CSCCE trainings Archives

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.

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.

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.

Training update: Three CSCCE multi-week courses coming up later this year!

Registration is now open for our “Fall” cohorts of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), Nurturing Online Communities (NOC), and Project Management for Scientists (PMB)!

These trainings will round out our offerings for 2025. This blog post will give you a sense of who each training is designed for and how they connect to the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program. We’ve also created a new infographic detailing the impact of CEF on our 350+ CEF graduates and the communities they serve. If you’re considering the course, but need documentation to back up your professional development funding request, hopefully this will help!

If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF)

This eight-week course is designed to offer new and existing community managers a core set of actionable skills and strategies. Participants meet twice a week, with lecture-style content interspersed with discussion and project work.

Our fall offering of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF25F) will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Thursday, 4 September until Thursday, 23 October.

The key dates are:

Social hour: Thursday, 4 September at 10am – 11am EDT / 2pm – 3pm UTC
Monday lessons: 8, 15, 22, 29 September; 6*, 20 October at 10am – 11:30am EDT / 2pm – 3:30pm UTC
Thursday Co-Labs: 11, 18, 25 September; 2, 9*, 16 October at 10am – 11:30am EDT / 2pm – 3:30pm UTC
Graduation: 23 October at 10am – 12pm EDT / 2pm – 4pm UTC

*CSCCE will be closed on Monday, 13 October 2025 in observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. To accommodate this, we have slightly adjusted the schedule for this CEF cohort. “Reading Week” will now only take place during one session, on 2 October 2025, and the Week 7 lesson that would have taken place on Monday, 13 October will be held on Thursday, 9 October.

Pricing:

CSCCE offers rates to reflect the different organizations that community managers work for and the range of budgets that may be available.

General rate: $1275 – For non-profits.
Supporting rate: $1575 – Aimed at for-profits and others who would like to support the participation of others.
Discounted rate: Depending on participants paying the supporting rate, we may be able offer a limited number of discounted tickets for this cohort. If you would like to participate but your organization is unable to cover the whole cost, please complete this course discount request form.

Find out more about CSCCE’s refund policy.

More information is available on the CEF webpage.

Project Management for Scientists – choose the training combo that works best for you!

A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated the graduation of our first general registration cohort of our Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB). They followed in the footsteps of our pilot cohort, which we ran for Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grantees at the end of 2024. And we’re excited to announce that the training will be back on our calendar in November/December of this year!

In this blog post, we’ll share a little more about our thinking behind offering PMI (the Mini-workshop, An Introduction to Project Management for Scientists) and PMB as separate but connected trainings, and highlight how these trainings impacted the STEM community, program, and project managers who took them.

If you have any questions about what you read here, please contact training@cscce.org.

“There is a lot of project management advice and resources out there but having a training dedicated to STEM and its unique challenges makes it much more meaningful and immediately valuable.” – PMB24CZI participant

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!