Honeyman T1
1UNSW, Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
I work at the intersection of research, digital infrastructure, policy and people.
My career has focused on building the systems, services, communities and practices that help researchers manage, use, share and sustain data, software and other digital research outputs.
I bring more than 20 years’ experience across universities, national research infrastructure, research projects and cultural organisations. My work has ranged from hands-on data management, metadata, archives, corpora and research software through to national program leadership, institutional service design, stakeholder engagement and business implementation.
At UNSW, I am Policy & People stream lead and business implementation lead for the Research Data Experience Program. My current focus is shaping the operating model, governance model and financial model for a future research data service supporting more than 7,000 affiliated researchers.
Previously at the Australian Research Data Commons, I led the Research Software Program and authored the National Agenda for Research Software. I also worked as Solutions Architect for the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons, supporting national-scale initiative design, partner engagement and service planning.
I am especially interested in socio-technical change: how technology, governance, incentives, workflows, communities and support models need to line up for research infrastructure to work in practice.
Abstract:
The ARDC's National Agenda for Research Software was developed in 2021 through extensive consultation across the sector. It responded to a research ecosystem in which software creation remained relatively specialised, costly and unevenly distributed. The agenda posed three challenges: seeing software as a research output, shaping software through improved practice, and sustaining software and the communities that depend upon it.
The emergence of agentic coding tools calls into question many of the assumptions that underpinned that framing. As software creation becomes accessible to a much larger proportion of the research workforce, the scale, economics and visibility of research software production are changing. Researchers can increasingly create software artefacts, workflows and services that would previously have required specialist expertise. At the same time, established assumptions about software quality, stewardship, discoverability, maintenance and reuse are being challenged.
This presentation revisits the National Agenda from the perspective of 2026. Rather than asking whether research software remains important, it explores how the role of research software within the research ecosystem is changing as software creation becomes more commonplace. It examines how the audiences identified in the original agenda may be shifting, how risks and opportunities are being redistributed, and whether the framework of seeing, shaping and sustaining research software still adequately characterises the challenges facing the sector.
The presentation concludes by proposing questions for a successor agenda and inviting discussion on how Australia should respond to a future in which software creation may be increasingly abundant, while trust, quality and stewardship remain constrained.
