In January 2026, we hosted a community Tools Trial on the open-source community platform Zulip, which some communities are using or considering as an open-source alternative to Slack. It was a really informative session, and our expert speakers did an excellent job of highlighting how the platform works, how to manage a migration from Slack, and how you as a community manager can make life easier for your members, as well as showcasing some of Zulip’s more “advanced” features.
You can find a recap of the call in this blog post (which includes recordings and resources), but that’s not the only outcome from the Trial! We worked with speakers Samantha Wittke and Danny Garside to create a CC BY Zulip Quick Start Guide – and it’s now available for download and reuse!
What’s a Quick Start Guide?
Quick Start Guides are pieces of scaffolding that community managers can use to lower technical barriers to participation within an online community. They’re not intended to be a full technical guide, but rather they focus on addressing common engagement concerns that members often express such as “how do I turn down the volume of notifications to something I can manage” and “how do I make a post?” Information might include:
- How to log in to a platform
- How to create a personal profile and configure your settings
- Basic orientation information and tips for engaging
- Guidance around expectations and etiquette
- Instructions on how to troubleshoot problems
- Contact information if they need help
A good Quick Start Guide will help your members feel welcome and able to contribute, and save you time as a community manager by reducing the number of individual help messages you receive.
We shared this Quick Start Guide as a downloadable PDF, but depending on your community, you could create a Quick Start Guide in other formats, such as Google Docs, GitHub repos, or webpages. Some things to consider when making scaffolding materials like these include:
- Making sure your members know they exist (e.g., by including it in a welcome email)
- Writing them in such a way that they stay “evergreen” (e.g., using a generic contact email address for help queries)
- Keeping an eye on platform updates that might necessitate creating new versions
Who’s this Quick Start Guide for?
We created this Quick Start Guide with STEM community managers in mind, but it is broadly applicable to anyone hosting a community in Zulip. We know that several of our own community members are considering hosting their community in Zulip, so this is a template they can adapt to meet their specific needs.
Do you have any other Quick Start Guides?
Yes! We created our very first Quick Start Guide for Slack, the platform we currently use to convene our 1000+ member community of practice in Slack. Since then, we’ve created several additional Quick Start Guides for other platforms we use in community activities and our online professional development training (including Canvas learning management system), and we’ve made other scaffolding materials (such as our member onboarding survey and our new member tip sheet) available to download and adapt.
Re-using CSCCE scaffolding materials
We know that community managers often find making time to create new scaffolding materials from scratch to be a challenge alongside the other tasks they do and so the new Zulip Quick Start Guide, as well as all of our scaffolding templates, are available for re-use under a CC BY license. This means that you are welcome to download and adapt them for use in your own community with attribution, which helps to spread the word to other community managers that CSCCE exists as a professional resource for them, too.
Every CSCCE resource includes a section about reuse with recommended citation information, but if you have any questions about how to acknowledge us in your adapted guide, just let us know! You can email us at info@csce.org.
Read more about the importance of community scaffolding
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.” Some scaffolding your members will only use as they get started, other pieces of scaffolding might help them do something specific (e.g., author a guest blog post or contribute to a community call). And scaffolding doesn’t always have to be a written document – it might be a short “how-to” video or series of welcome emails.
Further reading: We discuss scaffolding extensively in part three of our Community Participation Model guidebook, as well as in our “House Party” Concept Booklet.
Upcoming Tools Trial: CiviCRM
Continuing our ongoing explorations of open-source tools, our next community Tools Trial will focus on CiviCRM, an open-source constituent relationship management (CRM) platform. Join Lauren Collister (IOI), Yo Yehudi (OLS) and your fellow STEM community managers to learn more on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 at 2pm EDT / 4pm UTC. FInd out more!