Events Archives

CSCCE Community Book Club: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

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.

Infrastructure update: CSCCE switches to Zeffy for training sales

As of January 2026, we’re pausing our use of Eventbrite for handling registration and payment processing for our trainings and switching to Zeffy. We began using Eventbrite several years ago as a simple solution for course and Mini-workshop registrations made using a credit card. Over the years, Eventbrite’s functionality has changed, and so with the transition to a new year, we’re giving a new platform a shot!

This blog post is intended to walk you through the new registration interface in Zeffy, including a couple of nuances that make it slightly different from Eventbrite. If you have any questions about Zeffy, or you’re having any difficulty registering for a course or Mini-workshop, please contact training@cscce.org. We will continue offering registration via invoice if that works best for your organization.

An update to CSCCE’s Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB)

In 2025, we launched a new general registration project management training designed specifically for STEM (and STEM-adjacent) professionals. The training debuted in two parts: an introductory Mini-workshop (also known as PMI) and a three-week, six-module bootcamp (aka PMB). In 2026, based on feedback from participants, we’re combining these two parts (PMI + PMB) into a single training offering (that also includes a new orientation option – see below for more).

In this blog post, you’ll find an overview of the training, as well as what these recent changes mean for individual registrants, private cohorts, and participants in the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program. If you have any questions at all, please reach out to training@cscce.org.

Training update: Let us know what CSCCE trainings you’d like to take in 2026!

As part of our mission to professionalize the role of the community manager in STEM, we’ve developed a comprehensive catalogue of online professional development trainings.

These Multi-week courses and Mini-workshops are designed in such a way that learners can pick and choose those most relevant to their needs, but with a throughline of vocabulary and frameworks that connect into a bigger picture.

While we know that these trainings are making a real difference to our learners and the communities they support (see our recent evaluation of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals), we’re also aware that many STEM professionals are feeling the pressures of budget cuts, making it harder to prioritize taking our trainings.

As we look ahead to 2026, we’re reaching out to our community to ask:

What CSCCE trainings would you like to take in 2026?

Introducing the inaugural Birdaro training program cohort!

At the end of last month we launched the pilot cohort of the Birdaro training program for open-source leaders, which will run for 12 weeks until mid-December 2025.

Thanks to strong interest in the program from a range of projects, we have put together a cohort that represents a variety of focus areas, fiscal homes, project stages and project sizes. You can read more about how we intentionally built this cohort of participants, and used their input to iteratively shape the pilot curriculum in an earlier blog post.

In a new series of five blog posts on the Birdaro website, we’re introducing you to the teams taking part in the Birdaro 2025 pilot cohort. You can click through to read more about each of these projects below, and visit this page of the Birdaro website to learn more about individual team members.

We’re reviewing applications for the first Birdaro training program!

We wanted to share an update on the application and selection process for the first cohort of the Birdaro training program, including how it’s been influencing our next steps with program design.

It’s been a busy few weeks as we’ve worked in an intentionally iterative manner to review applications and work with applicants to determine the schedule and timing for this brand new training for open-source project leaders. We received applications from more than 50 open-source projects in just three weeks and we’ve been enjoying learning more about the projects and what their needs are.

If you’re just hearing about Birdaro now and wishing you’d applied, the strong interest we’ve received means that we hope that we’ll be able to run another cohort next year. So make sure you’re signed up to our newsletter to stay up to date.

Congratulations to our latest Certification Program grads!

Next week, at our Q3 Quarterly Skills Share session (a regular part of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program), we’ll be celebrating two more certification program graduates!

Lena Karvovskaya, Community Coordinator for the Dutch Thematic Digital Competence Centre for the Natural and Engineering Sciences (TDCC-NES) at TU Delft Library, and Zachary Baker, Community Manager for the Open Molecular Software Foundation, are now CSCCE-certified community managers: Congratulations, Lena and Zach!!

In this blog post we share a few of Zach and Lena’s reflections on the program and highlight their individual training journeys. And, for those less familiar with the program, we’ve also included a brief summary of what it involves.

As a reminder, we now accept open enrollment in the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, which means you can join the program at any time. So if you’re interested in signing up, do send an email to training@cscce.org!

Conference recap: CSCCE @ SciTS 2025

On Wednesday, 30 July 2025, CSCCE’s Lou Woodley (Founder and Director) and Camille Santistevan (Director of Learning) participated in the 2025 Science of Team Science conference, which took place online from 28-30 July 2025.

Lou hosted a panel discussion featuring recent and soon-to-be grads of our Certification Program, and Camille gave a brief oral presentation about the program, why we created it, and how it’s impacting participants.

In this blog post, we’ve summarized the two sessions, and include links to various related resources (including the slides from Camille’s talk). If you have any questions about joining the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program as a participant, or the potential for sponsorship, please contact info@cscce.org.

The Birdaro Training Program – supporting open-source leaders

Announcing a new training opportunity for open-source leaders.

Open-source projects are a unique combination of volunteer collaboration and product development. As an open-source project becomes popular or heavily used, its creators face complex questions like “how can we support contributors so that they stay involved with the project as demands increase?” Or, “how can we fund maintainers to ensure project continuity?” Or, “what infrastructure do we need to put in place to gather input from users?”

Over the past three years, we’ve worked with several open-source projects as clients, and engaged with the NSF’s Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems program to develop training for project leaders as they worked to scale and grow their projects.

Now, thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we’re expanding on what we’ve learned to launch a new initiative, the Birdaro training program, making it available (for free in its pilot phase!) to those in decision-making positions in open-source projects as they navigate growth, scaling, and sustainability of their projects.

APPLY TO JOIN THE BIRDARO TRAINING PROGRAM

In this blog post, we share more information about the program, who is eligible to apply, and how to submit your application, as well as other ways you can get involved in Birdaro as a guest speaker, resource curator, and more. Please send any questions or inquiries to info@birdaro.org.

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!