The Shared Language of Crowds: A Crowd-Sourced Approach to Mapping Research Software Engineering and Software Engineering Research Terminology

training in software engineering, acquiring their understanding of software engineering through experience, self-study, and interactions with colleagues. Anecdotally, RSEs often use different terminology than is commonly used in the software engineering research (SER) community for similar concepts. This has the potential to create challenges in communication between the two communities. As an outcome of the Dagstuhl Seminar 24161, we developed an approach to explore the terminologies used by the RSE and SER communities, which uses crowd-sourcing to build out a website presenting a “mapping of terms” between the groups. In this work, we will briefly recap our approach and the design of the website and describe some of our initial experiences gathering input from members of both communities, offering a look “behind the scenes” of the development of the term mapping content.