August 2025 CSCCE Monthly Newsletter

New resources, trainings, and more!

AUGUSt 2025 Newsletter

New resources, trainings, and more!

In this month’s newsletter, we’re highlighting both the published resources you might have missed over the past couple of months, as well as the professional development trainings we’re offering through the end of the year. Most of these trainings are open for general registration, and they touch on a range of topics relevant to community managers, program managers, project coordinators, and more! Please feel free to forward this newsletter on to others in your network who may have overlapping interests.

New CSCCE resources

In early July, we released a collection of one-page info sheets that succinctly describe our multi-week courses. We know how important it is to spend your funds wisely, and we hope these info sheets make it easier to choose a training that’s matched to your needs.
We’ve also published a worksheet to help you define the voice and tone of your community content (an activity we facilitate for participants in our Content Design course).
And, we’ve added a new resource to our CC BY community scaffolding library: A Quick Start Guide for using the online whiteboard platform, Mural.

MORE CSCCE RESOURCES

CSCCE trainings coming up over the next few months

Next week, we’ll be welcoming our 16th general registration cohort of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) into the CSCCE online classroom. This course, which almost 400 STEM community managers have taken to date, has had far-reaching impacts on STEM communities.

At the end of September, Nurturing Online Communities (NOC) is back for its second cohort. This seven-week course is perfect for anyone convening their community in an online forum, and especially valuable if you’re looking to increase engagement, recruit new members, and/or work through specific challenges.

And then in late November/early December, we’re offering Project Management for Scientists; a combination of an introductory Mini-workshop (PMI) and three-week bootcamp (PMB) ideal for anyone managing a team or collaborative project in STEM.

Alongside these general registration courses, we’ll also be piloting the Birdaro training program from late September. This 12-week training is designed specifically to meet the needs of an inaugural cohort of 25 open-source project teams. We’ll be sharing more updates about this program soon on the CSCCE blog!

Also in this month’s newsletter:

Congratulate our newest graduates of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program
Consider registering for our upcoming “working with volunteers” Mini-workshop
Read a recap of our participation in the recent Science of Team Science conference (which included a panel of Certification Program participants!)
Find out more about Birdaro and our new training program for scientific open-source project leaders

Birdaro: A training program for open-source professionals in STEM

Open-source projects are a unique combination of volunteer collaboration and product development. As an open-source project becomes popular or heavily used, its creators face complex questions like “how can we support contributors so that they stay involved with the project as demands increase?” Or, “how can we fund maintainers to ensure project continuity?” Or, “what infrastructure do we need to put in place to gather input from users?”

The Birdaro training program from CSCCE is intended to support leaders of open-source projects in STEM as they work through challenges related to scaling and sustainability.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BIRDARO

Training news

A collage of two headshots, one of Lena, one of Zach, separated by a blue diagnonal line.

Congratulations to our newest Certification Program Graduates!

Congratulations to Lena Karvovskaya (TU Delft) and Zachary Baker (Open Molecular Software Foundation), who are the latest graduates of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program! You can find out more about Zach and Lena’s path through the program (which is modular and open for enrollment year round) on the CSCCE blog.

The digital badge image for Nurturing Online Communities (NOC) is an olive green circle with a white center. “NURTURING ONLINE COMMUNITIES” spelled out in white, over the top of the olive green circle, and an olive green umbel design is overlaid in the white center. At the bottom right, on the outside of the circle, it says “CSCCE Training Course” in two shades of teal.

Nurturing Online Communities

Participating in NOC is an opportunity to explore social science claims about how people behave online to develop strategies and tactics to increase engagement, commitment, and constructive behavior. Each week, you’ll spend time with experienced CSCCE instructors and work with your peers to solve your real-world challenges.

More information | Register online

The digital badge image for Project Management for Scientists (PMB) is a blue circle with a white center. PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR SCIENTISTS is spelled out in white, over the top of the blue circle, and a blue umbel design is overlaid in the white center. At the bottom right, on the outside of the circle, it says “CSCCE Training Course” in two shades of teal.

Project Management for Scientists

Develop the skills you need to manage complex projects with contextualized project management frameworks and tactics in this applied training for STEM professionals. By the end of the training, you will have completed a draft Project Canvas for your work, and expanded your network of community and project managers in STEM.

More information | Register online

Photo of the back of someone wearing a read t-shirt that says "volunteer," by ray sangga kusuma on Unsplash

Working with volunteers

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking things such as “I feel really self-conscious about asking for contributions from our volunteers – are we being too demanding?” and “I know that different members in our community need different things, but I don’t know where to start.” then this 2-hour, discussion-based workshop is for you.

A collage image of five info sheets, as if fanned out on a table.

Course info sheets – make the case and spread the word!

Many of our learners need to make the case for funding and dedicated time to attend our trainings, so we made one-page summaries for all of our courses. They can be found on the individual course pages on the CSCCE website and can also be downloaded directly at any time from Zenodo.

Download

News and resources from CSCCE

Voice and tone: A worksheet to help you refine your community comms and content

In the opening week of our Content Design (CODE) course, which takes a community-centric approach to creating comms and content, we facilitate an activity to help learners define the voice and tone of their content. While the voice you use should stay consistent across all of your communications, it can be modulated for different audiences by changing the tone used. In our highly reflective activity – which you can now try yourself thanks to our new worksheet – you work through the process of identifying the adjectives which describe the voice and different tones used in your communications, and might then sense check them with your colleagues.

Download

Mural Quick Start Guide: A new addition to our CC BY scaffolding collection

Scaffolding is the supportive information, activities, and processes that address barriers to member participation and ensure that all members can access and engage in community programming. Over the years, we’ve created a variety of scaffolding to support our community members and learners, and we’ve licensed these materials CC BY so that other community managers can reuse and adapt them, as relevant. Our latest “Quick Start Guide” offers instructions for getting started in the whiteboard platform, Mural, including tips about features we commonly use in our programming.

Download

Conference recap: CSCCE @ SciTS 2025

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 (Erin Conn, Miriam Krause, Zach Baker, and Rieley Auger), and Camille gave a brief oral presentation about the program, why we created it, and how it’s impacting participants. In a post on the CSCCE blog, we summarized the two sessions, including links to various related resources.

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