Blog

Making a PACT for more accessible resources – a workshop for rOpenSci

Over the past few months, we’ve been delighted to work with Yani Bellini Saibene at rOpenSci as she’s designed and built a brand new champions program. One of the ways we’ve been supporting that work is by delivering an online training for the new champions in how to design and host successful meetings. This month we used our “making a PACT” framework for more engaging meetings and events – and after reaching out to the participants to ask about their accessibility requirements, we were prompted to make some adjustments to how we facilitated the workshop and shared materials.

Community managers are always learning about new tools and making improvements to how we support community members – and this approach is no different for CSCCE staff! So in the spirit of “working out loud”, this blog post includes more information about the PACT framework and how we updated our existing workshop to make it more accessible.

March’s Community Call – Oblique thinking for STEM community managers

Are you facing a community management challenge right now that you just can’t find a solution to? In this month’s community call, CSCCE community of practice member Beth Duckles will facilitate an Oblique Thinking activity to help us all work together on finding solutions.

This year, we’re switching up our community call formats, cycling around three broad approaches each quarter: i) sharing of skills and knowledge e.g, via talks, panel discussions and show and tell; ii) building together e.g, by combining our collective knowledge to do or make something new – including shaping our CoP and; iii) providing more opportunities to build deeper connections with one another via various different approaches to networking that are grounded in skills you can reuse in your own role.

This month, we are focusing on connecting, and you can expect something completely different from any CSCCE community call that’s come before! We’ll be asking you to share your varied skills, including those you might not flex so often in the workplace, and collaborate with other members of the community to solve common challenges in STEM community management. Expect to leave feeling energized and having connected more deeply to other members of the CSCCE CoP!

Date: Wednesday, 15 March 2023

Time: 11am EDT / 3pm UTC

Zoom link to join: click here

Add to calendar: click here

February Community Call Recap – Creating accessible community spaces online

This month our community call focused on the accessibility of community resources and programming – emphasizing practical actions we can all take to support the participation of members with disabilities. We heard from two members of our community of practice; Sara Kobilka (of Renaissance Woman Consulting and co-creator of the Digital Engagement Accessibility Toolkit) and Rebecca Carpenter (Virtual Academic Community Manager of the Deaf STEM Community Alliance at Rochester Institute of Technology); held space for questions and discussion, and finished the call with a “show and tell” of some tools that can aid in the accessibility of slide decks, websites, Zoom calls, and written content.

In this blog post, we share an overview of the call, including recordings of Sara and Rebecca’s presentations, as well as a number of helpful resources that you can take a look at. We’re also working on a short resource to help guide STEM community managers specifically, and if that seems like something you’d like to be involved in making, please let us know by emailing info@www.cscce.org.

February’s Community Call – Creating inclusive community resources and programming

As a community manager, you work hard to create resources that are available to as many people as possible. When it comes to digital resources, this includes making sure that your PDFs are screen-reader compatible, your Zoom calls are captioned, and your slide decks don’t feature text that is too small.

On this month’s call, we’ll hear from CSCCE staff and members of our community of practice about how to create accessible resources, as well as check whether your existing resources need an update.

Date: Wednesday, 22 February 2023

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join: click here

Add to calendar: click here

Join this month’s call to find out how you can make your resources and programming more accessible. Image credit: CSCCE

An update on CSCCE staff changes: New year, new org chart!

If you came to January’s community call, you will have heard CSCCE’s Director Lou Woodley talk through some changes to our staff team. There are some new faces joining the team and a new way of looking at our organizational structure that reflects the way we are continuing to grow. In this post, we outline these shifts, signpost where we’re headed, and acknowledge some of the challenges we’ve faced as a rapidly growing, highly collaborative staff team.

January, 2023 Community Call Recap: CSCCE’s plans for the next year

For our first community call of 2023, we wanted to continue our tradition of periodic updates about what’s happening at CSCCE. In these updates, we draw back the curtain and share more details about what we’re working on, as well as some reflections that other growing organizations and communities may share. From onboarding new staff members to preparing for the first cohort of our certification program, there’s a lot going on, which brings with it necessary changes in process and underlying technical infrastructure. This recap blog post will get you up to speed on all the news.

Note: A recording of this call is available to members of our Community of Practice, and a link is available in Slack. Please contact info@www.cscce.org if you need assistance.

Welcome to Maya Sanghvi – CSCCE’s newest Junior Trainer and Curriculum Assistant

We have another new staff member to tell you about! Maya Sanghvi joined CSCCE’s training team earlier this month, having recently graduated with a BS in cognitive science from Yale University. We’re so excited to welcome Maya to the team, and can’t want to see how she contributes to our expanding training offerings. Read on for a little more about Maya!

About Maya

Just like several other members of the CSCCE staff team, Maya has a scientific background, and conducted research on decision-making while she completed her undergraduate training. And, like our entire staff team, she sees the need for a more human-centric approach to research culture.

Welcome to Cat Dayger – CSCCE’s new Director of Operations and Technology

In 2023 we’ll be adding several new staff members to our team, the first of whom is our new Director of Operations and Technology, Cat Dayger! We’re so excited that Cat is here, and in this blog post we’ll tell you a bit more about her and her newly created role at CSCCE.

About Cat

A photo of Cat Dayger, who has brown hair, light blue eyes, and is wearing blue rectangular earrings.

Cat is based in Portland, Oregon, where she previously worked as the assistant director of team science and strategy at the Knight Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research (CEDAR) center. Her work at CEDAR included overseeing team development, creating new processes for reviews and promotions, developing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and implementing center-wide leadership initiatives and trainings. While in this role, she took part in CSCCE’s Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals course, and has been a member of our community of practice for almost two years.

Image credit: Rebecca Benoit

January’s community call – What’s coming up for CSCCE in 2023

Happy New Year! The turning of the year is often accompanied by transition, setting new intentions, and planning for the months ahead. That’s certainly where we find ourselves at CSCCE, with 2023 promising to be a huge year for our growing organization.

In our first community call of the year, we’ll share what’s coming up, including new courses, clients, and community programming. This is a great way to catch up if some of our newsletters fell into the cracks of December email chaos, or if you’re new to our community of practice and would like to find out more about opportunities to get involved. Our calls are open to anyone, so if you’re not yet a community member but you’re interested in what we do to support STEM communities and the people who build them, please do feel free to join.

Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join: click here

Add to calendar: click here

*Our January community call will be an update from the CSCCE virtual offices, during which we’ll share what we have coming up in 2023. Image credit: CSCCE*

New project: Open science cloud infrastructure and training for communities in Latin America and Africa

This article is cross-posted from the 2i2c blog with additional text describing CSCCE’s role.

We are excited to announce that the team and proposal described in this blog post has been awarded funding by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative!

Our goal is to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service that enables community-based cloud-native workflows in the biosciences. We will promote values of open and inclusive community practices, infrastructure that enables these practices, and a “train the trainers” approach that empowers community leaders to share expertise in cloud infrastructure with others in their communities. Our focus will be on communities in Latin America and Africa, and we hope to learn how this model could be extended to other global communities that are historically marginalized from large-scale scientific infrastructure projects.

CSCCE will be working with all of the partners involved in the grant to identify a model for running Open Science Cloud Services (OSCS) for global communities that is generalizable, sustainable, and replicable. We’ll be hosting a series of project kickoff meetings to align everyone around shared vocabulary and best practices for working together, which will be codified into core documentation such as a team playbook. And we’ll be supporting a newly-hired program manager for the project.

This is a collaborative effort between 2i2c, The Carpentries, CSCCE, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science. For more detailed information, see the blog post with our full grant narrative.