The “Organizing software community workshops: Experiences from three independent simulation software projects” article has been published in the Electronic Communications of the EASST on December 15 2025.
It is available through this link: https://doi.org/10.14279/eceasst.v85.2700
The ESPResSo summer school is an annual CECAM training event for the soft matter community. It plays a critical role in the dissemination of MultiXscale’s portfolio of tools and workflows for multi-scale simulations, and relies on a unique blend of scientific lectures and live coding sessions for rapid onboarding of new software users. Each iteration of the school emphasises a different aspect of soft matter physics and allocates time to presenting other software relevant to multi-scale simulations, such as waLBerla, GROMACS, and SwarmRL. On the last day, research talks illustrate how these simulation software are applied to solve real-word problems, and discuss new trends and recent developments in soft matter research.
In the paper, together with collaborators from other simulation packages, we share our lessons learned regarding event formats that maximise participants engagement and community growth, and distill “good practices” for event planning that complement the literature on this topic by documenting the specific challenges of formats with live coding sessions.
