Scaffolding is the supportive information, activities, and processes that address barriers to member participation and ensure that all members can access and engage in community programming. It can take the form of technical guides, welcome packs, onboarding calls, and many more examples. We’ve made a number of scaffolding documents for the CSCCE Community of Practice as well as for participants in our training courses. On this page, we’ve curated those resources, which are all available under CC BY licenses, for you to adapt for use in your own community, with attribution.
Please refer to the “Citation and Reuse” section of each resource for guidance on how to acknowledge it, or reach out to info@cscce.org with any questions.
Technical scaffolding to support tool use
Slack Quick Start Guide
by Lou Woodley, Maya Sanghvi, and Katie Pratt
This quick start guide is a brief technical orientation for Slack group members to help them to set up their profile and configure Slack notifications in a way that works for them.
Canvas Quick Start Guide: Suggestions and tips for setting up your Canvas account and navigating your Canvas courses
by Alice Martinic, Katie Pratt, and Lou Woodley
This guide contains some quick tips for configuring and using Canvas. They are organized into four key areas that describe Canvas account creation, Canvas navigation, profile configuration and account settings, and managing notifications.
Canvas Badges Quick Start Guide: Suggestions and tips for accessing and sharing badges awarded by CSCCE
by Alice Martinic, Katie Pratt, and Lou Woodley
This guide contains some quick tips for using Canvas Badges as a recipient of a digital badge from CSCCE. They are organized into three key areas that describe badge access and account creation, using the Canvas Badges Backpack to store and organize badges, sharing your new badge
Community member scaffolding to support participation in the CSCCE community of practice (CoP)
Welcome to the CSCCE Community of Practice! A tip sheet for new members
by Lou Woodley and Katie Pratt
This document is intended to help new members of the CSCCE community of practice, which is predominantly hosted on Slack, get started. It highlights some key links, programming, and activities, and was updated to v3 in December 2023.
CSCCE Community of Practice new member onboarding survey
by Lou Woodley
As part of the onboarding process to the CSCCE community of practice, we ask new members to tell us a little bit more about the kind of programming they would find useful using this survey. Can reuse or adapt this survey in your own community.
Community champions scaffolding to support emergent leaders
CSCCE start up guide for special interest group leads
by Lou Woodley and Katie Pratt
This guide is designed to help co-chairs of CSCCE special interest groups get started, onboard new group members, and set their group up for success, whatever the group’s goals might be. This guide was updated in February 2022.
Guidelines for contributing to the CSCCE blog
by Lou Woodley, Elizabeth Garbee, and Katie Pratt
This document is intended to help you write an engaging guest blog post for the CSCCE blog, the largest freely available resource of scientific community management content online.
More about scaffolding
The CSCCE Community Participation Model (part three) – Scaffolding to lower barriers to participation in STEM communities
by Lou Woodley, Katie Pratt, and Camille Santistevan
In this third part of our CSCCE Community Participation Model series, we focus on the role of scaffolding to support and grow inclusive communities in STEM.
The house party metaphor for community management
by Katie Pratt and Lou Woodley
In this concept booklet, we set up the metaphor of a house party for community management, and then unpack several common challenges (including maintaining and socializing scaffolding) in a series of essays and reflection questions.
Related blog posts
Exploring community scaffolding using the house party metaphor – The second in a series of blog posts using the house party metaphor for community management to unpack common challenges and opportunities in STEM communities.
Community call
Our February 2022 community call focused on how scaffolding influences engagement and inclusion in communities. We discussed three main challenges community managers face when it comes to scaffolding: finding time to create it, making sure members know about it and use it, and making sure it stays up to date. You can read a recap of that call on the CSCCE blog.
If you used or adapted any of these scaffolding documents, consider donating to CSCCE so that we can continue sharing our resources for free!