Tag: event formats

Book Dashes: Collaborative Community Events

In this guest blog post, Arielle Bennett-Lovell (a 2019 CSCCE Community Engagement Fellow) reflects on the third Turing Way Book Dash event, which took place 20-21 February 2020 in London, UK.

What is the Turing Way? 

Science today is moving at an incredible pace, but preventing people from building on your work by making it impossible to replicate has almost certainly cost us years of progress. The Turing Way book project addresses this reproducibility crisis by collating community resources around how to design and carry out robust analyses that can be reused by other researchers in the future. 

Conceived by Kirstie Whitaker at The Alan Turing Institute, and managed by Malvika Sharan,  the book itself is currently hosted online and built using Jupyter Books and GitHub. Over 80 contributors across the globe built the book, through remote collaboration, workshops, and in-person events. These Book Dashes bring participants together in person to work on pieces of the book simultaneously for a full day. The third Book Dash for the Turing Way was held on 20-21 February 2020 in London, UK, and I was lucky enough to go. 

Continue reading “Book Dashes: Collaborative Community Events”

Organizing community events

Successful event programming is a feature of many communities – whether that’s a monthly community call or an annual conference. But how do you design events that are welcoming from the outset and that promote enjoyable, inclusive interactions between attendees?

Guidebook to virtual events

This guidebook was co-created with members of the CSCCE community of practice. This section focuses on event formats and contains 12 “recipes” for organizing engaging virtual events.

Using virtual events to facilitate community building: event formats

by Lou Woodley, Katie Pratt, Rachael Ainsworth, Eva Amsen, Arne Bakker, Stefanie Butland, Stephanie O’Donnell, Naomi Penfold, Allen Pope, Tom Quigley, and Emmy Tsang

July 20, 2020

We created this guide to help you host successful online meetings that your attendees enjoy. Our emphasis is on engaging and inclusive events where attendees will feel able and motivated to participate and connect with others.

Guidebook to in-person events

The CALM events project team of Arne Bakker, Chiara Bertipaglia, Megan Carter, Liz Guzy, Leslie Hsu, and Ann Meyer from the CEFP2019 cohort created a comprehensive guidebook to organizing in-person events.

CALM events guidebook for building community through events

by Arne Bakker, Chiara Bertipaglia, Megan Carter, Elizabeth Guzy, Leslie Hsu and Ann Meyer

The CALM events guidebook is a comprehensive multi-chapter guide to planning and hosting events of different formats in order to build community.

Blog posts

Event formats

Icebreakers and welcomes

  • Pre-event interviews – In How to prepare 40 new community members for an unconference CEFP2017 Fellow, Stefanie Butland outlines the pre-event preparations that she carried out to help new members of the community feel prepared and welcome.
  • Breaking the ice well – CEFP Fellows Allen Pope, Amber Budden, and Stefanie Butland and mentor Aidan Budd discuss facilitating interpersonal community interactions in person. In part one they describe several icebreaker activities and in part two they describe how to bring your community along with you in what can sometimes be a nerve-wracking activity for a community manager!

Event programming

Transitioning in-person events ONLINE

Virtual tools trials

Our virtual tools trials bring together interested members of our community of practice to try out platforms that might be useful for convening communities online. Our tools trials are ongoing, so if you have a platform you’re interested in trying, or would like to co-host a trial and share your experience, please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org.

After each trial, we share a recap of our findings on our blog, each of which includes a link back to the full collaborative notes document from the trial. Find out more about:

Community call

In July 2020’s CSCCE community call we discussed “Planning and evaluating accessible online events” with three speakers from the CSCCE community of practice.

Speakers and their slides

  • “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This – Non-Player Characters & Prepping For Your Virtual Event” – Tom Quigley, ConservationXLabs (slides) 
  • “It’s All About Access: Planning Meetings for Wider Audiences” – Rebecca Carpenter, Deaf and Hard of Hearing Virtual Academic Community (slides) 
  • “Evaluating Virtual Events” – Emily Lescak, Code for Science and Society (slides) 

Summary and resources list

Check out the blog post recap of the call – including additional resources recommended by attendees.