Tag: scientific communities

CSCCE’s Community Profiles Project: First round of profiles now out!

Today we’re launching the first outputs from a project that we’ve been working on this year to better characterize communities in science – and to support scientific community managers, their leadership, and funders to meaningfully compare some of the current activities taking place across the broad landscape of STEM community projects.

The CSCCE community profiles project has resulted in the creation of an initial collection of 13 community profiles – two page PDFs capturing core features of each community from staffing to programming and funding sources. We collected the data using a custom, detailed survey and then translated what we found to a standardized profile template, which was specifically created for this project. The resulting profiles, which incorporate CSCCE’s own frameworks for describing communities and community member engagement, allow easy comparison between different scientific communities. 

In this post we introduce the rationale for the project and highlight the first 13 profiles. In Thursday’s post, we outline how the project was carried out.

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February’s Community Call – help us to launch our Community Profiles project

Our next CSCCE Community Call is on Wednesday 19th February at 2pm Eastern. Join us to discuss how we’re going to be creating Community Profiles to help connect scientific community managers with others doing similar things – and how to make the profiles useful to you!

Introducing the Community Profiles project

Some of the questions that we get asked most often about scientific community management go along the lines of “I’m looking to launch a new community focused on X. Can you tell me about another organization that’s already done this?” or “We’re looking to expand our community programming to include Y. Are there any best practices about how to do this – or things we should absolutely avoid?”

To help our community members to answer these questions more directly themselves, we’re looking to create a series of downloadable Community Profiles. At this concept stage (read: plans may evolve as we test and iterate!) we envisage that the profiles will be very visual, two-page summary sheets with some vital stats about specific communities that have agreed to be featured. As a user, you’ll be able to compare communities with similar audiences, online tools, programming and more – and possibly also reach out to their community manager to ask any follow up questions.

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Why do academics use social networking sites?

This post, written by CSCCE Director Lou Woodley, takes a look at the motivations of academics who use social networking tools. Last week our team took a quick look at … Continue reading “Why do academics use social networking sites?”

This post, written by CSCCE Director Lou Woodley, takes a look at the motivations of academics who use social networking tools.

Person using a laptop
“Browsing” by Nick Olejniczak under CC BY-NC 2.0

Last week our team took a quick look at a recent paper, which asks “Why do academics use academic social networking sites?” The paper presents the results of a survey of 81 researchers at three Israeli institutes who were asked about their motivations for using ResearchGate and Academia.edu.

The survey draws upon the Uses and Gratifications theory from the field of media studies for its research questions – exploring whether the five broad motivations for media consumers may also apply to academics that use online professional networks. Here we outline that theory and then highlight some of the findings from the paper.

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What’s Community Engagement in science? And why does it matter? Q&A with Lou Woodley

Two weeks ago we announced the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows program. Following on from that, Program Director (and Trellis’ Community Engagement Director) Lou Woodley answered some great questions from Matt … Continue reading “What’s Community Engagement in science? And why does it matter? Q&A with Lou Woodley”

Two weeks ago we announced the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows program. Following on from that, Program Director (and Trellis’ Community Engagement Director) Lou Woodley answered some great questions from Matt Shipman on the Communication Breakdown blog. The conversation is cross-posted below.

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