Welcome to Donna Okubo – CSCCE’s new Membership Director

This week, we welcomed Donna Okubo onto the CSCCE staff team. Donna joins us as our Membership Director, and will play a key role as we pilot an institutional membership program next year. We’re delighted she’s decided to share her considerable experience with CSCCE and hope you’ll give her a warm welcome, too.

About Donna

Donna brings more than 14 years of experience in open access and open science to the role of CSCCE membership director. Before joining us, she spent more than a decade working for the Public Library of Science (PLOS), building their 150-member organizational membership program from the ground up. Her talent for seeking out and maintaining partnerships across a diverse range of academic, infrastructure, and industry organizations will be pivotal as CSCCE builds its own institutional membership program (more on that in the coming weeks).

“I’m so excited to join CSCCE at such a dynamic moment in the organization’s development,” she said. “I’ve always loved the start-up spirit, and the CSCCE team is clearly making a vital impact on the way science is done today.”

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September’s Community Call – Quarterly Programming Update

We’re excited to share some new programming options for community members coming up over the next few months, as well as other CSCCE behind-the-scenes news, and so we hope you will join us on Wednesday, 22 September 2021 at 4pm UTC / 11am EDT for our quarterly programming update.

Note that this call will not be recorded, in order to facilitate frank discussion.

The September 2021 CSCCE Community Call will give an overview of our upcoming community programming, ways that you can get involved, and a sneak peek behind the scenes. Image credit: CSCCE

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We’re hiring! Are you CSCCE’s new Membership Director?

Thanks to a new grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we’re now looking to hire our first Membership Director! 

This is a key role at a pivotal point in CSCCE’s evolution as we work to transition from an organization that’s significantly subsidized by philanthropy to one that is more financially self-sufficient. Part of charting that path to financial sustainability includes developing an institutional membership program to support different groups and organizations who are convening communities and looking to access best-in-class training, support, and consultancy services. 

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Announcing a new grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support CSCCE’s transition to financial sustainability

We’re delighted to announce that CSCCE has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support us as we chart a path to financial sustainability. This blog post offers an overview of our plans, with more details about specific projects to come in future posts. 

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Registration now open for the last offering of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals this year (CEF21F)

General registration opens TODAY for Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF21F). This 7-week online course, intended for new and more seasoned community managers alike, grounds learners in CSCCE’s core frameworks, offering a strong foundation for strategic community building in STEM.

This is the last time in 2021 that we’ll be running CEF, and it’s also your last chance to take this consistently oversubscribed offering at its current price point. So hurry and book your place today! 

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Summer 2021: Opportunities to deepen your connections within the CSCCE community of practice

This summer, we are focusing our community programming on building a denser network of connections within the CSCCE community of practice. This means not only creating opportunities for new connections to form, but also to strengthen the relationships that already exist. In this blog post, we highlight the events and activities we’re hosting to meet these goals, and we hope that you’ll mark your calendars to join in. If you’re not already a member of the community, you can request an invitation to our Slack workspace

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New guidebook completes CSCCE’s core resource on using virtual events to facilitate community building in STEM

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the importance of intentionality and good planning in making the most of virtual gatherings. Whether engaging in ideation sessions, report outs, networking, project planning or seminars, we’ve seen how careful choices ahead of the event and thoughtful facilitation during and afterwards can lead to more enjoyable and inclusive experiences for everyone in the virtual room.

To support this transition online, over the course of the last year CSCCE has published a series of resources to help community managers and event organizers – including tip sheets, guidebooks and write-ups of different tools. Today we’re pleased to share a new guidebook and a new series of mini-workshops to continue that support. 

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New CSCCE mini-workshop series on virtual events launches 20 July 2021

Starting this July, we’re piloting a new 90-minute mini-workshop format as part of our expanding professional development curriculum to support community managers in STEM. Our first series will focus on planning and facilitating virtual events, with five standalone mini-workshops for you to choose from. Take one or take them all! 

In this blog post, we answer any questions you might have about the virtual events series, but if we’ve missed something, please email us at: info@www.cscce.org

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Creating collaboration guides: New CSCCE resource to help research collaborations succeed

On 26 May 2021, CSCCE Director Lou Woodley took part in the Zuckerman Institute’s Neuroscience Symposium, joining a session on team science and collaborative research. As part of the session she facilitated a workshop for attendees to explore how and why collaboration guides are so important, and shared a brand new CSCCE tip sheet on creating them. Read on to find out more. 

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April’s community call recap – An update on CSCCE community programming

Keeping our members regularly updated so that they can make informed decisions about where and when to engage is a core part of our communications strategy, and for our April 2021 community call we shared a quarterly update to make visible various things that have been happening so far this year. In this post, we give a summary of our community programming and related community projects over the last few months, as well as a sneak peek at what’s coming up over the summer. We will be sharing more information about our paid training offerings and sustainability planning, which we also discussed in the call, in future blog posts. 

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