This month, we’re showcasing a new collection of community profiles on our community call, and have invited four of the community managers who took part in this project to share their experiences. Join us on Wednesday, 21 July 2021 via Zoom, and read on for more details about the call.
Join us to learn more about research into STEM communities. Image credit: the CSCCE.
Continue reading “July’s Community Call: CSCCE community profiles round two”For January’s community call we focused on resilience. The topic of this year’s Community Manager Advancement Day, resilience is particularly important for scientific community managers, who tend to be prone to burnout due to busy and somewhat ambiguous roles, which require rapid switching between a broad range of skills. In addition, scientific community managers often work alone, behind the scenes, and with limited institutional support.
Following two prior presentations on resilience for CSCCE fellows, CEFP 2017 alumna Jennifer Davison agreed to share her talk with the entire community. You can watch Jen’s presentation in full below, or read on for a brief recap. Also in this post, a collection of tips for building a personal resilience practice gathered from the participants in the call, and a host of resources from blog posts to books to podcasts.
Continue reading “January’s community call recap: (Personal) Resilience and Community (Management)”…resilience is seen as the capacity to withstand change for some time but also, past a certain point, to transform while continuing or regaining the ability to provide essential functions, services, amenities, or qualities.
Moser, 2008
Our newest resource, the CSCCE Skills Wheel and guidebook, is out this week. Created by the C3 project team of the 2017 CEFP cohort, the wheel defines 45 skills used in varying degrees by scientific community managers, laying out a common language and framework for hiring, professional development, and personal fulfillment.
As part of CSCCE’s Community Engagement Fellowship Program (CEFP), fellows self-organize into small groups to take on a research or resource-development project. The Catalyzing Cultural Change (C3) team, Jennifer Davison, Andreas Leidolf, Malin Sandström, Elisha Wood-Charlson, and Lou Woodley, wanted to define the skills and core competencies for scientific community engagement managers, while also understanding how these roles are positioned within different types of scientific communities or organizations.
To do this, they compared the skills listed in a range of scientific community manager job descriptions, surveyed scientific community managers within the 2017 CEFP cohort, and, along with additional literature research, created the CSCCE skills wheel.
Continue reading “What does a scientific community manager do? Check out the CSCCE Skills Wheel and accompanying guidebook!”On this month’s community call we unveiled the first round of our community profiles, with Lou and independent contractor Sara Kobilka presenting the goals and methodology of our research. We also heard from three members of our community who took part in the study, and how their profiles helped them think about their communities, and their engagement strategies, in new ways.
In out last blog post, we announced the release of 13 new “Community Profiles,” created by CSCCE staff in collaboration with independent contractor, Sara Kobilka. In this post, which was co-authored with Sara, we delve a little deeper into our methodology.
As we began the survey design process we worked to balance multiple considerations. First, we wanted something as complete as possible. Lou created the first version of the survey with the goal of collecting information about communities that scientific community managers had previously expressed interest in learning about – such as funding models, staffing, and online collaboration tools. At the same time, we didn’t want to make the survey too onerous for community managers to complete.
Continue reading “CSCCE’s Community Profiles Project: How did we do it?”Today we’re launching the first outputs from a project that we’ve been working on this year to better characterize communities in science – and to support scientific community managers, their leadership, and funders to meaningfully compare some of the current activities taking place across the broad landscape of STEM community projects.
The CSCCE community profiles project has resulted in the creation of an initial collection of 13 community profiles – two page PDFs capturing core features of each community from staffing to programming and funding sources. We collected the data using a custom, detailed survey and then translated what we found to a standardized profile template, which was specifically created for this project. The resulting profiles, which incorporate CSCCE’s own frameworks for describing communities and community member engagement, allow easy comparison between different scientific communities.
In this post we introduce the rationale for the project and highlight the first 13 profiles. In Thursday’s post, we outline how the project was carried out.
Continue reading “CSCCE’s Community Profiles Project: First round of profiles now out!”September’s community call will take place on Wednesday, 23 September at 6pm UTC (2pm US Eastern Time) and will center around the release of CSCCE’s Community Profiles. After an overview of the project, we’ll also hear from some of the community managers who participated in this pilot research study.
In our series of posts about results of the State of Scientific Community Management survey we’ve looked into what types of organizations are home to scientific communities, examined their communication … Continue reading “Scientific community managers’ top challenges and training needs”
In our series of posts about results of the State of Scientific Community Management survey we’ve looked into what types of organizations are home to scientific communities, examined their communication channels and ways of planning activities, and analyzed scientific community managers’ backgrounds, skill sets, and how their positions are funded.
In our final blog post about survey results, we return to the topic of community managers’ skill sets, focusing on their top challenges and the areas where they want more training.
Continue reading “Scientific community managers’ top challenges and training needs”
We’re back with more insight from the State of Scientific Community Management survey. Previous posts have explored aspects of the community management position, the nature of the organizations where communities … Continue reading “How scientific community managers shape activity planning”
We’re back with more insight from the State of Scientific Community Management survey. Previous posts have explored aspects of the community management position, the nature of the organizations where communities are found, and features of the communities themselves such as their communication channels.
In this post we look at three findings about program and activity planning in communities. Read on to see how having a community manager leads to activities that are more frequent, strategically planned, and participatory.
Continue reading “How scientific community managers shape activity planning”
In previous posts about our State of Scientific Community Management survey, we’ve explored what types of scientific organizations have communities and we’ve described features of scientific community managers’ training and … Continue reading “Online platforms are still making inroads in scientific communities”
In previous posts about our State of Scientific Community Management survey, we’ve explored what types of scientific organizations have communities and we’ve described features of scientific community managers’ training and skill sets and their funding.
Today, we’re looking at some properties of the actual communities: their communication channels and platforms. Read on to find out about online versus offline communication channels and the adoption of online community platforms.
Continue reading “Online platforms are still making inroads in scientific communities”