We are in the initial stages of building an Australian RSE community to raise awareness of the role and bring the community together. In Australia, the term RSE includes academics/researchers who code but are lacking recognition and metrics needed to progress their academic career; professional software engineers working in the research space; and system administrators who maintain research systems.

Our interim steering committee can be found in Committee.md

Join our email group https://groups.google.com/forum/?#!forum/rse-nz-au

From the RSE UK website:

If you answer one or more of these questions, then you are probably an RSE:

• Are you employed to develop software for research?
• Are you spending more time developing software than conducting research?
• Are you employed as a postdoctoral researcher, even though you predominantly work on software development?
• Are you the person who does computers in your research group?
• Are you sometimes not named on research papers despite playing a fundamental part in developing the software used to create them?
• Do you lack the metrics needed to progress your academic career, like papers and conference presentations, despite having made a significant contribution through software?

There is a wide international community that started in the UK. Every chapter is different and has different definitions. For example from the RSE UK website:

A growing number of people in academia combine expertise in programming with an intricate understanding of research. Although this combination of skills is extremely valuable, these people lack a formal place in the academic system.

There are also links to the other International communities here: https://rse.ac.uk/community/international-rse-groups/