For our second Tools Trial of the year, we’re continuing our theme of open-source platforms that support community engagement by hosting a session about CiviCRM!
Date: Wednesday, 25 March 2026 | Add to calendar
Time: 2pm US EDT / 6pm UTC (90 minutes)
Zoom link: join the call
Speakers:
Coming up on Wednesday, 11 March 2026 at 11am EDT / 3pm UTC, we’re planning a live, 90-minute community book club session co-hosted by CSCCE community member Jody Peters (University of Notre Dame / Ecological Forecasting Initiative community manager).
The book club will focus on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, a short fable that is used to explore a model outlining five things that are essential for a healthy, collaborative team (or working group, steering committee, or sub-community). If you haven’t read the book yet, but are curious and would like to join us for our book club session, rest assured, it’s not a long read (or listen!). If possible, we do ask that you read the book before the call, but we will also offer a recap of the key themes at the beginning of the session.
Continue reading “CSCCE Community Book Club: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”On Wednesday, 21 January 2026 CSCCE hosted a Tools Trial to support our community in learning about the open-source community platform Zulip. The Trial, like the many we’ve run before, offered basic information about the platform, and then explored different use cases relevant to community managers – including migrating a community from Slack into Zulip.
In this blog post you’ll find a brief summary of the call, as well as a curated list of resources relevant to anyone interested in setting up a Zulip instance. And you can watch the recordings of our four expert presenters: Philip Durbin (Dataverse), Maria Doyle (Bioconductor), Samantha Wittke (CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland), and Danny Garside (Digital Research Academy).
Continue reading “Zulip Tools Trial Recap – Find out more about this open-source community platform!”To close a turbulent year for many STEM community managers, we hosted our seventh annual end-of-year community potluck on Tuesday, 16 December 2025. Lou and Katie lightly scaffolded the call in our usual “appetizers, main courses, and desserts” format, and we are grateful to everyone who attended and shared so generously.
This blog post is a brief summary of the call – although we are being mindful not to share any personal information. We do not record calls like these to protect the ability of participants to be open about their experiences, if they want to. If you’re curious to learn more about how we facilitate community calls, send us an email – we’d be happy to chat!
Continue reading “December community call recap: An online potluck filled with reflection, (re-)connection, and…cats!”CSCCE Tools Trials are synchronous opportunities for STEM community managers to test out a new platform and/or explore how that platform can be used to support community engagement (e.g., our GitHub series).
Generally, CSCCE Tools Trials emerge from ongoing conversations in our community of practice (hosted in Slack). Recently, several of our members have expressed an interest in learning more about Zulip – an open-source platform with a lot of similar functionality to Slack – as well as the OS constituent relationship management (CRM) platform CiviCRM. So, we’re bringing back Tools Trials in Q1 of 2026 to get to know these platforms better!
The first Tools Trial we’ve scheduled will focus on Zulip, but keep an eye on our Events calendar for more trials coming soon! If there’s an open-source platform that you think STEM community managers should know more about (especially if it’s something you’re an expert in using and would be willing to present about or demo), please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org.
Date: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Time: 11am US EST / 4pm UTC (90 minutes)
Speakers:
As the end of 2025 draws near, we’re planning a gathering for the CSCCE community that recognizes the ups and downs of the last 12 months, and offers an opportunity for community connection and care.
As in years past, the call will be roughly divided into three “courses,” with participants encouraged to “bring a dish to share” – in other words, our collective contributions will create a unique gathering, which you can expect to include reflection prompts, gentle activities, and opportunities to discuss and set intentions for the year ahead. We’ve included an outline of our plans for facilitating this year’s event below, but we’re always open to your suggestions, so please reach out to Lou, Katie, or info@cscce.org if there’s something you’d particularly like to talk about or share.
This call is for:
Date: Tuesday, 16 December 2025 (please note the day – CSCCE community calls have historically taken place on a Wednesday, but due to conflicting client work, we’ll be meeting on a Tuesday for this session!)
Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88123402630?pwd=wAWBFiikRLnFyZIAj6b3KwRvUxdwRb.1
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On Wednesday, 18 June 2025, we held our fifth curated networking event at our annual mid-year social. The event has always been very well-received, and over the years we’ve had several requests for the instructions. So, this year, we published a guidebook that describes how we do it – and includes access to our template docs, sheets, and forms!
We’ve added the new guide to our existing series on using virtual events to facilitate community-building, which we began back in 2020 with a crowdsourced collection of event formats. Since then, we added a curated collection of resources from around the internet, guidelines for selecting and testing new online tools to support your virtual events, and our “making a PACT” framework to help you plan out your meetings with four key elements in mind.
You can find all of these resources (and more!) on our organizing community events resource page. Read on for a brief recap of this year’s social!
Continue reading “Annual mid-year social: Recap and NEW “how to” guide available for download!”For the fifth year running, our June community call (and annual mid-year social) will be an opportunity to network with other members of the CSCCE community of practice!
We’ll once again be offering our curated networking forum – and as an added bonus this year, we’ll also be publishing the instructions and template documents we use to run the event! So, whether you’ve been before and want to be the first to snag your free guidebook, or this is your first time joining a CSCCE community call, we hope you’ll join us for an hour of one-on-one and small group conversations with other community managers in STEM!
Please register for the event, and let us know who you’d be particularly interested in meeting, using this brief registration form. The deadline for registration: Friday, 6 June 2025.
This call is for:
Date: Wednesday, 18 June 2025
Time: 11am EDT / 3pm UTC
Registration form: Let us know you’re coming, and who you would like to meet! You’ll receive a calendar invite and Zoom link after completing the form.
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.
Continue reading “January/February 2025 Community Call Recap: An update from CSCCE and a community conversation”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
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