Posted by Lou Woodley, Program Director – AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program
Last week, the pilot year of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program launched with a week-long training for the inaugural class of Fellows at AAAS HQ in Washington, DC. Our Fellows are from diverse organizations – including scientific societies, research institutes and data sharing initiatives. You can meet all of the Fellows here.
Our training week was intended to give the Fellows a common grounding in some of the theory of community management, and allow them to begin bonding as a cohort. Each day we focused on a different theme – starting with a general overview of community management on day one and building to the challenges of culture change, self-care and burnout towards the end of the week. Along the way we explored community strategy, content planning and some relevant resources from the Science of Team Science.
Because we know how hard it can be to digest lots of material in a single week, we allowed plenty of time each afternoon for reflection sessions – ably facilitated by a great team of mentors who guided the conversations and made sure to capture the key points. All this synthesis led to the Fellows creating their own personalized action plans for 2017 – and returning to their host organizations ready for a great year ahead.
Additionally, over the course of the week the Fellows formed Project Teams that will continue to collaborate together over 2017 to create additional resources and conversations around community metrics, content strategy, community advocacy programs and more. Stay tuned as they report back on their activities over the year!
A big thank you to our trainers and mentors for their contributions to the week, and to the curriculum advisory committee that met back in September to seed some of the ideas that were translated into the training.
We’ll be blogging some more details about the training week in due course, but for now you can catch up via the tweets in the Storify below: