited user community. Therefore, the pool of potential participants is also limited, but typically highly overlapping with existing user groups. Attaching to a domain or local organization, such as CECAM or SimTech, comes with additional advertising support through their channels. Besides these channels, most effective methods seem to be prominent display on the website of the project/code, related talks at other conferences, as well as word of mouth and targeted emails to collaborators and relevant mailing lists (local, project-related, or domain-specific). Posts on social media (such as LinkedIn, BlueSky, or YouTube) are important to attract new users in the long run, but few participants seem to discover the event first via social media. Early advertising is very important: a “save the date” as soon as this has been planned can help the target audience keep the event on their radar. Reminders close to the submission/registration deadline are also expected. Academic culture might discourage researchers from advertising. Yet, reaching out to a diverse audience and securing a critical mass of participants are essential to the success of an event. In addition, events increase exposure to potential contributors who can maintain and develop the software in the long run. Since these events are also typically notfor-profit, open to everyone, and educate on scientific topics and open-source software profiting everyone, there is little reason for such hesitation. 3.3 Venue The ESPResSo summer school and DuMuxcourse are organized at their respective home institutions in Stuttgart. The preCICE workshop has been organized in Stuttgart and Munich, home institutions of the developers. This decision greatly simplifies logistics, since all the infrastructure is already available, organizers are familiar with the venue and facilities, and the teaching staff does not need to travel Events can be “co-located” within another event in order to bring together different communities and decrease the organizational costs. The DuMuxcourse was co-located at InterPore2019 in Valencia, Spain. The ESPResSo summer school reserves one half-day for other software teams to present their code. Alternatively, such events can be co-organized by user groups (with the preCICE workshop 2025 as an example), taking a significant part of the organizational workload from the development team, which can focus on the scientific aspects of the event planning. 8 / 21 ECEASST contact address for the event. Besides this event-specific attack, consult with the local IT department before setting up a registration page (which should offer encrypted connection via HTTPS), and organize the setup of guest accounts for the venue network and for any computing systems used for training. Get up-to-date with relevant regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), especially when storing personal e-mail addresses or dietary preferences. When taking pictures of the participants for promotional material and social media, it is essential to make participants sign a waiver release form. 5.9 Collect and act on feedback Collecting feedback is necessary to improve future iterations of the event. Design a feedback form with targeted questions that yields actionable insights. In closed-ended questions, ask how participants liked specific parts of the event that can easily be changed. Ask how often people would come back to such an event, how they found out about it, and where else they would expect to see it advertised. In open-ended questions, ask what people enjoyed, what would make them return, and what they would like to see added/removed/improved. Send the feedback form on the last day of the event, so that participants can complete it while their experience is still fresh. Analyze the results internally and include findings in a post-event blog post, as well as in the webpage of the next iteration of the event. Refer to these results when planning the next iteration. 5.10 Start small and work your way up The events presented in this document grew organically over the years and took several iterations to reach their current attendance rates. Start with local user meetings and progressively raise the stakes. First, invite external collaborators to give scientific talks about novel applications of the software, and open the venue to the public (use the news feed of the institute homepage and send an invitation to the graduate school mailing list). Then, include a user training session and advertise to external collaborators. Explore the possibility to meet the software community at another conference, for example in a birds-of-a-feather meeting, or with satellite meeting attached to the conference. Collect statistics (number of participants) and outcomes (white paper, collaboration agreements) in publicly available documents (e.g., a blog post or a new post on the home institution home page) that can later be linked to when applying for funding at institutions that financially support software workshops. 6 Conclusion Annual workshops and schools organized in Stuttgart allow us to meet directly with our community, learn their needs and showcase recent developments with the codes. They also provide us with an opportunity to work together with prospective, new, or advanced users to foster collaborations or help them integrate their contributions into the respective codebases. In this short guide, we distilled several lessons learned that made our events successful and offered pointers to more specialized resources where relevant. These events are small enough to be planned by a small team over a few weeks and with a budget that can be partially or fully covered by existing 15 / 21 Organizing software community workshops funding or a registration fee comparable to many other academic events. We believe that organizing such an event is manageable with reasonable effort for early-career researchers and junior RSEs, and that it can play a catalytic role in the development of a research software community. Acknowledgements: J.-N.G., R.W. and C.H. acknowledge funding by the European Union; this work has received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) and countries participating in the project under Grant Agreement No. 101093169. The contributions of J.-N.G., R.W. and C.H. were co-funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) under the funding code 16HPC095. The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the author(s). G.C. and B.U. acknowledge funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under project number 528693298. C.H. acknowledges funding from the DFG under project number 391126171. G.C., B.U., B.F., L.K., C.H. and R.W. acknowledge funding from Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2075 under project number 390740016, and support from the Stuttgart Center for Simulation Science (SimTech). B.F. would also like to thank the Federal Government and the Heads of Government of the Länder, as well as the Joint Science Conference (GWK), for their initiative within the framework of the NFDI4Ing consortium (DFG project number 442146713). 16 / 21 ECEASST 7 Appendix 7.1 Schedules Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Lectures Lectures Lectures Lectures Talks Lectures Lectures Lectures Lectures Talks Hands-on Hands-on Hands-on Hands-on Hands-on Hands-on Hands-on Hands-on Social Poster session Social Table 2: Typical ESPResSo summer school schedule. From 08:00 to 12:30, 3 h of lectures (blue blocks) and scientific talks (orange blocks) are organized in 4 × 45 min or 2 × 90 min slots with a 30 min coffee break (thin gray blocks), followed by a 90 min lunch break (thick grey blocks). From 14:00 to 17:00, 3 h of hands-on sessions (green blocks) are organized in 2 × 90 min slots with a 30 min coffee break. From 17:00 to 20:00, social events (pink blocks) and a poster session (brown block) take place. Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Training Training Talks Support Training Training Talks Talks Support Training Training Talks World Café Support Social Social Social Poster session Table 3: Typical preCICE workshop schedule. From 09:00 to 12:00, 3 h of hands-on training (blue blocks), user and developer talks (orange blocks) or user support sessions (green blocks) are scheduled depending on the day, followed by a 60 min lunch break (gray blocks). From 13:00 to 17:30, this pattern repeats for 2 × 2 h, with a 30 min coffee break (gray blocks). Time is reserved for social events in the evening from 19:00 to 21:00 and during the week, and for the world café and poster session (brown blocks). The schedule is split in two parts: training and main workshop. 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