CSCCE Blog Editor, Author at CSCCE

An update on CSCCE staff changes: New year, new org chart!

If you came to January’s community call, you will have heard CSCCE’s Director Lou Woodley talk through some changes to our staff team. There are some new faces joining the team and a new way of looking at our organizational structure that reflects the way we are continuing to grow. In this post, we outline these shifts, signpost where we’re headed, and acknowledge some of the challenges we’ve faced as a rapidly growing, highly collaborative staff team.

January, 2023 Community Call Recap: CSCCE’s plans for the next year

For our first community call of 2023, we wanted to continue our tradition of periodic updates about what’s happening at CSCCE. In these updates, we draw back the curtain and share more details about what we’re working on, as well as some reflections that other growing organizations and communities may share. From onboarding new staff members to preparing for the first cohort of our certification program, there’s a lot going on, which brings with it necessary changes in process and underlying technical infrastructure. This recap blog post will get you up to speed on all the news.

Note: A recording of this call is available to members of our Community of Practice, and a link is available in Slack. Please contact info@cscce.org if you need assistance.

Welcome to Maya Sanghvi – CSCCE’s newest Junior Trainer and Curriculum Assistant

We have another new staff member to tell you about! Maya Sanghvi joined CSCCE’s training team earlier this month, having recently graduated with a BS in cognitive science from Yale University. We’re so excited to welcome Maya to the team, and can’t want to see how she contributes to our expanding training offerings. Read on for a little more about Maya!

About Maya

Just like several other members of the CSCCE staff team, Maya has a scientific background, and conducted research on decision-making while she completed her undergraduate training. And, like our entire staff team, she sees the need for a more human-centric approach to research culture.

Welcome to Cat Dayger – CSCCE’s new Director of Operations and Technology

In 2023 we’ll be adding several new staff members to our team, the first of whom is our new Director of Operations and Technology, Cat Dayger! We’re so excited that Cat is here, and in this blog post we’ll tell you a bit more about her and her newly created role at CSCCE.

About Cat

A photo of Cat Dayger, who has brown hair, light blue eyes, and is wearing blue rectangular earrings.

Cat is based in Portland, Oregon, where she previously worked as the assistant director of team science and strategy at the Knight Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research (CEDAR) center. Her work at CEDAR included overseeing team development, creating new processes for reviews and promotions, developing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and implementing center-wide leadership initiatives and trainings. While in this role, she took part in CSCCE’s Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals course, and has been a member of our community of practice for almost two years.

Image credit: Rebecca Benoit

January’s community call – What’s coming up for CSCCE in 2023

Happy New Year! The turning of the year is often accompanied by transition, setting new intentions, and planning for the months ahead. That’s certainly where we find ourselves at CSCCE, with 2023 promising to be a huge year for our growing organization.

In our first community call of the year, we’ll share what’s coming up, including new courses, clients, and community programming. This is a great way to catch up if some of our newsletters fell into the cracks of December email chaos, or if you’re new to our community of practice and would like to find out more about opportunities to get involved. Our calls are open to anyone, so if you’re not yet a community member but you’re interested in what we do to support STEM communities and the people who build them, please do feel free to join.

Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join: click here

Add to calendar: click here

*Our January community call will be an update from the CSCCE virtual offices, during which we’ll share what we have coming up in 2023. Image credit: CSCCE*

New project: Open science cloud infrastructure and training for communities in Latin America and Africa

This article is cross-posted from the 2i2c blog with additional text describing CSCCE’s role.

We are excited to announce that the team and proposal described in this blog post has been awarded funding by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative!

Our goal is to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service that enables community-based cloud-native workflows in the biosciences. We will promote values of open and inclusive community practices, infrastructure that enables these practices, and a “train the trainers” approach that empowers community leaders to share expertise in cloud infrastructure with others in their communities. Our focus will be on communities in Latin America and Africa, and we hope to learn how this model could be extended to other global communities that are historically marginalized from large-scale scientific infrastructure projects.

CSCCE will be working with all of the partners involved in the grant to identify a model for running Open Science Cloud Services (OSCS) for global communities that is generalizable, sustainable, and replicable. We’ll be hosting a series of project kickoff meetings to align everyone around shared vocabulary and best practices for working together, which will be codified into core documentation such as a team playbook. And we’ll be supporting a newly-hired program manager for the project.

This is a collaborative effort between 2i2c, The Carpentries, CSCCE, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science. For more detailed information, see the blog post with our full grant narrative.

2022 CSCCE Resource Guide

CSCCE’s Community of Practice, which we host in a Slack workspace (find out more and request to join here), contains a wealth of information. Over the years, our members have shared hundreds of blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, and other media about a multitude of topics, from how to write inclusive content to hosting engaging and accessible events.

Whether you’re a member of the community and could use a reminder, or you’ve been wondering what tips our members have, we’ve curated some of 2022’s highlights in this blog post. Below is a list of 49 resources that garnered some of the most engagement in our Slack community over the past year.

December, 2022 Community Call Recap: A Feast of Tech Tools

Here at CSCCE, we relish opportunities to learn from each other. So, for our annual potlucks, we ask everyone to bring knowledge instead of food! This year, we asked participants to bring their favorite tech tools and tips — and tech problems in search of solutions. Below is a smorgasbord of tools suggested by our Community of Practice, as well as a list of common tech problems with some suggested solutions for you to sink your teeth into. If you weren’t on the call but you’d still like to contribute, no problem! We used a Mural board to brainstorm, and you’re still welcome to add to it.

CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program – More information available and live info sessions!

In July we announced that in 2023 we’ll be launching a new certification program for STEM Community Managers, building on our foundational training Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals. Since we made that announcement, we’ve been listening to feedback and working on some details.

In this blog post, we share some updates, including when the first cohort will begin their course of study and how you can let us know that you plan on enrolling. We also share when we’ll be hosting info sessions so that you can get quick answers to any questions you might have, and how your organization can sponsor the program if you’d like to support the participation of others.

November’s community call recap: Community managers share their strategies for engaging volunteers

For our November call, the theme was working with volunteers. Yanina Bellini Saibene (rOpenSci) moderated a discussion between Saranjeet Kaur (RSE Asia Association) and Melissa Mendonça (NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas) with brief comments from Yared Abera Ergu (The Carpentries in Africa). The panelists addressed a range of topics including:

The types of volunteer positions available in their communities
What motivates their volunteers
Problems with common approaches to volunteer labor and potential solutions

In this blog post, we provide brief descriptions of the panelists’ and facilitator’s backgrounds and summarize their thoughts on these three topics.