CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program Archives

Upcoming CSCCE training courses to enhance your community engagement and content design skills

Registration is now open for two of CSCCE’s multi-week training courses: Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF26W) and Content Design (CODE26Sp).

In this blog post you can find out more about each training (but please reach out to training@cscce.org if you have any questions), including various resources to support your participation.

In service of our ongoing commitment to “shining a light on the less visible,” we’ve also included some information about what it means for us to run live, cohort-based online trainings like these, and why it’s so important that we fill each cohort we offer.

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.

Seven more STEM community managers have completed the CSCCE Certification Program!

Next week, we’ll be hosting our final Quarterly Skills Share (QSS) session of 2025! These sessions are a regular part of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program that are both an opportunity for knowledge-sharing among peers, and a regular check-in at which we share news and updates.

One of those updates is that we have SEVEN more CSCCE-certified community managers to celebrate!

Rieley Auger (Global Land Programme), Sophie Bui (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), Yan-Kay Ho (Open Bioeconomy Lab & Reclone – Reagent Collaboration Network), Allie Lau (American Physical Society), Zoë Leanza (Sage Bionetworks), Johanssen Obanda (Crossref), and Curtis Sharma (Research Data Alliance) all completed their program requirements, and at next month’s QSS we’ll all get to celebrate their graduation!

This blog post highlights our newest grads’ paths through the program, as well as some reflections on what they learned during their time with us. And, for those less familiar with the program, we’ve also included a brief summary of what it involves.

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.

Announcing the first graduates of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program!

In September 2023, we launched the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program – a multi-modular professional development training intended to be completed over the course of approximately two years. We’re delighted to share that two of the participants are now ready to graduate as our first CSCCE-certified STEM community managers!

Congratulations to Erin Conn, Project Director of the SEA Change Community at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Miriam Krause, Director of Education, Outreach, and Diversity for the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology!

In this blog post, we’ll share more about Erin and Miriam’s experiences in the program, and how we’re celebrating their accomplishments. If you’re interested in learning more about the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, either as an individual participant or as a financial sponsor, please reach out to training@cscce.org.

How Canvas LMS supports participation in the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program

As we announce a round of updates to our Community Manager Certification Program following the initial two pilot cohorts, we’re also sharing some additional information about how we deliver the program so that it’s consistently a high quality experience for learners.

In a previous post, we pulled back the curtain to describe the stages of going from piloting a training to converting it to a “steady state” offering with all the required internal and documentation and templates, as well as final versions of all learner-facing materials. In this post, we go deeper into one key piece of technical infrastructure that we’ve adopted over the past couple of years: the learning management system, Canvas.

Canvas is a powerful online platform that allows us to curate training materials and share them with our learners in a consistent, recognizable way that looks and feels like all other CSCCE outputs. It also affords the ability for learners to come back later to revisit course materials – something that’s especially useful as we build out a program as interconnected as our certification journey!

So let’s take a look at how we have adopted Canvas – and the ways in which it supports program delivery. If, after reading, you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to training@cscce.org

A behind-the-scenes look at how we take a “pilot” training and consolidate it into its final, “steady state” form

If you’ve been following the growth of CSCCE’s online training program over the past few years, you may have noticed that every time we launch something new, we call it a “pilot.” This is because we know that the “v1” of anything needs feedback and iteration to make it better. But what happens after we pilot something? How do we take a training through to a high-fidelity, steady state version that we can deliver consistently time and again?

In this blog post we pull back the curtain on that process of moving to steady state delivery to make visible some of the less obvious infrastructure work we’ve been engaging in over the past few years. And we explain why we’ve made that investment and how it supports us in continuing to deliver trainings that are engaging, effective – and reproducible!

Updates to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program including a “pay-as-you-go” option!

The CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program launched around 18 months ago with the goal of being THE in-depth, professional development program for STEM community managers.

Since launch, we’ve welcomed almost 30 STEM community managers into the program, delivered 2 go-arounds of our CODE and PBK courses, 15 Mini-workshops, and 4 Quarterly Skills Share sessions. In that time, we’ve also sought regular feedback to understand any modifications we might make to best support our learners. Today we’re sharing some of the updates we’ve made which together provide a more flexible way to enroll, onboard, and pay for the program!

If you have any questions about anything in this post, please reach out to training@cscce.org, or join us on Wednesday, 26 March at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC for our monthly community call. We’ll be sharing a brief overview the program, demo-ing CSCCE’s trainings in Canvas, and holding space for questions about the program.

Nurturing Online Communities (NOC)

Building and nurturing a community in an online environment comes with specific needs and challenges. This seven-week course is designed with community managers of scientific communities of practice in mind, and will explore a variety of social science claims about how people behave in online communities to inform actions that you might take to support increased engagement, commitment, and constructive behavior.

In this seminar-style course, participants will engage with instructors and each other in regular discussions, guided by the course textbook, Building Successful Online Communities by Kraut and Resnick. The course will cover 6 topics related to managing online communities and each week we will review the corresponding chapter of the textbook, focusing on key themes identified by staff, and work together on a case study to apply the concepts. Later the same week, learners will spend a 90-minute Co-Lab working in breakouts on a CSCCE-designed activity to apply a translation of the core concepts to their own community, followed by a debrief.

Our fall offering of Nurturing Online Communities (NOC25F) will run on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning Tuesday, 30 September until Friday, 14 November 2025.

The key dates are:

Tuesday lessons: 30 September; 7, 14, 21, 28 October; 4, 12** November at 12pm – 1:30pm ET / 4/5pm – 5/6:30pm UTC*
Friday Co-Labs: 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 October; 7,14 November at 12pm – 1:30pm ET / 4/5pm – 5/6:30pm UTC*

*Note that daylight savings may affect the timing of live sessions for those outside the US in the final week two weeks of the course).

**CSCCE will be closed on Tuesday, 11 November 2025 in observance of Veterans Day. To accommodate this, our week 7 lesson will take place in the same time slot on Wednesday, 12 November.

Registration deadline: Friday, 5 September, 2025