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December 2024 Community Call Recap – Cooking up connections at our annual potluck!

On Wednesday, 18 December we held our sixth annual community potluck – an opportunity for members of the CSCCE community of practice to come together for a laid back hour or so of conversation, connection, and reflection.

Every year for these events, we use the metaphor of a potluck dinner party to scaffold the call. At a potluck, guests bring a dish to supplement the host’s plans. Similarly, at CSCCE’s annual potluck, everyone is invited to bring something to share, although it’s never food! This year, we asked our guests to bring appetizers of resources and community management stories from 2024, while we “fired up the grill” in Mural for the main course. And to round out the meal, we celebrated with a chatterfall “digestif,” each sharing three words we hope to embody in 2025.

In this blog post, you can find out a little bit more about how we facilitated the call, and check out a word cloud of our 2025 intentions!

Project Management for Scientists: A new training course from CSCCE!

We’re excited to end the year by announcing two new trainings in the CSCCE training portfolio that focus on project management – with the opportunity to register for one now and to let us know if you’d be interested in the second!

In early December 2024, we ran a pilot offering of a brand new multi-module training, Project Management for Scientists. We developed the course with funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and piloted it with almost 30 CZI grantees. This training followed a 2-hour long Introduction to Project Management that we ran earlier in October which a larger group of 50 participants attended.

In 2025, we’ll be making both of these trainings more widely available, and in this blog post, we share more about who they’re for and also the different formats they could take.

We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in taking the trainings as an individual. Let us know your preferences for a bootcamp vs. a multi-week training, as well as your availability in the first half of 2025, using this short form.

Additionally, if you think your community or organization would benefit from a private cohort of the trainings, you can also let us know by emailing training@cscce.org.

Introducing the Catalyst Project Community Partner Highlights

This blog post originally featured on the Catalyst Project website, where it is available in English and Spanish.

The Catalyst Project is a community-engaged initiative designed to support the adoption of open science principles in under-served bioscientific research communities through the provision of reliable and sustainable cloud computing infrastructure. It’s a project we’ve been working on now for almost two years, which involves staff from seven different organizations: 2i2c, The Carpentries, CCAD, CSCCE, IOI, MetaDocencia, and OLS, and is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

A key part of the project is engaging with Community Partners in Africa and Latin America: Institutions, organizations, and individuals who are undertaking bioscientific research projects that require cloud computing infrastructure. As collaborators on the Catalyst Project, Community Partners can access and use 2i2c’s open science cloud services, and also receive training from 2i2c, The Carpentries, MetaDocencia, and OLS to support their work. Community Partners also play a vital role in shaping an evolving governance model for the Catalyst Project to help sustain, scale, and maximize impact in Latin America, Africa, and under-served communities around the world.

In a new collection of blog posts (that we hope will expand over the next couple of months!) we’re highlighting the work of the Catalyst Project Community Partners. This post is a gateway to learning more about the Catalyst Project and its Community Partners. If you have any questions or feedback about the project, please send an email to the core team.

5th Birthday Series: CSCCE resource downloads reach 50k!

CSCCE’s free PDF resources, which we make available via Zenodo, have now been downloaded more than 50,000 times! And to make this milestone even more special, it’s also our 5th Birthday this October.

In this blog post, one in a series we’re working on to celebrate our birthday and reflect on the ups and downs of the past five years, we highlight our “top 5” resources. We love hearing how you’re using these resources in your work – whether it’s adapting one of our scaffolding templates or implementing a new engagement strategy based on the CSCCE Community Participation Model!

We also want to say a big THANK YOU to those of you who helped make these resources. While some of our resources are developed by CSCCE staff, many were co-created in collaboration with the members of our community of practice.

Lastly – we’d love to hear from you if there’s a resource you need but haven’t found anywhere else. Maybe we can partner with you and other community managers in STEM to make it! Send us an email (info@cscce.org) with your idea.

Welcome to Alli Lindquist – CSCCE’s new Teaching and Project Assistant

This month, we welcome Alli Lindquist to the CSCCE team as our new Teaching and Project Assistant! Alli will be joining the CSCCE training team, and will be taking over much of Maya’s work as she prepares to head to grad school this fall.

In this blog post, we share a little more about Alli’s background and her new role here at CSCCE, and also how her work fits into our evolving team (for more on some of our recent staff transitions, please revisit last month’s blog post on the topic).

About Alli

With a background in neuroscience and biology, Alli has spent time researching Parkinson’s disease and working on developing cutting edge microscopy tools. She holds a masters degree in biology from Carnegie Mellon University, and has worked as a course developer and teaching assistant, lab manager, and research technician. Most recently, Alli served as a senior editor for Knowing Neurons, a neuroscience education and outreach website. We’re thrilled that Alli is bringing this combination of training and communications expertise to the team at CSCCE!

New resources for community managers using GitHub to engage their members

In 2023, we hosted a series of Tools Trials that focused on the online tools community managers use to support scientific open-source communities – whether that’s by coordinating conference planning, collaborating on creating new resources together, or building out new technical documentation. Over the course of the series, GitHub came up over and again as a preferred platform for many, and there were a number of different ways of using the platform to build community (not just to collaborate on code!).

Today, we’re sharing a collection of outputs from these calls: A new tip sheet that lays out the features of GitHub that make it a useful tool for community managers, and six case studies that showcase some of its potential applications:

VIEW THE COLLECTION ON ZENODO

June 2024 Community Call Recap: Annual mid-year social and curated networking forum

On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 we hosted our fourth annual curated networking forum for members of our community of practice. This is a regular opportunity for STEM community managers to get to know each other in a series of personalized one-on-one and small group chats – a virtual take on speed networking, if you like!

In previous years, all participants in the event have joined us on Zoom and experienced the event entirely synchronously, but this year, we welcomed our first asynchronous participant. In this blog post, we share a little more about the event, and how asynchronous networking worked for us in this pilot outing.

Announcing Birdaro – a new project to support scientific open source projects as they scale

We’re excited to announce Birdaro, a new project to support open source software (OSS) projects as they consider scaling and plans for long term sustainability, thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

In recent years, OSS products have become increasingly important within STEM research and beyond – underpinning research methodology and making possible new advances, particularly in high-throughput and data intensive fields. Alongside this growing recognition are emerging and ongoing conversations about how best to support the longer term persistence of these projects – with new organizational entities, conferences, books, reports, and other resources arising to support conversations about project scaling and sustainability.

An update about the CSCCE staff team: We have a new org chart!

As Octavia Butler’s famous quote goes, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change,” and that has certainly been true for us over the past couple of years at CSCCE.

Our training offerings have expanded, our client list has grown, and our community of practice has continued to mature – all as we’ve continued to learn and grow as an organization and as individuals. Alongside some of these milestone shifts, we’ve made some changes internally by implementing new technological infrastructure, and continuing to develop and discuss internal team processes and culture. All of this supports us in figuring out how to navigate showing up everyday as people who believe in the power of collaborative work and co-creating together in a complex world. Yes, like you, we’re working on that daily too! 🙂

As a function of all of this, our staff team has expanded and evolved and, in this post, we share our new org chart. It now includes a new “table of functions” to describe how each of us contributes to CSCCE’s core areas – and we talk a bit in the post about how we ended up here. If you’re interested in discussing the inner workings of a small STEM nonprofit in more detail, do reach out to info@www.cscce.org. We’re always interested to hear from others working in a similar context.