Come to this month’s CSCCE community call to find out more about creating a playbook for your community, team, collaboration, or champions program! Playbooks (which are often given various different names) are written hubs that keep your community members, community champions, or community team on the same page by making visible the who, what, why, when, where, and how of your shared work together.
On this month’s call, we’ll give a brief overview of what a community playbook is, why you should have one, and what playbooks look like in a range of STEM contexts. Our invited speakers all recently took our training course, Creating Community Playbooks (PBK), and will be sharing the playbook they created as well as how it’s making a difference in their communities.
This call may be of particular interest to you if:
- You’re not sure what a playbook is, or if making one is really necessary in your specific situation
- You’re considering joining the next cohort of PBK (which starts in July!)
- You’d like to see some examples of playbooks in action in a range of contexts – including online collaborations, open-source software projects, and national laboratories/core facilities
- You’re a member of the CSCCE community of practice (CoP) and would like to meet other members
- You aren’t yet a member of the CSCCE CoP, but are considering joining
Date: Wednesday, 29 May 2024
Time: 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC (please note: this month’s call is one hour later than our regular time!)
Add to calendar (or contact us at info@cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)
Community playbooks – keeping everyone on the same page
Community playbooks (which might alternatively be called collaboration guides, team handbooks, and more) are core pieces of documentation that support collaborative work by making visible key information and processes. They can take a variety of forms – from GitHub repos to Google docs to PDFs and printables – and they are often maintained in such a way that multiple people can contribute to keeping them up to date.
Playbooks can be created to address a range of use cases, and in some teams multiple playbooks keep different aspects of the project on track. Playbooks act as a “source of truth,” ensuring that everyone involved in a project or community has access to the same information and understands shared norms and processes. As such, they are intended to reduce confusion and conflict, contribute to an increased sense of belonging, and increase team performance.
At CSCCE, we’ve worked with numerous clients to create playbooks – as well as supporting our 40 CEFP fellows in making playbooks for their communities. We have seen over and again how they can positively impact communities, collaborations, and teams. They enable programs to be repeated, support projects in scaling, and even address issues of burnout so community managers can re-focus on more strategic work. Whether you’re managing an open-source software project, building an international research collaboration, or planning a champions program for your members, creating a playbook is a great strategic first step.
CSCCE’s upcoming PBK training
This month’s community call is a great opportunity to decide if our multi-week training course, Creating Community Playbooks (PBK), is right for you. The course is structured as a series of workshops, and at the end of the course you’ll walk away with a “lite” version of your playbook as well as a plan for how you’ll maintain and socialize it with your community members.
As with all our online courses, participation is capped at 20-25 participants, ensuring that you also leave our training with new connections and insight into different STEM communities.
You can find more information about the course on the PBK webpage, and if you have any questions, please reach out to training@cscce.org. The deadline to register for our summer offering of PBK is 21 June, and the course will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Monday, 15 July until Thursday, 29 August 2024.
May’s call
SPEAKERS
- Sophie Bui, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
- Allie Lau, American Physical Association (APS)
- Martin Magdinier, OpenRefine
ABSTRACT
Join May’s community call to:
- Learn more about the application of community playbooks in a variety of organizational settings in STEM
- Explore different examples of community playbooks
- Consider if CSCCE’s training course, Creating Community Playbooks, fits into your professional development plan for 2024
- Meet other community managers in STEM and grow your professional network
How to join
May’s call will take place on Wednesday, 29 May 2024, at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC
Our calls are hosted in Zoom – click here and we’ll see you in the webinar!
Video or not? You’re welcome to turn on your webcam if you like but fine if you prefer just to use audio.
Our community calls generally last 90 minutes to allow time for discussion, but we try to keep all of the presentations within the first 60 minutes. We understand that virtual meetings have a tendency to overrun and overlap, so please don’t feel sheepish about arriving late or leaving early. We’d love to see you either way!
We will record the presentation portion of this month’s and make the recordings available via our YouTube channel. We will also share a recap of the call on our blog within one week of the call taking place, and you are welcome to join the asynchronous conversation on Slack.
Captioning is available for CSCCE community calls (read more about our approach to Zoom’s AI-based transcription services), and we make every effort to ensure that our slide decks are screen-readable.
ADDITIONAL INFO ABOUT OUR COMMUNITY CALLS
Our community calls usually take place on the third Wednesday of every month at 11am Eastern, but occasionally times and dates vary depending on speaker availability so please check our calendar of events.
Wonder what we’ve talked about in previous calls? The archive listings can be found here, with select recordings available on YouTube.
Not yet in our Slack group? Request to join here.
Further resources
We curate a growing collection of resources for community managers on our website. If you have any questions about our work, or are interested in partnering with us on a future project or call, please contact info@cscce.org.