Blog

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

June 2024 Community Call Recap: Annual mid-year social and curated networking forum

On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 we hosted our fourth annual curated networking forum for members of our community of practice. This is a regular opportunity for STEM community managers to get to know each other in a series of personalized one-on-one and small group chats – a virtual take on speed networking, if you like!

In previous years, all participants in the event have joined us on Zoom and experienced the event entirely synchronously, but this year, we welcomed our first asynchronous participant. In this blog post, we share a little more about the event, and how asynchronous networking worked for us in this pilot outing.

Announcing Birdaro – a new project to support scientific open source projects as they scale

We’re excited to announce Birdaro, a new project to support open source software (OSS) projects as they consider scaling and plans for long term sustainability, thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

In recent years, OSS products have become increasingly important within STEM research and beyond – underpinning research methodology and making possible new advances, particularly in high-throughput and data intensive fields. Alongside this growing recognition are emerging and ongoing conversations about how best to support the longer term persistence of these projects – with new organizational entities, conferences, books, reports, and other resources arising to support conversations about project scaling and sustainability.

An update about the CSCCE staff team: We have a new org chart!

As Octavia Butler’s famous quote goes, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change,” and that has certainly been true for us over the past couple of years at CSCCE.

Our training offerings have expanded, our client list has grown, and our community of practice has continued to mature – all as we’ve continued to learn and grow as an organization and as individuals. Alongside some of these milestone shifts, we’ve made some changes internally by implementing new technological infrastructure, and continuing to develop and discuss internal team processes and culture. All of this supports us in figuring out how to navigate showing up everyday as people who believe in the power of collaborative work and co-creating together in a complex world. Yes, like you, we’re working on that daily too! 🙂

As a function of all of this, our staff team has expanded and evolved and, in this post, we share our new org chart. It now includes a new “table of functions” to describe how each of us contributes to CSCCE’s core areas – and we talk a bit in the post about how we ended up here. If you’re interested in discussing the inner workings of a small STEM nonprofit in more detail, do reach out to info@www.cscce.org. We’re always interested to hear from others working in a similar context.

Facilitating collaboration and decision-making: A workshop series for the Rare As One Network annual meeting

In mid-May, CSCCE was honored to host a three-day workshop series for the Rare As One Network’s annual meeting. The meeting’s attendees had a shared interest in developing strategies to support large-scale collaboration and collaborative decision-making, topics that we regularly offer trainings on, and we were delighted to share our frameworks in this highly interactive online workshop setting.

This blog post offers a summary of the series. If you are interested in learning more about commissioning a similar training for your organization or community, please reach out to training@www.cscce.org. (Review a full list of workshops in our catalog.)

May Community Call Recap – The who, what, when, where, why, and how of making a community playbook!

This month’s community call was an opportunity to talk about community playbooks, and the impact they can have on a community or team.

We were joined by three members of the CSCCE community of practice, each of whom recently created a playbook as part of their participation in our newest online course Creating Community Playbooks (PBK): Allie Lau (American Physical Society), Martin Magdinier (OpenRefine), and Sophie Bui (National Center for Supercomputing Applications).

In this blog post you can watch recordings of each of the presentations and find out more about the questions and discussion their talks inspired. We’ve also included more information about the PBK course – registration for our next cohort closes on 21 June 2024! If you have questions about the course, do reach out to training@www.cscce.org.

Fostering equity and leadership: The rOpenSci Champions Program selection process

This post is adapted and abridged from the original, which appeared on the rOpenSci blog and was authored by Francisco Cardozo, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Camille Santistevan, and Lou Woodley

As part of our work with longtime client and partner rOpenSci, we’ve been supporting community manager Yanina Bellini Saibene with developing their champions program.

The goal of the rOpenSci Champions Program is 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. This program includes 1-on-1 mentoring for the Champions as they complete a project and perform outreach activities in their local communities.

This blog post focuses on how participants are selected from a pool of applicants for the rOpenSci Champions Program – a multi-step process intentionally designed to ensure a diverse cohort of Champions and Mentors.

An update about how we’re using Zoom at CSCCE

This post was authored by CSCCE’s Director of Community, Alycia Crall.

The CSCCE relies on a number of communication platforms to support programming in our community of practice. One of the primary platforms we have adopted is Zoom, and we currently have two Zoom accounts. One that is used for external programming, training, and events. The second is used internally for staff meetings and other communications.

Background on changes to Zoom

In August 2023, Zoom updated their terms of service that suggested they could use meeting audio, video, chat, screen sharing, and other content to train their Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. At CSCCE, we value making our programming accessible in a range of ways AND we want our learners and community members to feel comfortable speaking freely without any concerns for their privacy. Due to privacy concerns, closed captioning was activated on a case by case basis as we examined how our team and community of practice might be impacted by these changes.

How does CSCCE online training impact community managers and their organizations? Read our report to find out!

Thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we recently completed a medium-term evaluation of our foundational training course, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF). We’ve just published a report that summarizes the results of this work, which shows impact across three levels of scale – the individual, their community/organization, and the wider STEM ecosystem.

In this blog post, we’ll recap some of the rationale for the report and a high level overview of our findings. Subsequent posts will share more about our user-centered design approach to creating professional training courses, what we learned about the impact of CEF at each level, and how this work will impact our ongoing training offerings.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

April Community Call Recap – The impact of short-form professional development training in STEM

At this month’s community call, we were talking about the impact of short-form professional development trainings – focusing not only on how individuals use what they learned during a training in their day to day work, but also considering how such trainings may result in changes at the level of the STEM ecosystem by affecting common practices and connecting learners across projects and organizations.

The call included an overview of the Bicycle Principles, a framework for designing and evaluation inclusive and engaging trainings, as well as presentations about two different methods for gathering and analyzing impact.

In this blog post, you’ll find recordings of the three presentations from the call, as well as a brief summary of what each talk focused on. Do join us for our call next month, Wednesday 29 May at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC, when we’ll be taking a closer look at the application and utility of community playbooks (a.k.a. Collaboration guides, lab handbooks, and more). Add to calendar.

Three bicycles stand on a set of concrete steps, with long grass on either side. The bicycle in front is pale blue with white wheels, the one behind is white with black wheels, and the one in back is black with yellow wheels. — What do bicycles have to do with short-form training? Read on to find out! Photo by Solé Bicycles on Unsplash