CSCCE Blog Editor, Author at CSCCE

CSCCE Community Tools Trial Recap: Mural/Padlet/Jamboard

On Thursday, 10 September 2020, several members of the CSCCE community of practice met to try out and compare three virtual ideation tools; Mural, Padlet, and Jamboard – which broadly try to create the collaborative experience of using sticky notes and/or flipcharts online).

This was the second in a series of tools trials to help scientific community managers source platforms that meet their needs as meetings and conferences transition online (check out the recap of our Qiqochat trial here). In this post, we recap our shared pros and cons of the three platforms, give you access to our notes from the call, and tell you what’s next for CSCCE tools trials.

Welcome to Camille Santistevan – CSCCE’s Lead Trainer and Curriculum Development Specialist

Our team is growing! This week we welcomed Camille Santistevan to CSCCE, who, as our new Lead Trainer and Curriculum Development Specialist, will work with center Director Lou Woodley to consolidate and expand our suite of trainings and associated materials.

She will also co-lead the fall training modules that we’re piloting with members of our community of practice, and work with the team as we plan out the next steps for our flagship training, the Community Engagement Fellowship Program.

About Camille

Camille comes to CSCCE from The City University of New York, where she has worked as Associate Director of Public Relations for the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) since 2014. In her time there, she helped build a community of researchers from across the University and at a variety of career stages who used ASRC’s facilities and equipment. She was also instrumental in developing and delivering a science education curriculum for the center, while overseeing numerous outreach and engagement programs and events.

August Community Call Recap: Meeting members where they are to build a successful scientific community

Our August 2020 community call coincided with the release of the CSCCE Community Participation Model, a cornerstone of our Community Engagement Fellowship Program training but until now not publicly available. To celebrate, we invited two CEFP alumni to share their experiences using the model to inform how they think about, and engage, the members of their communities.

In this blog post, we’ll recap a few takeaways from the call, and we share each of the presentations as standalone videos for you to watch at your convenience. Plus, we share what we’re cooking up for next month’s call!

The CSCCE Community Participation Model

Lou Woodley introduces the CSCCE Community Participation Model.

August’s Community Call: Member engagement and the CSCCE Community Participation Model

August’s community call will take place on Wednesday, 26 August at 6pm UTC (2pm US Eastern Time) and will focus on how community managers can describe the different ways in which members engage within a community – and whether those modes align with the overall objectives of the community.

We’ll unveil a new resource, the CSCCE Community Participation Model, and hear from two CEFP alumnae who, after learning about the model in our Fellowship training, used it to inform their work. Join us to learn more and add your voice to the discussion.

Join August’s call to learn more about engaging your members in ways that work for them. Image credit: CSCCE

CSCCE Community Tools Trial Recap: QiqoChat

On Thursday, 20 August 2020, several members of the CSCCE community of practice met to try out the virtual conference platform QiqoChat. This was the first in a series of tools trials meant to help scientific community managers source platforms that meet their needs as meetings and conferences transition online. In this post, we recap our shared pros and cons of the platform, give you access to our notes from the call, and tell you what’s next for CSCCE tools trials.

Kickstarting your creativity in the time of COVID-19

In the Community Roundtable’s 2019 State of Community Management survey, 50% of community managers reported feeling a high degree of burnout in previous months. One area burnout can impact community managers is our creativity. In 2020, with COVID-19 changing the way we work, it can be daunting to find ways to overcome burnout and tap into our creativity. In this guest blog post, Stephanie E. Vasko, Managing Director for the Center for Interdisciplinarity at Michigan State University, offers three activities that have inspired creativity since she began working from home in March 2020.

July Community Call Recap: Organizing inclusive, accessible, and successful virtual events

This month, our content and programming focused on organizing and implementing virtual events. With the global COVID-19 pandemic, virtual meetings, conferences, and other events have become part of everyday life for many people, and the task of planning, executing, and evaluating them in STEM often falls to community managers. So, for our July community call we invited three members of our community of practice to share their knowledge and start a conversation about best practices.

Watch the three presentations from July’s call in their entirety.

Presentations

“It’s Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This – Non-Player Characters & Prepping For Your Virtual Event” – Tom Quigley, ConservationXLabs (slides)
“It’s All About Access: Planning Meetings for Wider Audiences” – Rebecca Carpenter, Deaf and Hard of Hearing Virtual Academic Community (slides)
“Evaluating Virtual Events” – Emily Lescak, Code for Science and Society (slides)

Going Online: How we organized the first ever virtual csv,conf (part 3)

This is the third of three guest blog posts by Serah Rono, Lilly Winfree, Jo Barratt, Elaine Wong, Jess Hardwicke, John Chodacki, and Jonathan Cain, co-organizers of csv,conf (catch up on part 1 and part 2). In this final post, the authors look to the future (and explain the comma llama!).

#CommaLlama

It would not be csv,conf if it had not been for the #commallama. The comma llama first joined us for csv,conf,v3 in Portland and joined us again for csv,conf,v4. The experience of being around a llama is both relaxing and energising at the same time, and a good way to get people mixing. Taking the llama online was something we had to do and we were very pleased with how it worked. It was amazing to see how much joy people got out of the experience and also interesting to notice how well people adapted to the online environment. People naturally organised into a virtual queue and took turns coming on to the screen to screengrab a selfie. Thanks to our friends at Mtn Peaks Therapy Llamas & Alpacas for being so accommodating and helping us to make this possible.

Virtual Events! Announcing a new guidebook from CSCCE

With the COVID-19 pandemic came a global shift to remote working and virtual events. Because of this, over the last few months many members of the CSCCE community of practice have become experts in planning and facilitating a range of virtual event formats.

We wanted to celebrate this knowledge and make it more widely available, and so over the last few weeks we worked with several members of the community to consolidate our expertise into a freely-downloadable guidebook to virtual event formats.

Going Online: How we organized the first ever virtual csv,conf (part 2)

This is the second of three guest blog posts by Serah Rono, Lilly Winfree, Jo Barratt, Elaine Wong, Jess Hardwicke, John Chodacki, and Jonathan Cain, co-organizers of csv,conf (check out part 1 and part 3). In this post, the authors share their process for planning an online conference.

Planning an online conference

Despite the obvious differences, much about organising a conference remains the same whether virtual or not. Indeed, by the time we made the shift to an online conference, much of this work had been done.