Welcoming your members, or teammates, intentionally

This month we’re thinking about new beginnings and how they play out in STEM projects. They’re often full of the potential energy of what is to come, the start of a new investment of time and resources – and they usually involve building new relationships (or evolving existing ones). In order to ensure that everyone on a new team, or new members in a community, feel connected, welcome, and aligned, it’s especially important to be intentional in this phase of a project – and that’s exactly what we’ve been practicing with several of our own activities over the past few weeks!

Onboarding team members to new projects
A first step for any new collaboration is to think through who is in the group, the connections that exist already, and to establish how everyone expects to work together. Earlier this month, we hosted a kickoff meeting for a new CZI-funded project in order to identify the starting points for members of the project, and topics that need to be discussed to support the collaborative work to come. To guide the event, we created a team onboarding survey that asked about expectations, experience, and preferences, and synthesized our findings into recommendations and next steps that we presented back for discussion.

Onboarding learners to new trainings
We also recently welcomed more than 70 NSF POSE awardees (Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems) to the POSE Training Program that we are hosting. We guided participants through a multi-stage onboarding process that introduced them to the tech tools we’re using as well as outlining expectations for participation and ongoing connection – and we provided mechanisms for sharing feedback and asking questions.

And welcoming a new team member to CSCCE!
And lastly on the theme of onboarding – a new staff member joined the CSCCE team this week! As our organization has grown over the last three years, we have developed an onboarding process and associated scaffolding to help make the transition into a new role with us clear and welcoming. We hope you’ll join us in welcoming Emily Lescak as the Project and Community Manager for the POSE Training Program.

Also in this month’s newsletter:

Read about CSCCE’s partnership with the National Microbiome Data Collaborative in Nature Microbiology
Join Lou and Camille for two workshops on designing and supporting large STEM collaborations during CZI’s Science Leadership Series (open to all CZI grantees)
Catch up on this month’s community call, which featured a salon-style conversation about how the changing social media landscape is impacting STEM community builders
Snag a last-minute spot in our next Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals cohort – we have just 2 tickets left!

News and updates

Welcome to Emily Lescak!

This week, Emily Lescak joined the CSCCE staff team as Project and Community Manager for the POSE Training Program, and will be working to support program participants and ensure smooth operations behind the scenes. Emily is a longtime member of CSCCE’s community of practice, and previously worked to build community at the Wikimedia Foundation and Code for Science & Society’s Event Fund.

Find out more

Publication highlights successful NMDC Ambassadors program

A new paper published earlier this month in Nature Microbiology, co-authored by CSCCE’s Camille Santistevan and Lou Woodley, reports on the success of the National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC) Ambassador Program. This work highlights the outsized impact community champions programs can have in culture change initiatives that rely on a change in community norms.

CSCCE hosts kickoff meeting for new CZI-funded collaboration

This month, CSCCE hosted a hybrid kickoff meeting, including an innovative team readiness assessment, for collaborators on a new CZI-funded project to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service for bioscience researchers in Latin America and Africa. The project is led by 2i2c, and involves The Carpentries, CSCCE, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science.

The POSE Training Program pilot begins!

At the end of March, we began a pilot offering of the POSE Training Program. This cohort includes more than 70 awardees of NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems program. To bring them all onboard smoothly, we created an onboarding journey that introduced them to technology, scaffolding, and each other.

CSCCE-led trainings for CZI grantees

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is hosting a series of webinars this year for all of its science grantees on topics related to leadership, career development, science communication, and more. On 10 and 24 May, CSCCE’s Director Lou Woodley and Director of Learning Camille Santistevan will lead two of these sessions, focusing on preparing for, and designing for, collaborative projects in STEM.

Find out more and register

Last call for CEF23Sp!

There are just two spaces left in our Spring cohort of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), which begins on 12 May and runs on Tuesdays and Fridays through 30 June. CEF is designed to offer new and existing community managers a core set of actionable skills and strategies that can be immediately applied to their work.

Find out more about the course | Let us know you’d like to join

April’s Community Call – A conversation about the future of STEM communities online

This month’s “salon-style” call focused on the changing landscape of social media, and how STEM professionals are engaging (or not) on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. CSCCE Director Lou Woodley and Communications Director Katie Pratt created a loose scaffold to facilitate the call, which inspired a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation.