scaffolding Archives

Exploring community scaffolding using the house party metaphor

Over the coming months we’ll be exploring a number of metaphors about community management that can support conversations about specific concepts and common challenges in a creative and free-flowing manner.

You can read more about the series in our overview post. For each metaphor, there will be a blog post describing the metaphor and several additional posts applying it to specific scenarios. This post is the second in a series of four posts dissecting the house party metaphor.

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, 22 November at 11am EST / 4pm UTC when we’ll be discussing the house party metaphor on our monthly community call!

Introducing the house party as a metaphor for exploring community management

You can read more about the series in our overview post. For each metaphor, there will be a blog post describing the metaphor and several additional posts applying it to specific scenarios.

In this blog post, we’ll review the components of the house party metaphor, and then on Thursday we’ll be back with a look at the importance of community scaffolding. Next week, you can expect two more posts that go deep into the metaphor.

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, 22 November at 11am EST / 4pm UTC when we’ll be discussing the house party metaphor on our monthly community call!

Join the call on Zoom
Add to calendar (to receive regular calendar invites to CSCCE monthly community calls, send an email to info@cscce.org)

February’s community call recap: Creating scaffolding to support your community

February’s community call focused on how scaffolding influences engagement and inclusion in communities. The call coincided with the release of the third installment of The CSCCE Community Participation Model guidebook, which described what scaffolding is and why it matters. And, as a gesture of gratitude and love to our community members in Valentine’s week, we also updated a number of our CC BY licensed scaffolding PDFs and created easily-adapted Google doc versions to support the creation of scaffolding across the STEM ecosystem.

We spent time on the call discussing and exploring these resources and the challenges community managers face when trying to create and/or socialize scaffolding in their communities, as well as coworking to create, adapt, and update materials. In this post, we recap some of the key points that came up during our community conversation.

Scaffolding for healthy communities: New CSCCE guidebook out today!

Today we released the third part in our series of guidebooks that explore CSCCE’s Community Participation Model. It focuses on scaffolding – the items that complement programming to lower barriers to participation and support multiple modes of member engagement in a community.

You can download a copy of the guidebook for free here, and read on for an overview of what scaffolding is and why you need it.

February’s community call: Creating scaffolding to support your community

Our February call will focus on scaffolding — onboarding documentation, how-to manuals, and tip sheets that keep everyone within an organization or community on the same page.

We’re currently finalizing a guidebook that lays out the role of scaffolding in STEM communities, and we’re excited to give you a sneak peak of the guidebook’s core concepts. This month’s call will also include time for participants to create or update their own scaffolding – either by adapting CSCCE’s CC-BY-licensed scaffolding templates or building and/or sharing their own organization’s documents.

Join us on Wednesday, 16 February at 4pm UTC / 11am EST for more. Click here to join the Zoom meeting.

For our February 2022 community call, we’ll be discussing the scaffolding that supports communities. Image credit: CSCCE

Opportunities to co-create with CSCCE in 2022

Co-creating resources with members of our community of practice is an important part of what we do here at CSCCE. It adds depth and breadth to the resources we publish while also being an opportunity for members to both gain a citable publication and give back to the community. In many cases, working on a CSCCE project also leads to new professional connections and working relationships that persist long after we publish the final product.

So, as we continue our series of forward-looking blog posts, we’re thinking about the co-creating and collaboration opportunities that will exist over the next few months. If any of these opportunities pique your interest, let us know by emailing info@cscce.org.

Co-create with us! Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

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.