For our second Tools Trial of the year, we’re continuing our theme of open-source platforms that support community engagement by hosting a session about CiviCRM!
Date: Wednesday, 25 March 2026 | Add to calendar
Time: 2pm US EDT / 6pm UTC (90 minutes)
Zoom link: join the call
Speakers:
For our second Tools Trial of the year, we’re continuing our theme of open-source platforms that support community engagement by hosting a session about CiviCRM.
CiviCRM is an open-source constituent relationship management (CRM) platform designed for nonprofits. It can be used to manage community member data, design and implement communications campaigns, and support fundraising efforts. For STEM community managers, like those in the CSCCE community of practice, CRMs like Civi hold the potential to better understand their members and how they interact with the community and each other. How to unlock that potential, however, can feel overwhelming, with significant technical and financial barriers (not to mention initial setup time).
At the Tools Trial, we’ll explore some of these topics, and get a better sense for what is possible with Civi.
Speakers:
On Wednesday, 21 January 2026 CSCCE hosted a Tools Trial to support our community in learning about the open-source community platform Zulip. The Trial, like the many we’ve run before, offered basic information about the platform, and then explored different use cases relevant to community managers – including migrating a community from Slack into Zulip.
In this blog post you’ll find a brief summary of the call, as well as a curated list of resources relevant to anyone interested in setting up a Zulip instance. And you can watch the recordings of our four expert presenters: Philip Durbin (Dataverse), Maria Doyle (Bioconductor), Samantha Wittke (CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland), and Danny Garside (Digital Research Academy).
Continue reading “Zulip Tools Trial Recap – Find out more about this open-source community platform!”CSCCE Tools Trials are synchronous opportunities for STEM community managers to test out a new platform and/or explore how that platform can be used to support community engagement (e.g., our GitHub series).
Generally, CSCCE Tools Trials emerge from ongoing conversations in our community of practice (hosted in Slack). Recently, several of our members have expressed an interest in learning more about Zulip – an open-source platform with a lot of similar functionality to Slack – as well as the OS constituent relationship management (CRM) platform CiviCRM. So, we’re bringing back Tools Trials in Q1 of 2026 to get to know these platforms better!
The first Tools Trial we’ve scheduled will focus on Zulip, but keep an eye on our Events calendar for more trials coming soon! If there’s an open-source platform that you think STEM community managers should know more about (especially if it’s something you’re an expert in using and would be willing to present about or demo), please let us know by emailing info@cscce.org.
Date: Wednesday, 21 January 2026
Time: 11am US EST / 4pm UTC (90 minutes)
Speakers:
Zulip is an open source platform, similar to Slack, that supports community engagement through threaded discussions and curated channels. It is growing in popularity in STEM, and within our community of practice there is a collective interest in learning more about the platform, as well as several resident experts willing to demo Zulip and answer questions.
Zoom link to join: https://us02web.zoom.us/meetings/83142974212/invitations?signature=diQ6rsI45PPUaynUdY0FO6enNS6XlFvZ2Eu8FmNgsZc
So, we’re bringing back our community Tools Trials format to facilitate a conversation about Zulip! Our panel of Zulip experts includes:
They’ll each share a brief demo or presentation to highlight the features of Zulip, and then they’ll all be available to answer any questions you might have about the platform.
CSCCE Tools Trials are free events that are open to anyone convening communities in STEM, and this session is perfect for you if you:
We intend for this to be the first in a short series of Tools Trials focusing on open-source tools for community engagement. Please check our Events calendar for future events, and/or reach out to info@cscce.org if you have a suggestion of a platform to trial.
For the fourth of our open-source Tools Trials, we took a closer look at some of the specific needs of research and developer communities.
In this blog post, we briefly recap what we learned about how to use GitHub to collaborate on technical documentation, how GitHub teams can support member management, and the kinds of user metrics Bitergia Analytics can gather so that you can stay informed about the health of your community activities. You can also watch each of the presentations from the call, and access a collection of related resources.
Continue reading “CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 4 Recap: GitHub and Bitergia to support research and developer communities”The third Tools Trial in our open-source series focused on OpenReview – an open-source platform that supports open peer review, primarily for conference abstracts but with the ability to be customized and applied to other situations. OpenReview PI Andrew McCallum and Senior Software Engineer Melisa Bok joined us to share some history about the platform, along with a demo of some of its key features.
We’re working on a series of tip sheets to consolidate much of the technical learnings from the entire series of Tools Trials, but in the meantime, if you missed the call you can watch the recordings and read a brief recap of the call below.
You can also read/watch recaps of Tools Trial 1, which highlighted various ways of using GitHub to support community activities, and Tools Trial 2, which focused on tools to support events.
Our next Tools Trial in this series will take place on Wednesday, 11 October at 10am EDT / 2pm UTC. We will be returning to GitHub, with presentations about how the Zarr community uses it to collaborate on technical documentation, how Rosetta uses GitHub teams to manage contributors, and how the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics team uses Bitergia to measure contributor analytics. More information | Add to calendar
Continue reading “CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 3 Recap: OpenReview”For the fourth Tools Trial in our open-source series, we’re taking a closer look at research and developer communities. Our speakers will be sharing how they use GitHub and Bitergia to connect across teams and understand member behavior.
This will be the third Tools Trial at which GitHib is making an appearance, so if you’d like a primer on the platform, take a look at the recap blog posts for Trial 1 and Trial 2. But don’t worry if you don’t have time – we’ll make sure that you have the background you need to follow the technical aspects of the presentation during the call.
Tools Trial Info:
You can find all Tools Trials announcements and recap blog posts on the CSCCE blog.
Continue reading “GitHub and Bitergia for supporting research and developer communities – CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 4”For the second Tools Trial in our series focusing on open-source tools, we invited staff from The Carpentries to highlight some of the tools they use to support community events like CarpentryCon. Toby Hodges (Directory of Curriculum) and Maneesha Sane (Deputy Director of Technology) took up the challenge, with Toby sharing the tool HedgeDoc, which supports collaborative note taking in markdown, and Maneesha demo-ing two different ways of setting up a GitHub repo (one to host a website, the other to solicit conference session proposals).
In this blog post, we’ve curated the video recordings of Toby and Maneesha’s presentations, as well as CSCCE staff member Emily Lescak’s introduction to the session, the resources that were shared during the session, and a brief overview of some of the key themes and discussion points.
Continue reading “CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 2 Recap: Using GitHub and HedgeDoc to organize and support community events”In the third Tools Trial of our series focused on open-source tools for community building, we’re taking a look at OpenReview, an open-source platform that supports open peer review, primarily for conference abstracts. Andrew McCallum and Melisa Bok from OpenReview will be joining us to take us through the key features of the platform, and CSCCE’s Emily Lescak will share an overview of some of the different ways it has been used in STEM communities – including for reviewing grants, and program applications.
Tools Trial Info:
You can find all Tools Trials announcements and recap blog posts on the CSCCE blog – including a summary of the first Trial in this series which focused on GitHub.
Continue reading “Exploring OpenReview and its various applications – CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 3”