Begin, or return to, your professional development with CSCCE

A belated happy new year from CSCCE! After a slightly extended year-end break, we’ve been hard at work scheduling some training opportunities for the first part of 2026, as well as re-invigorating our free community programming.

In today’s newsletter, we’re highlighting two of our popular multi-week, online training courses, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) and Content Design (CODE).

CEF is our longest-running training course (close to 400 individuals have graduated from CEF), and has positively impacted both the individuals who take part and the communities they manage. We’ve even seen a broader impact on the STEM ecosystem in general – findings you can read more about in our 2024 evaluation.

CODE, on the other hand, is a newer addition to the CSCCE training catalogue – this will be our third cohort of the course, and an exciting opportunity for anyone interested in growing as a communicator, content creator, and convenor. It’s also a required course in our Community Manager Certification Program, so if that’s on your wish list for 2026, now’s a great time to reach out to our training team and get signed up!

We’ll be back in your inbox with more training news soon – our Mini-workshop program for 2026 will kick off in April!

Also in this month’s newsletter, we’re creating more opportunities for our community of practice (which now convenes more than 1000 STEM community managers in Slack) to learn, connect, and grow:

Find out more about our recent Zulip Tools Trial
Register for our upcoming Five Dysfunctions of a Team book club
Add our next tools trial, which will focus on CiviCRM, to your calendar

And, we’ve been making some updates to our technical infrastructure – find out more about our switch to Zeffy.

Training news

This CEF info sheet describes course outputs, related resources, and how to participate.

Register for CEF

CEF is an eight-week course, designed to offer new and existing community managers a core set of actionable skills and strategies. Participants meet twice a week in live, 90-minute Zoom sessions, during which instructors describe core concepts and facilitate activities on how to put them into practice. Our next session begins on 19 March (deadline to register: 5 March).

More information | Register

This CODE info sheet describes course outputs, related resources, and how to participate.

Register for CODE

CODE is a six-week course that introduces a strategic approach to designing and creating community-engaged content. As for CEF, we host two live sessions per week, with lecture-style content complementing structured activities that layer the social and informational roles of community content. Our next session begins on 21 April (deadline to register: 3 April).

More information | Register

The CSCCE Certified Community Manager digital rosette. It is made up of a dark blue circle with an umbel flower motif in the center, and a lighter blue ribbon descending from the bottom of the circle. The words “CERTIFIED COMMUNITY MANAGER” are spelled out in white on the dark blue circle, and “CSCCE” appears on the lighter blue ribbon.

Enroll in CSCCE’s Certification Program

CSCCE’s Community Manager Certification Program builds upon CEF to create a longer-form, multi-component, online program for STEM community managers. The program equips participants with necessary skills and frameworks to ground their work in a community-centric leadership approach – and to signal those qualifications to others.

Find out more | Contact us

A photo of red sticky notes on a wall, under the heading "follow up topics"

Tell us which Mini-workshops you’d like to take

We’re currently putting together our Mini-workshop schedule for 2026. CSCCE Mini-workshops are 90- to 120-minute sessions that introduce discrete ideas in community management or go deeper on a core framework, bitesize training offerings for community professionals. To make a request, please complete our Mini-workshop interest form.

Browse the CSCCE Mini-workshop catalogue

Community updates

Zulip Tools Trial Recap – Find out more about this open-source community platform!

On Wednesday, 21 January 2026 CSCCE hosted a Tools Trial to support our community in learning about the open-source community platform Zulip. The Trial, like the many we’ve run before, offered basic information about the platform, and then explored different use cases relevant to community managers – including migrating a community from Slack into Zulip. In a post on the CSCCE blog, you’ll find a brief summary of the call, a curated list of resources relevant to anyone interested in setting up a Zulip instance, and recordings of our four expert presenters: Philip Durbin (Dataverse), Maria Doyle (Bioconductor), Samantha Wittke (CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland), and Danny Garside (Digital Research Academy).

CSCCE Community Book Club: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Coming up on Wednesday, 11 March 2026 at 11am EDT / 3pm UTC, we’re planning a live, 90-minute community book club session co-hosted by CSCCE community member Jody Peters (University of Notre Dame / Ecological Forecasting Initiative community manager). The book club will focus on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, a short fable that is used to explore a model outlining five things that are essential for a healthy, collaborative team (or working group, steering committee, or sub-community).

Join us for our CiviCRM Tools Trial

On Wednesday, 25 March at 2pm EDT / 6pm UTC we’ll be finding out more about another open-source community tool used by some of our members to manage their communities: CiviCRM. Lauren Collister (IOI) and Yo Yehudi (OLS) will be taking us through how they use the platform, and will be available to answer any questions you might have about setting up a CiviCRM instance for your community.