CSCCE Blog Editor, Author at CSCCE

February’s community call: Creating scaffolding to support your community

Our February call will focus on scaffolding — onboarding documentation, how-to manuals, and tip sheets that keep everyone within an organization or community on the same page.

We’re currently finalizing a guidebook that lays out the role of scaffolding in STEM communities, and we’re excited to give you a sneak peak of the guidebook’s core concepts. This month’s call will also include time for participants to create or update their own scaffolding – either by adapting CSCCE’s CC-BY-licensed scaffolding templates or building and/or sharing their own organization’s documents.

Join us on Wednesday, 16 February at 4pm UTC / 11am EST for more. Click here to join the Zoom meeting.

For our February 2022 community call, we’ll be discussing the scaffolding that supports communities. Image credit: CSCCE

January’s community call recap: Project management tools for community managers

Our January call focused on project management tools and how they can streamline collaborations and improve efficiency. This post includes a summary of the call, as well as video clips of presentations from Lou Woodley (CSCCE; describing the tool Trello), Alycia Crall (the Carpentries; describing Asana), Anne Heberger Marino (Lean-To Collaborations, describing Mural), Ellen Dow (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, describing Todoist).

It’s Community Manager Advancement Day! Some ideas to hone your skills and grow your professional network with CSCCE

Today is Community Manager Advancement Day (CMAD), and this year the focus is on professional development for community managers!

What is CMAD?

If this is the first you’re hearing about the annual celebration of community managers, a little background. CMAD was created in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang, a technology professional specializing in the intersection of technology and human behavior. Community members are encouraged to send messages of thanks to their community manager (using the hashtags #CMAD and #CMGR), and organizations that support community managers often host events or release resources to mark the occasion and explore the year’s theme (for example, last year we hosted a community call on 2021’s CMAD theme of resilience).

Community Manager Case Studies: What does it look like to be a community manager in STEM?

In 2016, we conducted a series of 10 interviews with community managers working in STEM. We asked them a series of questions with a view to sharing what their roles looked like and highlighting the work as an important piece of human infrastructure for effective collaboration.

More than five years later, after growing a community of practice involving more than 350 members, we’re revisiting the project. Our goal is to build a collection of case studies so that new and aspiring community managers can get an idea of what their role is or will be, and for hiring managers to understand what to look for in new hires.

We’re also curious about how community roles vary in different organizational settings. How does community management look in a professional society vs. higher education, for example? How do online communities compare to in-person ones, and how is that changing during the COVID-19 pandemic? We hope to explore these topics and more on the CSCCE blog as the project develops.

January’s community call: Project management tools and best practices for community managers

For our first call of 2022 we’re focusing on project management. It’s a common time of year to be thinking about big picture planning and strategy development, both individually and for your organization or team. And, there are a number of online tools out there that can help you map out your month, quarter, and/or year and keep track of tasks as you go.

In response to several requests, this month’s call will include a general introduction to some of the rationale behind project management as well as active demos of four different platforms that can help you with your project management; Trello, Asana, Mural, and Todoist. We’ll share how we keep on top of things here at CSCCE, as well as hear from three members of the CSCCE community of practice who use one or more of these platforms in their own community management work. There’ll also be an opportunity to try at least one of the tools in breakouts to help guide your own work.

Join us on Wednesday, 19 January at 4pm UTC / 11am EST for more. Click here to join the Zoom meeting.

Opportunities to co-create with CSCCE in 2022

Co-creating resources with members of our community of practice is an important part of what we do here at CSCCE. It adds depth and breadth to the resources we publish while also being an opportunity for members to both gain a citable publication and give back to the community. In many cases, working on a CSCCE project also leads to new professional connections and working relationships that persist long after we publish the final product.

So, as we continue our series of forward-looking blog posts, we’re thinking about the co-creating and collaboration opportunities that will exist over the next few months. If any of these opportunities pique your interest, let us know by emailing info@cscce.org.

Co-create with us! Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

Community calls coming up in Q1 of 2022

CSCCE community calls are a monthly opportunity for shared learning and connection. Members of the community of practice as well as anyone interested in the topic under discussion each month are all welcome to join, and we encourage you to spread the word among your own networks!

In this blog post, we share our plans for the first three calls of 2022. We also talk about the ways that we chose topics to highlight, the different kinds of formats we have hosted in the past, and how you can propose topics and/or present on future calls.

What’s coming up in Q1+ for CSCCE’s professional development courses?

CSCCE is the leading training organization for community managers in STEM and this year we’re looking to build upon our successful existing courses by adding some new options – and new technology – to the mix. Plus, we’ll be experimenting with an Accessibility Fund to support broader participation. Read on for the details!

Reflecting on some highlights from 2021

Happy new year! We hope that you got a bit of a break over the holiday period. Before we outline what’s coming up at CSCCE in 2022, we wanted first to reflect on 2021 and another busy 12 months for the CSCCE team.

While this post summarizes a few of CSCCE’s “greatest hits,” from the year, it has also been an emotionally and logistically challenging year, with many of us operating under conditions of radical uncertainty and yet always trying to show one another care. As we continue to operate in the midst of a global pandemic, we want to acknowledge that while it’s important to celebrate our successes, 2021 has been difficult too.

Before we dig in, a heartfelt thank you to everyone we’ve worked with over the past year; members of our community of practice, learners in our online trainings, and clients and colleagues. We appreciate every joyful opportunity to learn and grow alongside you as we work to professionalize and institutionalize the role of the community manager in STEM.

We’d also like to thank our major funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for their continued support, guidance, and commitment to the importance of building communities in STEM.

CSCCE to collaborate with rOpenSci on CZI grant to empower historically excluded groups as community leaders in scientific open source projects

This post originally appeared on the rOpenSci blog, and is cross-posted with permission from the authors, Stefanie Butland, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, and Maëlle Salmon. We’re excited to be partnering with the rOpenSci team to create a champions program to support new leaders in their community. Read on for more background on the project.

rOpenSci has been awarded new funding as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science program’s education and capacity building strategy. This $400K grant will support a new project to enable more members of historically excluded groups to participate in, benefit from, and become leaders in the R, research software engineering, and open source and open science communities.