Community calls Archives

December community call recap: An online potluck filled with reflection, (re-)connection, and…cats!

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!

December’s community call: Seventh annual CSCCE community potluck

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:

Members of the CSCCE community of practice – current and future! (if you’re not already a member of our free Slack-based community of practice, you can request to join here)
Anyone working in STEM and adjacent fields whose role involves collaboration or community building
Anyone who would appreciate a community space in which to mark the end-of-year transition in an intentional way

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

Add to calendar (or contact us at info@cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)

Annual mid-year social: Recap and NEW “how to” guide available for download!

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!

DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE

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!

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!

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.

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.