CSCCE Blog Editor, Author at CSCCE

Introducing the inaugural Birdaro training program cohort!

At the end of last month we launched the pilot cohort of the Birdaro training program for open-source leaders, which will run for 12 weeks until mid-December 2025.

Thanks to strong interest in the program from a range of projects, we have put together a cohort that represents a variety of focus areas, fiscal homes, project stages and project sizes. You can read more about how we intentionally built this cohort of participants, and used their input to iteratively shape the pilot curriculum in an earlier blog post.

In a new series of five blog posts on the Birdaro website, we’re introducing you to the teams taking part in the Birdaro 2025 pilot cohort. You can click through to read more about each of these projects below, and visit this page of the Birdaro website to learn more about individual team members.

We’re reviewing applications for the first Birdaro training program!

We wanted to share an update on the application and selection process for the first cohort of the Birdaro training program, including how it’s been influencing our next steps with program design.

It’s been a busy few weeks as we’ve worked in an intentionally iterative manner to review applications and work with applicants to determine the schedule and timing for this brand new training for open-source project leaders. We received applications from more than 50 open-source projects in just three weeks and we’ve been enjoying learning more about the projects and what their needs are.

If you’re just hearing about Birdaro now and wishing you’d applied, the strong interest we’ve received means that we hope that we’ll be able to run another cohort next year. So make sure you’re signed up to our newsletter to stay up to date.

Congratulations to our latest Certification Program grads!

Next week, at our Q3 Quarterly Skills Share session (a regular part of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program), we’ll be celebrating two more certification program graduates!

Lena Karvovskaya, Community Coordinator for the Dutch Thematic Digital Competence Centre for the Natural and Engineering Sciences (TDCC-NES) at TU Delft Library, and Zachary Baker, Community Manager for the Open Molecular Software Foundation, are now CSCCE-certified community managers: Congratulations, Lena and Zach!!

In this blog post we share a few of Zach and Lena’s reflections on the program and highlight their individual training journeys. And, for those less familiar with the program, we’ve also included a brief summary of what it involves.

As a reminder, we now accept open enrollment in the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, which means you can join the program at any time. So if you’re interested in signing up, do send an email to training@cscce.org!

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, and Camille gave a brief oral presentation about the program, why we created it, and how it’s impacting participants.

In this blog post, we’ve summarized the two sessions, and include links to various related resources (including the slides from Camille’s talk). If you have any questions about joining the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program as a participant, or the potential for sponsorship, please contact info@cscce.org.

The Birdaro Training Program – supporting open-source leaders

Announcing a new training opportunity for open-source leaders.

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?”

Over the past three years, we’ve worked with several open-source projects as clients, and engaged with the NSF’s Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems program to develop training for project leaders as they worked to scale and grow their projects.

Now, thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we’re expanding on what we’ve learned to launch a new initiative, the Birdaro training program, making it available (for free in its pilot phase!) to those in decision-making positions in open-source projects as they navigate growth, scaling, and sustainability of their projects.

APPLY TO JOIN THE BIRDARO TRAINING PROGRAM

In this blog post, we share more information about the program, who is eligible to apply, and how to submit your application, as well as other ways you can get involved in Birdaro as a guest speaker, resource curator, and more. Please send any questions or inquiries to info@birdaro.org.

Annual mid-year social: Recap and NEW “how to” guide available for download!

On Wednesday, 18 June 2025, we held our fifth curated networking event at our annual mid-year social. The event has always been very well-received, and over the years we’ve had several requests for the instructions. So, this year, we published a guidebook that describes how we do it – and includes access to our template docs, sheets, and forms!

DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE

We’ve added the new guide to our existing series on using virtual events to facilitate community-building, which we began back in 2020 with a crowdsourced collection of event formats. Since then, we added a curated collection of resources from around the internet, guidelines for selecting and testing new online tools to support your virtual events, and our “making a PACT” framework to help you plan out your meetings with four key elements in mind.

You can find all of these resources (and more!) on our organizing community events resource page. Read on for a brief recap of this year’s social!

Training update: Three CSCCE multi-week courses coming up later this year!

Registration is now open for our “Fall” cohorts of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), Nurturing Online Communities (NOC), and Project Management for Scientists (PMB)!

These trainings will round out our offerings for 2025. This blog post will give you a sense of who each training is designed for and how they connect to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program. We’ve also created a new infographic detailing the impact of CEF on our 350+ CEF graduates and the communities they serve. If you’re considering the course, but need documentation to back up your professional development funding request, hopefully this will help!

If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

The intersection of community engagement and open-source: CSCCE’s Director goes on a “Deep Dive” with CURIOSS

On Thursday, 15 May 2025, CSCCE’s founder and director Lou Woodley joined the Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS) community as the invited speaker for one of their regular “Deep Dive” sessions. CURIOSS – also seed-funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – is a community of practice for anyone working in a university or research OSPO (open source program office), and their monthly Deep Dive sessions are opportunities for the community to hear from experts in open science, open research, or academic open source.

Lou’s presentation, which was recorded and you can watch it in full below, highlighted some of CSCCE’s resources and trainings that are directly relevant to the work of open-source leaders and OSPO staff members. She did this by asking (and answering!) five questions, which we’ve briefly summarized below.

If watching Lou’s talk, or browsing this blog post, piques your interest in CSCCE’s work, please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org. We’d be happy to discuss your specific context, and whether our consultancy or training opportunities might benefit your project.

Announcing the first graduates of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program!

In September 2023, we launched the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program – a multi-modular professional development training intended to be completed over the course of approximately two years. We’re delighted to share that two of the participants are now ready to graduate as our first CSCCE-certified STEM community managers!

Congratulations to Erin Conn, Project Director of the SEA Change Community at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Miriam Krause, Director of Education, Outreach, and Diversity for the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology!

In this blog post, we’ll share more about Erin and Miriam’s experiences in the program, and how we’re celebrating their accomplishments. If you’re interested in learning more about the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, either as an individual participant or as a financial sponsor, please reach out to training@cscce.org.

Project Management for Scientists – choose the training combo that works best for you!

A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the graduation of our first general registration cohort of our Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB). They followed in the footsteps of our pilot cohort, which we ran for Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grantees at the end of 2024. And we’re excited to announce that the training will be back on our calendar in November/December of this year!

In this blog post, we’ll share a little more about our thinking behind offering PMI (the Mini-workshop, An Introduction to Project Management for Scientists) and PMB as separate but connected trainings, and highlight how these trainings impacted the STEM community, program, and project managers who took them.

If you have any questions about what you read here, please contact training@cscce.org.

“There is a lot of project management advice and resources out there but having a training dedicated to STEM and its unique challenges makes it much more meaningful and immediately valuable.” – PMB24CZI participant