CSCCE Blog Editor, Author at CSCCE

CSCCE receives funding from Sloan Foundation to support transition to online collaboration

We’re delighted to announce that CSCCE has received a $125k grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to continue our work supporting the transition to online collaboration that’s been accelerated due to the global pandemic.

In this post, we outline what we plan to deliver thanks to this grant – and we indicate the emerging opportunities to participate or collaborate with CSCCE that will result.

Supporting a rapid shift in norms

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has forced a sudden transition to online meetings and online work spaces for which many scientific organizations and communities were painfully under-prepared. Although discussions were underway in many organizations to improve access to conferences and events by offering virtual options, few had begun to implement them at scale. As a result, many organizations are now frantically trying to adapt, while lacking the in-house expertise, access to reliable information, and peer support necessary for staff to succeed.

CSCCE online modular trainings: Registration is now open for our Winter courses

This Fall we launched the first in a new series of CSCCE online training modules. In this blog post, we explain the courses and when they’ll be offered again, who we hope will take them, and how they impact our other programming, including a potential CEFP2021 cohort. If you have any questions about anything in this post, please reach out to us: info@www.cscce.org.

What are CSCCE online modular trainings?

Our online modular trainings distill years of experience and expertise in building successful communities in STEM into courses that fit into your busy schedule. Each training runs for six weeks, and involves two live sessions a week (totaling 2.5 hours) along with around 90 minutes of homework to complete each week.

First Birthday Series: The importance of co-creating resources in a community of practice

In this post, jointly authored by Communications Director, Katie Pratt and Center Director, Lou Woodley, we take stock of our resource collection, which now comprises eight pages on our website and includes 28 free-to-download guidebooks, worksheets, and community profiles in our Zenodo community repository.

The growing CSCCE resource collection. Image credit: CSCCE

November’s Community Call: Shaping future CSCCE programming

The recent shift to remote work, virtual meetings and events, and convening and connecting communities predominantly online has impacted how we all work, and in many cases required us to acquire new skills. Here at CSCCE, we’ve created programming and resources to support you throughout that shift, and now we invite you to shape what comes next.

In this month’s community call, we’d like to explore with you the next stage of our programming around the transition online – with the intention to discuss, develop and deliver resources together into 2021. Join us on Wednesday, 18 November at 7pm UTC / 2pm US EST to join the conversation, inform the resources we’ll develop, and shape the activities we’ll host over the next few months.

*Our October community call will crowdsource input on how CSCCE can support community engagement managers as they work to nurture and grow online communities. Image credit: CSCCE*

Announcing a new CSCCE working group – Community champions programs!

This week we’re launching a new CSCCE working group – for any STEM community managers planning or supporting community champions programs.

What are community champions programs?

As a community manager, chances are you spend a significant amount of your time operating at the “whole community” level – devising shared programming such as community calls and also creating newsletters and other reinforcing communications to keep the group informed and aligned around the various programming and activities.

While that community-level alignment is crucially important, a community moves forward its mission when members are empowered to take on emergent leadership roles – which enables the community to grow, become more sustainable, and to advance specific projects together via working groups and other smaller-group activities. In the CSCCE Community Participation Model (see image below) we refer to this mode of member engagement as the CHAMPION mode – and we’re working to develop our own champion infrastructure as well as working with other communities such as The Carpentries to develop theirs.

Ambassadors, Fellows, Champions, and More: What defines success in scientific community champions programs?

This post summarizes the report of the “Scientific Advocacy/Ambassador Programs Survey” by the 2017 Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP) Advocacy Ninjas project team (Melanie Binder, Heidi Laješić, Stephanie O’Donnell, Allen Pope, Gabrielle Rabinowitz, and Rosanna Volchok – with help from CSCCE Director Lou Woodley and former staff member, Rebecca Aicher) and was contributed by the authors.

Editorial note: Since the Advocacy Ninjas did their work and wrote up their report, we refined and published CSCCE’s Community Participation Model. In it, we describe a CHAMPION mode of participation, in which a community member is motivated to take on more responsibility for the success, sustainability, and/or running of the community. This might look like advocating for the community on social media, running a working group or local chapter, or taking the lead in creating and maintaining documentation to support the community. Champion programs, therefore, formalize or promote these activities, and offer recognition and training for members who participate. They empower emergent leaders, create nodes of trust within the community, and support myriad community needs and goals. Visit our new resource page for more.

First Birthday Series: Behind the scenes of community programming

For our “First Birthday Series” of blog posts, we are taking some time to reflect on CSCCE’s community of practice, which turned one year old on 21 October 2020. Our first post summarised the community “by the numbers,” and is a fun run-down of just how far we’ve come. In this post, we go a little deeper into the strategy and philosophy behind our programming. This post was jointly authored by Communications Director, Katie Pratt and Center Director, Lou Woodley.

A community of community managers

We are in a unique “meta” position at CSCCE in convening a community of community managers. That means members of our community of practice already know the potential value that’s waiting to be released when people with experience, knowledge, and ideas that are valuable to others in the group are brought together. Part of our job as community managers is to devise programming that supports the realization of that value, and that signposts to members what might be possible together. That’s true for CSCCE staff, as well as for our members as they support their own communities, although what that programming looks like will be specific to each community’s context.

CSCCE’s Community Participation Guidelines now available

This week we’re thrilled to share CSCCE’s Community Participation Guidelines with our community. These guidelines are the result of several months of careful consideration, and were co-created by members of our community of practice in a dedicated working group.

In this post, we, the members of that working group, outline our process. Over the coming weeks, we’ll also share additional blog posts in which we reflect on some of the nuances of preparing community participation guidelines. We are doing this for two reasons: We want you to know how we ended up here, and we want our experience to assist you as you develop similar guidelines for your community.

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@www.cscce.org.

The CSCCE core values, which informed our community participation guidelines. Image credit: CSCCE

October’s community call recap: Culture change in scholarly communications

Our October community call focused on the role of community in instigating culture change in scholarly communications. We heard from three members of our community of practice, each with a unique perspective and community to manage.

And, we celebrated the first birthday of CSCCE’s community of practice! Exactly one year ago, on 21 October 2019, Lou invited the first members to join our Slack workspace. It’s been a productive and exciting year, if somewhat unpredictable, and if you’d like to review our first year “by the numbers,” check out the first in a series of birthday blog posts.

*Our October call focused on culture change through the lens of scholarly communications. Image credit: CSCCE*

It’s our first birthday! The CSCCE community of practice in numbers

Happy birthday to us! This week CSCCE is celebrating one year since the launch of our community of practice.

In this blog post, we offer a snapshot of our last year by the numbers. In the coming weeks, we’ll also delve a little deeper as we release a series of posts about our accomplishments, lessons learned, and goals for the future.