We’re delighted to announce that the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) has a brand new home!
CSCCE is now a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, a 501(c)3. If you’re familiar with the Carpentries’ software and data skills trainings, we now share the same non-profit parent organization. Lou Woodley will remain director of the Center and says of the move:
“I’m thrilled that we’re entering the next phase of our activities to support the emerging field of scientific community engagement. We’re excited to join a stable of other community-oriented projects at Community Initiatives – and we’re eagerly looking ahead to launching new programming and our community of practice for scientific community managers”
Lou Woodley, CSCCE Director
Our work continues to be supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds the Community Engagement Fellows Program and other core CSCCE activities.
Providing support for scientific community managers remains at the heart of CSCCE’s mission. Image credit: CSCCE
Toby Hodges is a Bioinformatics Community Project Manager at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. He coordinates the EMBL Bio-IT Project, a community building and support project for bioinformaticians and computational biologists. In this role, he works with volunteers from the community to provide training and consulting, information, networking opportunities, and resources to EMBL scientists who use computational approaches in their research.
As community managers, one of the of the pressures on us is the
requirement that we make decisions based on an understanding of our
community members. We must frequently make choices on the assumption
that we know what the desires, motivations, and preferences are of the
people that make up our community. Although we have a close working
relationship and perhaps even friendship with some of them, it’s
generally very difficult for us to maintain a deep understanding of what
makes every member of our community tick, what they want to achieve,
and how we can help them to do that.
Shane M Hanlon is the Program Manager for AGU’s Sharing Science Program and a Senior Producer with the science storytelling organization The Story Collider. Learn more about the Sharing Science Community / @AGU_SciComm and follow him @EcologyOfShane.
Community (and communication) don’t happen naturally
Six months ago, I had no idea what a community manager was.
I’m the Program Manager for the American Geophysical Union’s
(AGU’s) Sharing Science Program. My
team and I work to provide scientists with the skills, tools, and opportunities
to help them share their science with any audience. We hold workshops,
webinars, create tools, manager social media outlets, and more, all in the
pursuit of this goal. Eventually we starting pulling folks together into a
network of like-minded individuals who are passionate about, and committed to,
science communication (scicomm), policy, and outreach. We called it the
“Sharing Science Network.” At that point I don’t know if I would have called it
a community – but it quickly evolved into one.
Brit Myers is a Project Manager for the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS), a non-profit membership organization with the mission of facilitating cross-boundary Arctic knowledge, research, communication, and education. She works to enhance the ability of the highly distributed Arctic research community to connect with one another and work more effectively through collaborative research programs.
Last year I was invited by Dr. Luisa Cristini from the Alfred Wegener Institute to co-convene a session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. Luisa was interested in submitting a session proposal specifically focused on issues relevant to the work of scientific project managers – a job title she and I share. Hoping to attract a larger number of abstracts to the proposed AGU session, we also agreed to reach out to the AAAS CEFP community to see if our session topic might be similar enough to their interests to warrant collaboration. Luckily, CSCCE’s Lou Woodley and another group of #CEFP17 session conveners agreed to join us in our efforts!
However, as we drafted the combined AGU session description – and during a number of other conversations that followed – there was some genuine uncertainty about where the boundaries might stand between those focused on professional development from a “Project Manager” standpoint vs. that of a “Research Community Manager.” For anyone with a Project Management job title, it is hard to forget that Project Management is a well-established profession with an official Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) regulated through accreditation organizations like the Project Management Institute. Alternatively, the “Research Community Manager” is viewed by the new Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement as an “emerging profession,” distinct enough from both traditional project management and/or non-scientific online community management to justify the time and attention needed to professionalize and institutionalize the role.
Image by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/building-ceiling-classroom-daylight-373488/
One task of a scientific community manager is to facilitate the activities of a community and to create opportunities for community members to engage in productive interaction. In this post CEFP2019 Fellow, Rayna Harris shares ten networking strategies for community managers.
Networking is a process we use to exchange ideas and to build relationships with individuals that share a common interest. In previous decades, most networking was done in-person, perhaps with the exchange of a business card or elevator pitch; however, digital communication is an increasingly common way that people network (Leek 2016). Whether you are an introvert or extrovert, the goal of this blog post is to provide community managers with a few strategies for networking to build their community and facilitate the exchange of ideas and information.
Join CSCCE at the 2019 FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) FSCI is a week-long course in scholarly communication for anyone who works in the world of science and scholarship. Classroom … Continue reading “Join CSCCE at FSCI 2019!”
Join CSCCE at the 2019 FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI)
FSCI is a week-long course in scholarly communication for anyone who works in the world of science and scholarship. Classroom courses, group activities, and hands-on training provide attendees with “a friendly, community-based way of learning about and keeping up to date on the latest trends, technologies, and opportunities that are transforming the way science and scholarship is done.”
In the second of our series of posts by the 2019 Community Engagement Fellows, Julianna Mullen walks us through her experiences building trust in an online community and sparking conversations … Continue reading “Building trust in online communities”
In the second of our series of posts by the 2019 Community Engagement Fellows, Julianna Mullen walks us through her experiences building trust in an online community and sparking conversations in an authentic way.
It had been the first bullet point in the job description: “Increase community engagement.”….The Community Manager for The Ocean Acidification Information Exchange would be in charge of getting its member scientists, policymakers, and educators talking to one another about preparing and adapting to ocean acidification.
I’d been a scientist and communicator for some time, but I’d never been a Community Manager; when I accepted the post, I knew the learning curve would be steep, but I was excited! Fast-forward into Month Two of my employment, when I’d made a series of important discoveries:
The OA Information Exchange was so quiet I could almost hear the crickets when I logged on.
Using the phrase “increasing engagement” to describe the breadth, scope, and complicatedness of my work was like calling the Encyclopedia Britannica “some books.”
I couldn’t rely on researching myself out of the hole because there simply wasn’t much material that spoke to what I was trying to do.
I’d failed to understand that an online community, even one comprised of scientists and policymakers working on something as technical as ocean acidification, needs the same kind of emotional tending as in-person communities.
In a blind panic, I reached out to some members I knew personally and asked what was going on. What was the holdup?
“I don’t want to waste anyone’s time with my stupid questions.”
“I don’t think I have anything to contribute.”
“I’m worried people will think I’m unintelligent.”
Sound familiar?
Julianna Mullen, Communications and Community Manager, NERACOOS
In the first of our series of posts by members of the CEFP2019 cohort, Naomi Penfold walks us through her strategy for prioritizing her workflow and staying focused.
You look at your week ahead, and see a calendar jam-packed with meetings and not enough time to respond to community requests or even start to deal with your inbox. Some of these interruptions will be exciting opportunities, but will they help you stay focused on your current goals for the community? Will you ever be able to leave your desk and go home? Despite our best efforts to stay organised and in control, I suspect we all end up feeling overwhelmed at times, especially when community management requires you to be there for people and be reactive in the moment as well as keep the ball rolling with long-term projects and general community programming.
If this resonates, you’re not alone: 32% community managers reported ‘prioritizing number of tasks to do’ as the greatest challenge in their role in CSCCE’s survey in 2016. Clearly something has to give, but who do you prioritise and why? How do you know which tasks are most likely to contribute to your overall mission? How can you say no and avoid becoming overwhelmed? In this post, I describe a method I’m trying to outline, use, and evaluate a community-based strategy. This method has helped me to say no and stay focused before, and now I’m trying to combine it with what we are learning about community strategy through the Community Engagement Fellowship Program.
Lay out your objectives to keep your community on track. Photo by Pille Kirsi from Pexels.
As the CEFP 2017 cohort’s final installment in our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) series, we interview Monica Feliu-Mojer, an award-winning PhD scientist-turned-communicator who leads communications and outreach forCiencia Puerto Rico (CienciaPR), a global community of more than 10,000 scientists, students, educators, and allies transforming science education in Puerto Rico, democratizing science, and training young scientific leaders. Monica also works with the non-profitiBiology, leading science communication trainings and producingvideo stories that explore the intersection of the culture, identity, and research of underrepresented scientists.
Check it out: Monica is guest-editing a special issue on “Inclusive Science Communication in Theory and Practice” for Frontiers in Communications with Erika Check Hayden, Thomas Hayden and Raychelle Burks, inviting research papers, case studies and essays.
Last week we hosted the initial training week for this year’s CSCCE Community Engagement Fellows. It’s an intense week with plenty of time spent together in the classroom and outside of it, and where we aim to do three things:
Equip the fellows with a shared understanding of some core community management principles – from how we think about scientific community managers to the role of strategy, programming and culture in the work that we do.
Surface the expertise that the Fellows already have – through lightning talks, small group discussions and the conversations that arise during the breaks and evening social events.
Nurture a sense of community between the Fellows so that together we create a trust-based cohort in which they can learn and support one another over the course of the year – and beyond.
So what materials do we cover during this foundational week? The curriculum builds each day to help fellows move from describing themselves and their own communities to appraising the strategies and tactics that they’re using – and how they might update them. By the end of the week they have plenty of tools and ideas to take back to their own organizations, as well as an understanding of the role that a community playbook or collaboration guide could play in their own work.
In this post we’ll give an overview of the core curriculum and in a second post we’ll outline the community playbook activities.
It’s all about the teamwork! Image credit: Lou Woodley
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