June’s community call – It’s time for another CSCCE curated networking forum!

For the fifth year running, our June community call (and annual mid-year social) will be an opportunity to network with other members of the CSCCE community of practice! 

We’ll once again be offering our curated networking forum – and as an added bonus this year, we’ll also be publishing the instructions and template documents we use to run the event! So, whether you’ve been before and want to be the first to snag your free guidebook, or this is your first time joining a CSCCE community call, we hope you’ll join us for an hour of one-on-one and small group conversations with other community managers in STEM! 

Please register for the event, and let us know who you’d be particularly interested in meeting, using this brief registration form. The deadline for registration: Friday, 6 June 2025. 

This call is for: 

  • Anyone working to build or nurture communities in STEM (whether or not your job title is “community manager!”)
  • Anyone looking for feedback on their community management work
  • Anyone looking for an opportunity to serve as an informal mentor
  • Community managers looking for a new event format that supports community networking
  • Those who love to network, AND those who find it a little awkward – we take (most of) the awkwardness away by setting you up with people to talk to!

Date: Wednesday, 18 June 2025

Time: 11am EDT / 3pm UTC 

Registration form: Let us know you’re coming, and who you would like to meet! You’ll receive a calendar invite and Zoom link after completing the form. 

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How Canvas LMS supports participation in the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program

As we announce a round of updates to our Community Manager Certification Program following the initial two pilot cohorts, we’re also sharing some additional information about how we deliver the program so that it’s consistently a high quality experience for learners.

In a previous post, we pulled back the curtain to describe the stages of going from piloting a training to converting it to a “steady state” offering with all the required internal and documentation and templates, as well as final versions of all learner-facing materials. In this post, we go deeper into one key piece of technical infrastructure that we’ve adopted over the past couple of years: the learning management system, Canvas.

Canvas is a powerful online platform that allows us to curate training materials and share them with our learners in a consistent, recognizable way that looks and feels like all other CSCCE outputs. It also affords the ability for learners to come back later to revisit course materials – something that’s especially useful as we build out a program as interconnected as our certification journey! 

So let’s take a look at how we have adopted Canvas – and the ways in which it supports program delivery. If, after reading, you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to training@cscce.org 

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A behind-the-scenes look at how we take a “pilot” training and consolidate it into its final, “steady state” form

If you’ve been following the growth of CSCCE’s online training program over the past few years, you may have noticed that every time we launch something new, we call it a “pilot.” This is because we know that the “v1” of anything needs feedback and iteration to make it better. But what happens after we pilot something? How do we take a training through to a high-fidelity, steady state version that we can deliver consistently time and again? 

In this blog post we pull back the curtain on that process of moving to steady state delivery to make visible some of the less obvious infrastructure work we’ve been engaging in over the past few years. And we explain why we’ve made that investment and how it supports us in continuing to deliver trainings that are engaging, effective – and reproducible!  

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Updates to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program including a “pay-as-you-go” option!

The CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program launched around 18 months ago with the goal of being THE in-depth, professional development program for STEM community managers.

Since launch,  we’ve welcomed almost 30 STEM community managers into the program, delivered 2 go-arounds of our CODE and PBK courses, 15 Mini-workshops, and 4 Quarterly Skills Share sessions.  In that time, we’ve also sought regular feedback to understand any modifications we might make to best support our learners. Today we’re sharing some of the updates we’ve made which together provide a more flexible way to enroll, onboard, and pay for the program!  

If you have any questions about anything in this post, please reach out to training@cscce.org, or join us on Wednesday, 26 March at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC for our monthly community call. We’ll be sharing a brief overview the program, demo-ing CSCCE’s trainings in Canvas, and holding space for questions about the program. 

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January/February 2025 Community Call Recap: An update from CSCCE and a community conversation

A big thank you to everyone who joined us at our first community call of 2025. We appreciated the opportunity to share a “big picture” view of how CSCCE’s training, consultancy, and community work is evolving as we pass the 5-year mark of operating as a fiscally-sponsored nonprofit.

We are also grateful to those of you who were able to stay for the second part of the call, where we discussed some of the challenges currently facing the STEM ecosystem. We hope to continue these conversations in Slack and at future community events, so if you were unable to attend this time, we hope you’ll join us in the future. 

In this blog post, we recap some of the news Lou, Camille, and Katie shared in the “updates from CSCCE” section of the call. 

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January’s community call – An update from CSCCE

Happy New Year! CSCCE is now five years old as a STEM nonprofit, and as the year turns we’ve been reflecting internally about where we go next as an organization. At this month’s community call, we’d like to invite you to join the conversation! 

On the call, Lou, Katie, and Camille will take a look back at some of the milestones we’ve celebrated so far, and then share some of the big projects that we’ll be focusing on in 2025. Throughout the call, there will be opportunities to share your feedback, and learn how you can participate in CSCCE community programming over the next 12 months. 

We hope you’ll join us!

Date: Wednesday, 29 January 2025 POSTPONED until Wednesday 19 February 2025

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join

Add to calendar (or contact us at info@cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)

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December 2024 Community Call Recap – Cooking up connections at our annual potluck!

On Wednesday, 18 December we held our sixth annual community potluck – an opportunity for members of the CSCCE community of practice to come together for a laid back hour or so of conversation, connection, and reflection. 

Every year for these events, we use the metaphor of a potluck dinner party to scaffold the call. At a potluck, guests bring a dish to supplement the host’s plans. Similarly, at CSCCE’s annual potluck, everyone is invited to bring something to share, although it’s never food! This year, we asked our guests to bring appetizers of resources and community management stories from 2024, while we “fired up the grill” in Mural for the main course. And to round out the meal, we celebrated with a chatterfall “digestif,” each sharing three words we hope to embody in 2025. 

In this blog post, you can find out a little bit more about how we facilitated the call, and check out a word cloud of our 2025 intentions! 

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Project Management for Scientists: A new training course from CSCCE!

We’re excited to end the year by announcing two new trainings in the CSCCE training portfolio that focus on project management – with the opportunity to register for one now and to let us know if you’d be interested in the second!

In early December 2024, we ran a pilot offering of a brand new multi-module training, Project Management for Scientists. We developed the course with funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and piloted it with almost 30 CZI grantees. This training followed a 2-hour long Introduction to Project Management that we ran earlier in October which a larger group of 50 participants attended.

In 2025, we’ll be making both of these trainings more widely available, and in this blog post, we share more about who they’re for and also the different formats they could take. 

We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in taking the trainings as an individual. Let us know your preferences for a bootcamp vs. a multi-week training, as well as your availability in the first half of 2025, using this short form

Additionally, if you think your community or organization would benefit from a private cohort of the trainings, you can also let us know by emailing training@cscce.org

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December’s community call: Annual community potluck

Phew. Can you believe it’s almost December (again)? And with the end of the year approaching, it means that it’s time for CSCCE’s annual community potluck – an opportunity to connect, share, and reflect (festive accessories encouraged, but not required!). 

This call is for: 

  • Members of the CSCCE community of practice – current and future! (if you’re not already a member of our free Slack-based community of practice, you can request to join here)
  • Anyone working in STEM and adjacent fields whose role involves collaboration or community building
  • Anyone who would appreciate a community space in which to mark the transition from 2024 to 2025 – with scaffolded reflections and opportunities to share and connect

Date: Wednesday, 18 December 2024

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC 

Zoom link to join

Add to calendar (or contact us at info@cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)

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Introducing the Catalyst Project Community Partner Highlights

This blog post originally featured on the Catalyst Project website, where it is available in English and Spanish.

The Catalyst Project is a community-engaged initiative designed to support the adoption of open science principles in under-served bioscientific research communities through the provision of reliable and sustainable cloud computing infrastructure. It’s a project we’ve been working on now for almost two years, which involves staff from seven different organizations: 2i2c, The Carpentries, CCAD, CSCCE, IOI, MetaDocencia, and OLS, and is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. 

A key part of the project is engaging with Community Partners in Africa and Latin America: Institutions, organizations, and individuals who are undertaking bioscientific research projects that require cloud computing infrastructure. As collaborators on the Catalyst Project, Community Partners can access and use 2i2c’s open science cloud services, and also receive training from 2i2c, The Carpentries, MetaDocencia, and OLS to support their work. Community Partners also play a vital role in shaping an evolving governance model for the Catalyst Project to help sustain, scale, and maximize impact in Latin America, Africa, and under-served communities around the world.

In a new collection of blog posts (that we hope will expand over the next couple of months!) we’re highlighting the work of the Catalyst Project Community Partners. This post is a gateway to learning more about the Catalyst Project and its Community Partners. If you have any questions or feedback about the project, please send an email to the core team

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