On Wednesday, 30 July 2025, CSCCE’s Lou Woodley (Founder and Director) and Camille Santistevan (Director of Learning) participated in the 2025 Science of Team Science conference, which took place online from 28-30 July 2025.
Lou hosted a panel discussion featuring recent and soon-to-be grads of our Certification Program, and Camille gave a brief oral presentation about the program, why we created it, and how it’s impacting participants.
In this blog post, we’ve summarized the two sessions, and include links to various related resources (including the slides from Camille’s talk). If you have any questions about joining the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program as a participant, or the potential for sponsorship, please contact info@cscce.org.
Coordinating connections: How do we tactically strengthen relationships and strategic partnerships?
Successful communities, collaborations, and teams all prioritize relationships. Not just establishing them (e.g., through scaffolded onboarding documents or activities), but maintaining them over time. This takes intention, and might look quite different depending on whether your group convenes online or in-person.
To talk about this, we convened a panel of community managers who all had a slightly different perspective on the topic and invited them to share a short presentation before answering audience questions and engaging with each other in conversation. Each panelist focused on a specific aspect of supporting collaborative work:
- Rieley Auger, Program Manager at the Global Land Programme, closed out the presentations with her talk on “Moving a team into in-person (if that’s available to you),” which used the case study of an international conference as a way of bringing community members and local stakeholders together
- Erin Conn, Project Director for SEA Change at AAAS, kicked off the session with a talk titled “Establishing team culture / laying the foundation for collaboration,” which touched on using documentation (scaffolding) to set yourself up for success
- Zach Baker, Community Manager at the Open Molecular Software Foundation followed up and talked about “Creating functional structures for teams to work together” including finding the right combination of tools and practices
- Miriam Krause, who is currently transitioning from her role as Director of Education, Outreach, & Diversity at the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, then spoke about “Taking an iterative approach to working together,” which involves gathering repeated feedback via multiple channels, being transparent about decision-making based on that feedback, and bringing folks along on the change journey, even through conflict, by staying rooted in shared values
Then, Lou moderated a thoughtful discussion, building on the overarching theme of the session: community managers are instrumental in maintaining and evolving team/community dynamics by intentionally designing various and varied opportunities for engagement and connection.
Related resources
- The four archetypes of community builders – In this blog post, Ja’dan Johnson describes four archetypes for community builders: The Planner, The Community Manager, The Growth-Driven Builder, and The Ecosystem Architect. We used these archetypes in a warm-up activity as audience members arrived into the online conference room, asking them which archetype they most closely identified with.
- One-page info sheets about CSCCE’s courses – These free-to-download and share info sheets summarize the structure, outputs, and target audiences for each of CSCCE’s multi-week online courses. Each course is designed to enhance and develop core skillsets for STEM community managers:
- Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF): https://zenodo.org/records/15793434 [REGISTRATION OPEN]
- Creating Community Playbooks (PBK): https://zenodo.org/records/15793475
- Content Design (CODE): https://zenodo.org/records/15793465
- Project management for scientists (PMB): https://zenodo.org/records/15793485 [REGISTRATION OPEN]
- Nurturing Online Communities (NOC): https://zenodo.org/records/15793503 [REGISTRATION OPEN]
Building practitioner capacity: the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program
In an overlapping session, titled “Academia & Professional Development for Integrators,” Camille delivered a 10 minute talk highlighting the value of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program for any STEM professional who is engaged in team building, community management, or network weaving.
Camille’s presentation included a brief overview of the program’s composition, focusing on how it is designed to impact individual community manager development as well as the communities they manage and the broader STEM community. She also touched on how many of the concepts we teach are applicable even more broadly, making our learners change agents for collaboration and transparent team work, no matter where they work.
After her talk, participants in the session asked thoughtful questions about the program design, including whether we’d considered a cohort-based approach (indeed, we initially rolled out the program in 2023 in this way, but switched to rolling enrollment earlier this year based on learners wanting more flexibility in when to join) and whether a bench science background was required for participation (no – while a lot of our learners do have an advanced STEM degree, we welcome folks from a wide range of backgrounds, including the humanities and social sciences).
Related resources
- Find out more about the Certification Program: https://www.cscce.org/trainings/cscce-community-manager-certification-program/
- Our longitudinal impact assessment of our CEF course: https://zenodo.org/records/11061734
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to our panelists, Erin, Zach, Miriam, and Rieley, whose careful preparation made for a really informative panel session. Past and present CSCCE team members Maya Sanghvi, Adrienne Gauthier, and Alice Martinic contributed considerably to the development of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, alongside Lou, Camille, and Katie Pratt, who also contributed to the development of Lou and Camille’s slides for the conference.
If you have any questions about the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, please email training@cscce.org. We’re particularly interested right now in sourcing sponsors for the program, in an effort to reduce financial barriers to participation, so if this sounds like something your organization would be interested in, we’d love to hear from you!