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November’s Community Call: Creating fulfilling volunteer opportunities in open source software communities

Many STEM communities rely on volunteers, and yet it can be hard to sustain volunteer engagement. For our November call, we’ve invited three community managers from open source software organizations to participate in a panel discussion about how to create volunteer opportunities that are emotionally and intellectually fulfilling, and recognize and reward member contributions in these volunteer roles.

While our panelists this month all work with open source communities (which ties in with the new POSE training program we’re developing!), we encourage you to attend even if this isn’t your focus area. The discussion will be relevant to a range of STEM community settings.

Join us via Zoom on 16 November 2022 at 11am EST/4pm UTC (note that the US daylight saving’s transition may change the time for this monthly call in your time zone.)

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This month’s call will feature a panel discussion about how to create opportunities that will keep volunteers engaged and fulfilled in the open source software space. Image credit: CSCCE

October’s community call recap: STEM leaders share their definitions of successful community management

This month’s community call was part of an ongoing series focusing on the role of community, and the community manager, in STEM. These conversations flowed from the 25 Community Manager Case Studies we published earlier this year, and we’ll be publishing a report to summarize our findings in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can catch up on our August (an overview of the case studies project) and September (a conversation about self-advocacy for community managers) calls on the CSCCE blog, and add our November call (which will focus on supporting and recognizing volunteers) to your calendar.

One of the common challenges identified from the case studies is that many community managers feel that their role is poorly understood, and so people in these roles sometimes find themselves juggling disparate definitions of success. During this session, we heard from three STEM leaders — Josh Greenberg from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, John Ohab from the Hertz Foundation, and Karthik Ram from the University of California at Berkeley — about how they think about the importance and impact of communities, and the qualities they look for in a successful community. This recap describes some of the themes that emerged during this discussion, and includes the recordings of each presentation.

We’re hiring: Junior Trainer and Curriculum Assistant

The CSCCE team is in a period of growth and transition, and we’re excited to be able to open up this junior role on our training team!

If you are interested in honing your training skills, learning the behind the scenes workings of Canvas LMS, and immersing yourself in the world of community building in STEM, then maybe you are CSCCE’s next Junior Trainer and Curriculum Assistant.

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October’s Community Call: Expectations and Metrics

Our October call will focus on why community-building is important to different STEM organizations and what success looks like in each case. We’ll hear from three STEM leaders – each representing a different type of organization from a funder to a lead PI – about why community is important to the work they do.

Join us via Zoom on Thursday*, 20 October, 2022, at 11am EDT/3pm UTC.

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*Please note that this month’s call is on a Thursday rather than during the regular Wednesday time slot due to speaker availability.

This month we’re looking at how to define successful community engagement.

September’s community call: Advocating for yourself to chart a career path

Community management in STEM is still an emerging profession, with community managers often finding themselves in the position of charting their own career path. Explaining to others what you do, why it’s important, and the ways in which you excel doesn’t always come naturally (especially the last part!) and it can help to have some strategies at your fingertips for different situations. So, for this month’s community call we convened an off-the-record conversation about how to advocate for yourself, build your CV, and work with your supervisors to advance your career.

This month’s call was a continuation of the conversation started back in August, so you might find it helpful to revisit the blog post recap of that call before diving into this one!

We’re hiring! Work with us to develop training and resources that support open source ecosystems

In September, CSCCE received major new funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with Karthik Ram at UC Berkeley to develop training for grantees of its Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program. Working closely with various partners in the open data, hardware, and software communities like the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), we’ll be creating curricula, best practices, supporting materials, and a new community of practice over the next two years, incorporating frameworks and practices from existing CSCCE trainings and the open source community.

To do this, we will be expanding our leadership and training teams, hiring three new positions. In fortuitous timing, we are also working to support URSSI as they hire their first community manager, some of whose time will be spent on this new project (see this blog post for more information about that role). In this post, we offer a brief summary of each new position here at CSCCE. If you’re interested in applying for any of the roles, please visit our hiring page for full job descriptions, and feel free to send any questions to info@www.cscce.org.

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CSCCE partner hire: URSSI is looking for a community manager

The US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), a fiscally sponsored Code for Science & Society project, is looking for a community manager. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in working with the research software community in the US and building a community of practice.

The new hire will also be working closely with CSCCE staff as we work to build a training program for NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) grantees (find out more about that project).

If you have any questions about this role with URSSI and how it connects with CSCCE, please contact info@www.cscce.org.

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CSCCE to work with UC Berkeley on delivering training to NSF POSE grantees

CSCCE has received funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with Karthik Ram at the University of California, Berkeley to create and deliver a training program for grantees of NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program. The program will run in 2023 and 2024 and be offered to all POSE grantee teams to help them create sustainable community-centric ecosystems around their open source projects.

In addition to working closely with POSE program officers, we’re thrilled to continue collaborating with Karthik Ram and the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) to design and deliver this new training series.

We are now embarking on a detailed planning phase, with training scheduled to begin in the early spring of 2023. In this blog post, we offer an overview of the scope of the program, highlighting four new employment opportunities with CSCCE and URSSI.

Re-introducing the CSCCE blog – An orientation to what’s here and how you can contribute!

CSCCE’s blog is a wealth of information on scientific community management. But, we realized, for many folks new to CSCCE, that information is somewhat buried in the archives. So, this week we decided to take a look back* at some of the blog posts we’ve** shared over the years, curating them so that you can easily find certain topics or collections, and invite you to add your thoughts as a guest blogger.

A photo of dozens of books open to random pages. Some of them overlap. — Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

September’s community call: Advocating for yourself to chart a career path

In August, we started a conversation about common challenges faced by community managers in STEM. On that community call, which also included an overview of our findings and recommendations from the CSCCE community manager case studies project, several participants noted that they often find themselves defending the importance of their work to leadership, human resources, and/or their community members. This challenge was connected to a lack of clarity around what it looks like to turn community management into a lifelong career; not only advocating for what you do today, but making a plan for where to go next.

So, this month we wanted to hold space to continue this conversation with an off-the-record community call co-moderated by members of the community of practice. This is a great opportunity not only to hear from others’ experiences, but also to help the community as a whole chart a path forward.

Join us on Zoom at 11am EDT / 3pm UTC on Wednesday, 28 September (please note that this month’s call will not be recorded, but we will share a blog post recap afterwards with key learnings and resources).