Tools trial number four in our ongoing series took place on Thursday, 24 September. About a dozen members of our community of practice (request to join here) met to try out the new video chat integration on Etherpad, an open-source collaborative note-taking platform.
A big thank you to community member Malika Ihle, who co-hosted this trial and kindly shared her expertise and experience with Etherpad.
Our previous trials covered Qiqochat, Mural/Jamboard/Padlet, and Gather. If you have any ideas or requests for future trials, or would like to co-host with us, let us know by emailing us: info@cscce.org.
In the third in our ongoing series of virtual tools trials, several members of the CSCCE community of practice (request to join here) met to try out Gather. You can catch up on previous tools trials here and here, and get the details for our next trial, Etherpad +Video, here).
The goal of these tools trials is to get to know virtual events software, figure out what platforms work best for what types of events, and provide an opportunity for members of our community to give their feedback or share previous experiences with the platform. We are trying out a variety of platforms, from virtual conferences and workshops (e.g., Qiqochat), to ideation and brainstorming (e.g., Mural/Jamboard/Padlet), to workplace productivity (watch this space!). Have an idea for a tool you’d like to trial? Contact us: info@cscce.org.
On Thursday, 10 September 2020, several members of the CSCCE community of practice met to try out and compare three virtual ideation tools; Mural, Padlet, and Jamboard – which broadly try to create the collaborative experience of using sticky notes and/or flipcharts online).
This was the second in a series of tools trials to help scientific community managers source platforms that meet their needs as meetings and conferences transition online (check out the recap of our Qiqochat trial here). In this post, we recap our shared pros and cons of the three platforms, give you access to our notes from the call, and tell you what’s next for CSCCE tools trials.
This is the second of three guest blog posts by Serah Rono, Lilly Winfree, Jo Barratt, Elaine Wong, Jess Hardwicke, John Chodacki, and Jonathan Cain, co-organizers of csv,conf (check out part 1 and part 3). In this post, the authors share their process for planning an online conference.
Planning an online conference
Despite the obvious differences, much about organising a conference remains the same whether virtual or not. Indeed, by the time we made the shift to an online conference, much of this work had been done.
In the second of our series of posts by the 2019 Community Engagement Fellows, Julianna Mullen walks us through her experiences building trust in an online community and sparking conversations in an authentic way.
It had been the first bullet point in the job description: “Increase community engagement.”….The Community Manager for The Ocean Acidification Information Exchange would be in charge of getting its member scientists, policymakers, and educators talking to one another about preparing and adapting to ocean acidification.
I’d been a scientist and communicator for some time, but I’d never been a Community Manager; when I accepted the post, I knew the learning curve would be steep, but I was excited! Fast-forward into Month Two of my employment, when I’d made a series of important discoveries:
The OA Information Exchange was so quiet I could almost hear the crickets when I logged on.
Using the phrase “increasing engagement” to describe the breadth, scope, and complicatedness of my work was like calling the Encyclopedia Britannica “some books.”
I couldn’t rely on researching myself out of the hole because there simply wasn’t much material that spoke to what I was trying to do.
I’d failed to understand that an online community, even one comprised of scientists and policymakers working on something as technical as ocean acidification, needs the same kind of emotional tending as in-person communities.
In a blind panic, I reached out to some members I knew personally and asked what was going on. What was the holdup?
“I don’t want to waste anyone’s time with my stupid questions.”
“I don’t think I have anything to contribute.”
“I’m worried people will think I’m unintelligent.”
Sound familiar?
Julianna Mullen, Communications and Community Manager, NERACOOS
We’re continuing to share reflections from the 2017 Community Engagement Fellows on the blog. In today’s post, Andy Leidolf introduces his four part series, “The Community Manager’s Survival Guide: Building Social Capital in Large, Heterogeneous, Geographically Dispersed Research Networks.” You can catch up on all posts by the Fellows here.
Posted by Andy Leidolf, Coordinator, Honors Program, Utah State University, and Executive Director, Society for Freshwater Science. Leidolf served as iUTAH Assistant Director and Project Administrator from 2014-2018.
If you have been following my series of blog posts (thank you!), I have probably succeeded by now in convincing you that iUTAH was a large, complex, and diverse project that would pose any number of challenges for even the best-trained and most well-resourced community manager. Having already shared my thoughts on how to deal with geographic dispersion and institutional diversity, I want to end by considering a third and final challenge: transcending boundaries imposed by collaborators’ differences in disciplinary background.
We’re continuing to share reflections from the 2017 Community Engagement Fellows on the blog. In today’s post, Andy Leidolf introduces his four part series, “The Community Manager’s Survival Guide: Building Social Capital in Large, Heterogeneous, Geographically Dispersed Research Networks.” You can catch up on all posts by the Fellows here.
Posted by Andy Leidolf, Coordinator, Honors Program, Utah State University, and Executive Director, Society for Freshwater Science. Leidolf served as iUTAH Assistant Director and Project Administrator from 2014-2018.
iUTAH—A Textbook Case for Institutional Diversity
Like most other states, Utah has a large number of institutions of higher learning: in addition to three research universities granting doctoral degrees, there are eight primarily undergraduate-serving institutions (PUIs), both 2- and 4-year. Although Utah is generally perceived as a fairly homogeneous state, there is a surprising amount of diversity even among peer institutions.
For example, our research universities include both public and private universities (Brigham Young University is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, aka. the LDS or Mormon Church) and are situated in settings that span the rural-suburban-urban gradient. Not unexpectedly, these universities attract very different student and faculty populations.
We’re continuing to share reflections from the 2017 Community Engagement Fellows on the blog. In today’s post, Andy Leidolf introduces his four part series, “The Community Manager’s Survival Guide: Building Social Capital in Large, Heterogeneous, Geographically Dispersed Research Networks.” You can catch up on all posts by the Fellows here.
Posted by Andy Leidolf, Coordinator, Honors Program, Utah State University, and Executive Director, Society for Freshwater Science. Leidolf served as iUTAH Assistant Director and Project Administrator from 2014-2018.
The Challenge
When I began my tenure as Assistant Director of the iUTAH EPSCoR project in October 2014, the fact that the members of my research collaboration were not co-located, but dispersed among eleven institutions of higher learning spread all over the state of Utah, as well as 100 state, national, and—in some cases—international partner organizations, made settling into my position, frankly, a scary prospect. We were funded by a five year, $20M grant from the National Science Foundation to enhance Utah’s water resources through research, training, and education. This included studying the state’s water system, as well as working to understand how factors like population growth, climate variability, changes in land use, and human behavior impacted the sustainability of our state’s water resources. No small feat. How was I ever going to learn who all these people were, what role they played in and for our community, and—most importantly—how to communicate and engage with them?
We’re continuing to share reflections from the 2017 Community Engagement Fellows on the blog. In today’s post, Andy Leidolf introduces his four part series, “The Community Manager’s Survival Guide: Building Social Capital in Large, Heterogeneous, Geographically Dispersed Research Networks.” You can catch up on all posts by the Fellows here.
Posted by Andy Leidolf, Coordinator, Honors Program, Utah State University, and Executive Director, Society for Freshwater Science. Leidolf served as iUTAH Assistant Director and Project Administrator from 2014-2018.
It’s Monday morning, 9 am. I am fresh off a two-week trip that seemed like a great idea when it was conceived three months ago. Confronted with the stark reality of my overflowing e-mail inbox, endless to-do lists spread across no less than three project management software applications, and the surly looks with which I am greeted by my co-workers, that axiom clearly no longer holds. In exactly four weeks, iUTAH EPSCoR will hold its last Annual Symposium and Summer All-hands Meeting, to cap off a successful 5-year run of advancing water science, training, education and outreach for the citizens of the state of Utah. And I am way behind.
I need to recruit people to introduce five invited talks of participants sharing their personal journeys with our project. I need to confirm 39 oral presentations spread among seven concurrent sessions. I need seven session chairs and one panel moderator. I need to sweet-talk/coerce/beg contacts at ten state institutions of higher education into convincing their top-level administrators to record a short video message congratulating iUTAH on its successes. I need to breathe. I need help. Fast.
Broader Impacts forum and workshops on March 31 in Salt Lake City UT. Credit: UU Office of Undergraduate Research
We’re now mid-way through the first year of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The first cohort of Fellows is made up of 17 scientific community managers working with a diverse range of scientific communities. As they continue to develop their community engagement skills and apply some of the ideas and strategies from their training, the Fellows will report back on the Trellis blog, sharing their challenges, discoveries, and insights. Today, Fellow Malin Sandström describes how a new project made a difference in her community.
The author (Malin Sandström, right) with a colleague (Chris Fitzpatrick, middle) and a 2016 student (Devin Bayly, left) in the Google Summer of Code program. Photo by Ylva Lillberg, INCF.
This summer, just above 1300 students have spent their time writing open source code for projects from over 200 mentoring organizations, within a program called “Google Summer of Code” that is run and sponsored by Google. I work for one of those 200 organizations. I have been involved in recruiting mentors and projects for us since 2013, and in charge of managing our participation since 2015. This is a fantastic program that has been of much value to us as an organization, and very enjoyable to work with for me personally.
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