Last week we celebrated the conclusion of the fellowship year for the 2019 cohort of our Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP) – with a three-day wrap-up meeting in NYC.
The meeting was a milestone for several reasons. It was our first true hybrid CEFP meeting where we bridged between in-person and remote participation, it was our first time hosting the CEFP training outside of DC (and we loved being in NYC!) and it was the first time that we now have a clear path from fellowship participation to a broader, ongoing set of professional development programming via our new community of practice.
We’re continuing our monthly community calls for scientific community managers next week at 2pm Eastern on Wednesday 29th January. Please join us to discuss what comes next for our community of practice.
As we start a new year our first community call of 2020 will focus on updates about phase two of our activities to support those building community in science. Join us to discuss the initial results of our survey of the members of our community of practice on Slack – which includes programming requests. We’ll also be sharing opportunities to join an initial number of working groups – and we’ll introduce CSCCE’s advisory board.
2019 has been a big year for CSCCE and with the holiday season rapidly approaching we thought we’d enter into the festive community-building spirit for our last community call of the year. So please join us on December 18th at 2pm Eastern for a virtual gathering designed to help us continue to get to know one another, celebrate the successes and things we learned this year, and look ahead to 2020.
Last month we launched the brand new CSCCE community of practice for scientific community managers – which includes monthly community calls that allow us to explore some foundational ideas in scientific community engagement together while getting to know one another and our communities.
What’s a community call?
A community call is a regular online event for community members to come together and meet one another, discuss topics of shared interest, and learn new things. Calls might include individual presentations, guest speakers, celebrating successes or diving deeper to brainstorm a particular topic in more detail.
We’ll be hosting a community call once per month on the third Wednesday of every month at 2pm Eastern which means November’s call will be on Wednesday November 20th.
CSCCE’s primary mission is to support and study the work of scientific community engagement managers – those professionals who build and nurture teams, networks and communities within science.
We do this through a variety of activities including our year-long fellowship program for existing scientific community-builders. This week, we expand our programming by launching a brand new community of practice (CoP) open to scientific community managers and those interested in this emerging role. Whether you’re new to community engagement or have many years or experience, whether you’re building, funding or evaluating communities in science, we welcome you to join and help to shape this new, supportive learning space.
As part of the launch of our brand new community of practice for scientific community managers, you’re warmly invited to join our first community call this Wednesday, 30th October at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific, 6pm GMT – note that the clocks went back in the UK this past weekend).
What’s a community call?
A community call is a regular online event for community members to come together and meet one another, discuss topics of shared interest, and learn new things. Calls might include individual presentations, guest speakers, celebrating successes or diving deeper to brainstorm a particular topic in more detail.
We’ll be hosting a community call once per month on the third Wednesday of every month, but to kick things off this month we’ll be meeting on Wednesday 30th October.
We’re delighted to announce that the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) has a brand new home!
CSCCE is now a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, a 501(c)3. If you’re familiar with the Carpentries’ software and data skills trainings, we now share the same non-profit parent organization. Lou Woodley will remain director of the Center and says of the move:
“I’m thrilled that we’re entering the next phase of our activities to support the emerging field of scientific community engagement. We’re excited to join a stable of other community-oriented projects at Community Initiatives – and we’re eagerly looking ahead to launching new programming and our community of practice for scientific community managers”
Lou Woodley, CSCCE Director
Our work continues to be supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds the Community Engagement Fellows Program and other core CSCCE activities.
Providing support for scientific community managers remains at the heart of CSCCE’s mission. Image credit: CSCCE
Toby Hodges is a Bioinformatics Community Project Manager at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. He coordinates the EMBL Bio-IT Project, a community building and support project for bioinformaticians and computational biologists. In this role, he works with volunteers from the community to provide training and consulting, information, networking opportunities, and resources to EMBL scientists who use computational approaches in their research.
As community managers, one of the of the pressures on us is the
requirement that we make decisions based on an understanding of our
community members. We must frequently make choices on the assumption
that we know what the desires, motivations, and preferences are of the
people that make up our community. Although we have a close working
relationship and perhaps even friendship with some of them, it’s
generally very difficult for us to maintain a deep understanding of what
makes every member of our community tick, what they want to achieve,
and how we can help them to do that.
Shane M Hanlon is the Program Manager for AGU’s Sharing Science Program and a Senior Producer with the science storytelling organization The Story Collider. Learn more about the Sharing Science Community / @AGU_SciComm and follow him @EcologyOfShane.
Community (and communication) don’t happen naturally
Six months ago, I had no idea what a community manager was.
I’m the Program Manager for the American Geophysical Union’s
(AGU’s) Sharing Science Program. My
team and I work to provide scientists with the skills, tools, and opportunities
to help them share their science with any audience. We hold workshops,
webinars, create tools, manager social media outlets, and more, all in the
pursuit of this goal. Eventually we starting pulling folks together into a
network of like-minded individuals who are passionate about, and committed to,
science communication (scicomm), policy, and outreach. We called it the
“Sharing Science Network.” At that point I don’t know if I would have called it
a community – but it quickly evolved into one.
Brit Myers is a Project Manager for the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS), a non-profit membership organization with the mission of facilitating cross-boundary Arctic knowledge, research, communication, and education. She works to enhance the ability of the highly distributed Arctic research community to connect with one another and work more effectively through collaborative research programs.
Last year I was invited by Dr. Luisa Cristini from the Alfred Wegener Institute to co-convene a session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. Luisa was interested in submitting a session proposal specifically focused on issues relevant to the work of scientific project managers – a job title she and I share. Hoping to attract a larger number of abstracts to the proposed AGU session, we also agreed to reach out to the AAAS CEFP community to see if our session topic might be similar enough to their interests to warrant collaboration. Luckily, CSCCE’s Lou Woodley and another group of #CEFP17 session conveners agreed to join us in our efforts!
However, as we drafted the combined AGU session description – and during a number of other conversations that followed – there was some genuine uncertainty about where the boundaries might stand between those focused on professional development from a “Project Manager” standpoint vs. that of a “Research Community Manager.” For anyone with a Project Management job title, it is hard to forget that Project Management is a well-established profession with an official Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) regulated through accreditation organizations like the Project Management Institute. Alternatively, the “Research Community Manager” is viewed by the new Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement as an “emerging profession,” distinct enough from both traditional project management and/or non-scientific online community management to justify the time and attention needed to professionalize and institutionalize the role.
Image by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/building-ceiling-classroom-daylight-373488/
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