CSCCE Tools Trials are synchronous opportunities for STEM community managers to test out a new platform and/or explore how that platform can be used to support community engagement (e.g., our GitHub series).
Generally, CSCCE Tools Trials emerge from ongoing conversations in our community of practice (hosted in Slack). Recently, several of our members have expressed an interest in learning more about Zulip – an open-source platform with a lot of similar functionality to Slack – as well as the OS constituent relationship management (CRM) platform CiviCRM. So, we’re bringing back Tools Trials in Q1 of 2026 to get to know these platforms better!
The first Tools Trial we’ve scheduled will focus on Zulip, but keep an eye on our Events calendar for more trials coming soon! If there’s an open-source platform that you think STEM community managers should know more about (especially if it’s something you’re an expert in using and would be willing to present about or demo), please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org.
About the Zulip Tools Trial
Date: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Time: 11am US EST / 4pm UTC (90 minutes)
Speakers:
- Samantha Wittke (CSC-IT Center for Science)
- Danny Garside (Digital Research Academy)
- Maria Doyle (Bioconductor)
- Philip Durbin (Dataverse)
- Rory Sawyer (OpenRefine)
A brief introduction to Zulip
Zulip is an open-source community platform, similar to Slack, that supports threaded discussions that can be organized by topic and channel. You can create public channels for the whole community (or team), private channels for sub-groups, and send and receive direct messages.
As an open-source product, you can choose to self-host your Zulip community or sign up through Zulip Cloud for hosted options (including free plans for nonprofits and smaller communities). If your community is already hosted in another platform (e.g., Slack, Mattermost, or Microsoft Teams), Zulip has clear instructions for migration. And at our Tools Trial, we’ll be discussing both setting up new communities AND transitioning your community from one platform to another.
Preparing for the Tools Trial
Between now and 21 January, we’ll be working with our speakers to tailor this Tools Trial to meet the needs of our community. If you’re interested in joining, we encourage you to let us know ahead of time if you have a specific use case or question that you’d appreciate exploring. 90 minutes can fly by, and we want to make sure the session is useful! Some topics that we anticipate covering include:
- An introduction to Zulip and its capabilities
- Best practices for setting up a new Zulip community
- Transitioning a community from Slack to Zulip
- Pros and cons of Zulip vs. other platforms
- OS bots that integrate with Zulip
You can reach out with specific requests by emailing: info@cscce.org.
About CSCCE Tools Trials
CSCCE Tools Trials began in the summer of 2020 as a way of testing out new online tools. It was a response to the rapid pivot to online convening necessitated by the COVID-19 pivot. We’ve since hosted a number of Trials, and you can find recap blog posts about each of them here.
Tools Trials are intended to be practical and participatory, so we encourage you to come with questions or use cases that you’d like to talk to the speakers about, or share with the other community managers or OS specialists who join the call.
Calls last 90 minutes, and with five expert speakers lined up for this session we hope you’ll be able to stay until the end (although we understand if you have to leave early). We plan on recording presentations and demos where possible, and will make these clips available via the CSCCE YouTube channel. In general, we turn recording off during Q&A and discussion to facilitate open sharing and problem-solving. We always synthesize (and anonymize) these conversations in a recap blog post, so even if you can’t join us live we’ll consolidate as much information as possible on the blog.
As with all CSCCE-hosted events, we expect anyone attending to abide by our Community Participation Guidelines and respect our Core Values.
Disclaimer
Please note that by hosting and presenting in these trials neither CSCCE nor any of the participants (or their organizations) who attend these trials are endorsing the platforms.