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

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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

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Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB)

This six-session bootcamp intensive offers a grounding in the basics of project management, tailored to apply to specific STEM contexts. This training draws upon a core text, The Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, with materials contextualized for STEM scenarios and applied to custom STEM case studies by CSCCE staff.

Over the course of this training, participants use CSCCE-created templates to create a Project Canvas describing the three key domains of a project (Foundation, People, and Creation) and the three building blocks of each domain (which include the project’s purpose, benefits, stakeholders, sponsor, and the plan for delivery and evaluation).

We use detailed STEM-specific case studies to support participants with completing the Project Canvas in small groups, with application sessions intended to aid participants in applying the concepts to their own project. In our experience, this provides the most value – supporting high fidelity acquisition of key concepts as well as dedicated time to make progress on individual projects with instructor support.

The Fall 2025 offering of the Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB25F) will run on Tuesdays and Fridays beginning Tuesday, 18 November until Friday, 12 December 2025.

The key dates are:

  • Tuesday lessons: 18 November; 2, 9 December at 12pm – 2pm EST / 5pm – 7pm UTC
  • Friday Co-Labs: 21 November; 5, 12 December at 12pm – 2pm EST / 5pm – 7pm UTC

*Note: Due to the Thanksgiving Holiday in the U.S., there will be no sessions on Tuesday, 25 November and Friday, 28 November.

Registration deadline: Tuesday, 28 October 2025

REGISTER FOR PMB25F

Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB25Sp)

Our spring offering of the Project Management Bootcamp for Scientists (PMB25Sp) will run on Mondays and Thursdays beginning Monday, 31 March until Thursday, 17 April.

The key dates are:

  • Monday lessons: 31 March; 7, 14 April at 12-2pm EDT / 4-6pm UTC
  • Thursday Co-Labs: 3,10,17 April at 12-2pm EDT / 4-6pm UTC

This six-session bootcamp intensive offers a grounding in the basics of project management, tailored to apply to specific STEM contexts and with a strong emphasis on the interpersonal considerations that support successful collaborative work. This training draws upon a core text, The Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, with materials contextualized for STEM scenarios and applied to custom STEM case studies by CSCCE staff.

Over the course of this training, participants use CSCCE-created templates to create a Project Canvas describing the three key domains of a project (Foundation, People, and Creation) and the three building blocks of each domain (which include the project’s purpose, benefits, stakeholders, sponsor, and the plan for delivery and evaluation).

We use detailed STEM-specific case studies to support participants with completing the Project Canvas in small groups, with application sessions intended to aid participants in applying the concepts to their own project. In our experience, this provides the most value – supporting high fidelity acquisition of key concepts as well as dedicated time to make progress on individual projects with instructor support.

Register on Eventbrite. 

Deadline to register: 25 March 2025

Our pricing structure for PMB reflects the different organizations that community managers work for and the range of available budgets. These prices are for a pilot offering of the training, and may increase for future cohorts.

  • General rate: $595 (pilot cohort pricing for non-profits)
  • Supporting rate: $750 (aimed at for profits and those who would like to support the participation of others. Find out more about our accessibility fund.)
  • 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.

Please email training@cscce.org with any questions.

Project Management for Scientists: A new training course from CSCCE!

We’re excited to end the year by announcing two new trainings in the CSCCE training portfolio that focus on project management – with the opportunity to register for one now and to let us know if you’d be interested in the second!

In early December 2024, we ran a pilot offering of a brand new multi-module training, Project Management for Scientists. We developed the course with funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and piloted it with almost 30 CZI grantees. This training followed a 2-hour long Introduction to Project Management that we ran earlier in October which a larger group of 50 participants attended.

In 2025, we’ll be making both of these trainings more widely available, and in this blog post, we share more about who they’re for and also the different formats they could take. 

We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in taking the trainings as an individual. Let us know your preferences for a bootcamp vs. a multi-week training, as well as your availability in the first half of 2025, using this short form

Additionally, if you think your community or organization would benefit from a private cohort of the trainings, you can also let us know by emailing training@cscce.org

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January’s community call recap: Project management tools for community managers

Our January call focused on project management tools and how they can streamline collaborations and improve efficiency. This post includes a summary of the call, as well as video clips of presentations from Lou Woodley (CSCCE; describing the tool Trello), Alycia Crall (the Carpentries; describing Asana), Anne Heberger Marino (Lean-To Collaborations, describing Mural), Ellen Dow (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, describing Todoist).

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January’s community call: Project management tools and best practices for community managers

For our first call of 2022 we’re focusing on project management. It’s a common time of year to be thinking about big picture planning and strategy development, both individually and for your organization or team. And, there are a number of online tools out there that can help you map out your month, quarter, and/or year and keep track of tasks as you go. 

In response to several requests, this month’s call will include a general introduction to some of the rationale behind project management as well as active demos of four different platforms that can help you with your project management; Trello, Asana, Mural, and Todoist. We’ll share how we keep on top of things here at CSCCE, as well as hear from three members of the CSCCE community of practice who use one or more of these platforms in their own community management work. There’ll also be an opportunity to try at least one of the tools in breakouts to help guide your own work.

Join us on Wednesday, 19 January at 4pm UTC / 11am EST for more. Click here to join the Zoom meeting

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Community calls coming up in Q1 of 2022

CSCCE community calls are a monthly opportunity for shared learning and connection. Members of the community of practice as well as anyone interested in the topic under discussion each month are all welcome to join, and we encourage you to spread the word among your own networks! 

In this blog post, we share our plans for the first three calls of 2022. We also talk about the ways that we chose topics to highlight, the different kinds of formats we have hosted in the past, and how you can propose topics and/or present on future calls. 

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Stepping Beyond the Personal and Professional Silos of a Research Project Manager

Brit Myers is a Project Manager for the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS), a non-profit membership organization with the mission of facilitating cross-boundary Arctic knowledge, research, communication, and … Continue reading “Stepping Beyond the Personal and Professional Silos of a Research Project Manager”

Brit Myers is a Project Manager for the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS), a non-profit membership organization with the mission of facilitating cross-boundary Arctic knowledge, research, communication, and education. She works to enhance the ability of the highly distributed Arctic research community to connect with one another and work more effectively through collaborative research programs.

Last year I was invited by Dr. Luisa Cristini  from the Alfred Wegener Institute to co-convene a session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting.  Luisa was interested in submitting a session proposal specifically focused on issues relevant to the work of scientific project managers – a job title she and I share. Hoping to attract a larger number of abstracts to the proposed AGU session, we also agreed to reach out to the AAAS CEFP community to see if our session topic might be similar enough to their interests to warrant collaboration.  Luckily, CSCCE’s Lou Woodley and another group of #CEFP17 session conveners agreed to join us in our efforts!

However, as we drafted the combined AGU session description – and during a number of other conversations that followed – there was some genuine uncertainty about where the boundaries might stand between those focused on professional development from a “Project Manager” standpoint vs. that of a “Research Community Manager.”  For anyone with a Project Management job title, it is hard to forget that Project Management is a well-established profession with an official Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) regulated through accreditation organizations like the Project Management Institute.  Alternatively, the “Research Community Manager” is viewed by the new Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement as an “emerging profession,” distinct enough from both traditional project management and/or non-scientific online community management to justify the time and attention needed to professionalize and institutionalize the role.

Image by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/building-ceiling-classroom-daylight-373488/
Image by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/building-ceiling-classroom-daylight-373488/

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