2025 was another busy year for CSCCE as we continued our work supporting community managers in STEM, and expanded our collaboration with open-source projects.
Threaded throughout our work is the idea that we can effect change on three levels: we can impact the careers of individual community managers by offering skills-based training and free resources; work with individual organizations to embed core practices and vocabulary through consultancy and training; and through this work, encourage ecosystem-wide recognition of the importance of community managers and related human infrastructure in STEM.
In this blog post, we take a look at some of the highlights of the last 12 months, which touch on all three levels. But before we do that, a quick “by the numbers” summary of CSCCE’s year!
- 1 new program developed and launched, the Birdaro training program for open-source leaders in STEM
- 2 new general registration courses released
- 4 Quarterly Skills Share sessions hosted as part of our Community Manager Certification Program
- 6: the number of general registration multi-week online training courses we ran (plus a private cohort of Project Management for Scientists) AND the number of external presentations and panels we participated in
- 8: the number of clients we worked with this year
- 10 general registration Mini-workshops offered (plus 14 private Mini-workshop sessions)
- 11 STEM community managers graduated from our Certification Program, and 20 more will continue with us into the new year
- 14: the number of free-to-download PDF resources we added to our Zenodo community
- 250 individuals trained in our general registration courses and Mini-workshops
- 1000 people are now part of the CSCCE community of practice in Slack (and it keeps growing!)
Perhaps the most surprising number of all? We did almost all of this with only 4 full-time staff members plus a part-time learning technologist!! This has been supported by getting all of our training infrastructure to “steady-state” this year – meaning we’re now able to efficiently deliver high quality, high fidelity trainings with an accompanying learning management system to manage all the course materials. We now have fully built-out course shells, lesson plans, and training materials. A major milestone for us and a culmination of almost five years of steady building of infrastructure! Go team!!
Training and resources for individual community managers in STEM
In 2025, 250 general registration learners joined us for our multi-week courses and Mini-workshops. Even more participated in CSCCE-run trainings through private offerings for our clients and by participating in the Birdaro training program. Our “back-of the envelope” calculations suggest that we trained upwards of 350 individuals this year alone, and deepened our relationship with a number of people who returned to build upon the trainings they took with us in years past.
This year we delivered our first flipped classroom training, re-vamping our Nurturing Online Communities (NOC) course, which initially piloted in 2021. Each week, we recorded short videos describing core concepts from the course’s core text (Building Successful Online Communities by Kraut and Resnick). By reviewing key information before each weekly lesson we were able to spend more of our synchronous time discussing the week’s theme and applying it to real-world scenarios.
“I really appreciated the time you spent recording these mini-lectures for us so that we could focus on discussion and problem-solving in the live sessions.” – NOC25F participant
We also made our Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB) available as a general registration course for the first time this year, having piloted it as a private training for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative at the end of 2024. And it was so popular that we ran two general registration cohorts AND a private offering in 2025!
“Working with other science-minded folks was really helpful to learning, as was the application of PM strategies and techniques to the STEM setting. So often, PM courses are very lingo-focused and relate vaguely to applied fields, like the sciences; this course was very thoughtful in its presentation of ideas.” – PMB25Sp participant
To complement our trainings, and to offer different pathways to accessing CSCCE’s frameworks, we publish guidebooks, tip sheets, and glossaries as downloadable PDF resources. This year, we published guidebooks on creating community-engaged content (used during our Content Design course), three new sections of our community management glossary (you can also browse all terms via our website), and practical guides for running an online networking social and using the virtual whiteboard platform, Mural. We also developed a series of course info sheets that summarize our trainings in a single infographic – a tool we hope will help more STEM community managers make the case for professional development to their supervisors and funders.
The CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program
In May, we announced the first graduates from the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program. Since then, 11 participants in the program successfully completed their training requirements of three multi-week courses, six Mini-workshops, and presenting and participating in Quarterly Skills Share sessions.
We launched the program in September of 2023, predicting that participants could expect to complete their studies in 18 months to two years (depending on when we were able to offer the various components, and how that scheduling interacted with their own availability). Earlier this year, we transitioned from a cohort-based intake to rolling enrollment, and added a pay-as-you go option to help participants spread their investment across multiple fiscal years.
As people graduate from the program, we’ve been asking them for feedback on what resonated and what we could adjust. It has been validating to hear from graduates how cohesive they’ve found our training materials and formats. Overwhelmingly, however, graduates cite the value they’ve found in connecting with each other, both during staff-run trainings and in the peer-to-peer learning environment of the Quarterly Skills Share sessions.
“The CSCCE team and the trainers clearly put a lot of thought into developing the courses, lessons and co-labs to make it as engaging and applicable as possible. The environment is always very welcoming and I felt that it was a safe and productive space for me and my fellow learners to share our thoughts and learn together.” – Yan-Kay Ho, 2025 CSCCE Certified Community Manager
Consultancy and private trainings for STEM organizations
Our consultancy work this year included expanding the reach of our materials to executive directors, project managers, growing teams, and community-engaged organizations. We worked with international STEM infrastructure organizations, US-based academic teams, and domain-specific nonprofits. Our consultancy included delivering private trainings, evaluating programs and activities, offering ongoing community engagement strategy support, and developing new training curricula. You can find out more about our past and current clients on our consultancy page.
If you’re interested in learning more about working with CSCCE, please send an email to info@cscce.org and we’ll set up an informational meeting.
Introducing the Birdaro training program for open-source leaders
Our big launch this year was the Birdaro training program. Funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we established Birdaro as a hub for scientific open-source projects to connect and up-skill in leadership, collaboration, and sustainability. A major component of this work was to host a cohort of open-source teams and guide them through a series of CSCCE-designed trainings on governance and documentation (a pilot offering that we anticipate will become one in a series of online training modules).
We announced the program in July, and decided to prioritize participation in the inaugural cohort to applications from projects with two or more team members. In September we welcomed 60 individuals from 24 projects into a 12-week program that combined Mini-workshops focused on governance and interpersonal dynamics; Lightning Talk sessions at which each team shared on topics related to scaling and sustaining collaborative projects; and a multi-week training adapting our Creating Community Playbooks course to open-source contexts.
For inquiries about future open-source trainings through Birdaro, including opportunities for sponsorship, please contact info@birdaro.org.
Ecosystem-wide impact now and into the future
Throughout 2025, we’ve shared CSCCE’s work at various conferences and gatherings that brought together thought leaders in open-source software, AI, next generation computing, and research development. This included our Director, Lou, giving a keynote at the NORDP conference, a deep-dive session on community engagement for the academic OSPO community, CURIOSS, as well as facilitating a panel at the Science of Team Science conference featuring several of our certification program graduates. Some of these presentations highlighted a study we conducted in 2024 to better understand the impact of our foundational multi-week training, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals, which we consolidated into a new infographic earlier this year. And Lou’s participation in an invite-only National Labs-led workshop on AI and the subsequent writing team, helped to support the publication of a new report on how community-building will become increasingly important for next-generation computing ecosystems.
As a testament to our broadening impact within the STEM ecosystem, our Slack-based community of practice welcomed more than 200 new members this year, and our 1000th member joined in late September. The workspace continues to host conversations about community management in STEM, a community-sourced jobs board, various special interest groups, and a channel devoted to regular one-on-one coffee chats powered by the Donut app. If you’d like to join, you can request an invitation at any time!
Thank you – see you next year!
Thank you to all of our community members, clients, and training participants for making this another fulfilling year for the CSCCE team. We wish you all the best for the holiday season, and a happy new year! We’ll be back in touch in January.