CSCCE Blog Editor, Author at CSCCE

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.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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.

5th Birthday Series: CSCCE resource downloads reach 50k!

CSCCE’s free PDF resources, which we make available via Zenodo, have now been downloaded more than 50,000 times! And to make this milestone even more special, it’s also our 5th Birthday this October.

In this blog post, one in a series we’re working on to celebrate our birthday and reflect on the ups and downs of the past five years, we highlight our “top 5” resources. We love hearing how you’re using these resources in your work – whether it’s adapting one of our scaffolding templates or implementing a new engagement strategy based on the CSCCE Community Participation Model!

We also want to say a big THANK YOU to those of you who helped make these resources. While some of our resources are developed by CSCCE staff, many were co-created in collaboration with the members of our community of practice.

Lastly – we’d love to hear from you if there’s a resource you need but haven’t found anywhere else. Maybe we can partner with you and other community managers in STEM to make it! Send us an email (info@cscce.org) with your idea.

Welcome to Alli Lindquist – CSCCE’s new Teaching and Project Assistant

This month, we welcome Alli Lindquist to the CSCCE team as our new Teaching and Project Assistant! Alli will be joining the CSCCE training team, and will be taking over much of Maya’s work as she prepares to head to grad school this fall.

In this blog post, we share a little more about Alli’s background and her new role here at CSCCE, and also how her work fits into our evolving team (for more on some of our recent staff transitions, please revisit last month’s blog post on the topic).

About Alli

With a background in neuroscience and biology, Alli has spent time researching Parkinson’s disease and working on developing cutting edge microscopy tools. She holds a masters degree in biology from Carnegie Mellon University, and has worked as a course developer and teaching assistant, lab manager, and research technician. Most recently, Alli served as a senior editor for Knowing Neurons, a neuroscience education and outreach website. We’re thrilled that Alli is bringing this combination of training and communications expertise to the team at CSCCE!

New resources for community managers using GitHub to engage their members

In 2023, we hosted a series of Tools Trials that focused on the online tools community managers use to support scientific open-source communities – whether that’s by coordinating conference planning, collaborating on creating new resources together, or building out new technical documentation. Over the course of the series, GitHub came up over and again as a preferred platform for many, and there were a number of different ways of using the platform to build community (not just to collaborate on code!).

Today, we’re sharing a collection of outputs from these calls: A new tip sheet that lays out the features of GitHub that make it a useful tool for community managers, and six case studies that showcase some of its potential applications:

VIEW THE COLLECTION ON ZENODO