Being a Community Manager Archives

Need a new way to talk about community management? The second CSCCE concept booklet describes “the garden metaphor”

Back in November, we shared our first “concept booklet” – a collection of essays and reflection questions that used the metaphor of a house party to discuss challenges and opportunities in STEM community management. This month, we’ve been sharing another metaphor – the garden!

Each metaphor lends itself to exploring different concepts – the house party was great for thinking about scaffolding, and the garden is particularly “fruitful” when considering who your members are and how they interact with each other. And, as we discussed on our March community call, these two metaphors may resonate differently with you and how you think about your work.

We’ve compiled all of our horticultural posts into our second “CSCCE concept booklet” which you can download for free, refer to as needed, and easily cite!

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The garden metaphor for community management: Companion planting and pollination – helping your members help each other

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring a number of metaphors about community management that can support conversations about specific concepts and common challenges in a creative and free-flowing manner.

You can read more about the series – and the accompanying community calls in our overview post. For each metaphor, there will be a blog post describing the metaphor and several additional posts applying it to specific scenarios. This post is the third in a series of four posts dissecting the garden metaphor. Previously, we described the house party metaphor and we subsequently published that series as a free-to-download booklet.

A drawing of corn, beans, and pumpkins all growing together, intertwined. — *In a technique known as companion planting the three crops (corn, beans, pumpkin) are planted close together. Image credit: Anna Juchnowicz via Wikimedia Commons*

The garden metaphor for community management: Tending to the many different plants in your garden

It’s rare for a garden to only contain one type of plant – in fact, if it did, we probably wouldn’t call it a garden, it would be an orchard, a rose bed, or even a field! And the same is true of communities. People with varied backgrounds and skill sets come together in a community over a shared purpose, but they don’t all have the exact same interests or availability. Some of their skill sets might overlap, and they might share similar schedules (e.g., members in a community of teachers might all share the same holidays), but it’s important as community managers that we appreciate our members’ differences and offer programming and activities to meet them where they are. After all – some people enjoy visiting a garden as a secluded space for a picnic, others appreciate marking the change of seasons with a box of veggies every couple of weeks, and you can tailor your programming to match.

A illustration of a collection of varied house plants, each with it's own unique appearance and planted in a range of different pots. — *Image by pch.vector on Freepik*

The garden metaphor for community management: Planting your garden – who is welcome in your community?

You can read more about the series – and the accompanying community calls in our overview post. For each metaphor, there will be a blog post describing the metaphor and several additional posts applying it to specific scenarios. This post is the second in a series of four posts dissecting the garden metaphor. Previously, we described the house party metaphor and you can download all of those posts in a concept booklet.

An illustration of a spring meadow, where plants with various leaf shapes, colors, and flowers flourish side by side. — Image by Freepik

When you imagine a garden, do you see a large lawn with a single bed of roses? Or do you see a space filled with variety – plants with big leaves and small leaves; vibrant red flowers and tiny yellow blooms; trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals?

Chances are, it’s the latter. But, it’s often much easier to plant and mow a lawn than tend a garden for a multitude of plants, each of which has its own requirements to flourish. Such vibrancy takes intentional planting, careful irrigation and fertilization, and ongoing maintenance to make sure all of your plants flourish, not just a select few. In this post we are going to focus on using the garden metaphor to think through establishing community spaces that are welcoming and inclusive. In our next post, we’ll be talking about ongoing maintenance (aka programming) that supports multiple types of members.

Introducing the garden metaphor for exploring community management

You can read more about the series – and the accompanying community calls – in our overview post. For each metaphor, there will be a blog post describing the metaphor and several additional posts applying it to specific scenarios. This post is the first in a series of four posts dissecting the garden metaphor. Previously, we described the house party metaphor, and we subsequently published that series as a free-to-download booklet.

Imagine yourself in a garden. Maybe you see a rose climbing a trellis, pink flowers blooming and scented. A long border filled with flowers of all different colors, bushes of different sizes, and in a couple of places large trees offer shade. A vegetable plot in one corner is filled with carrots, onions, and tomatoes, and in pots here and there lavender and mint grow tall and fragrant. All around, bees and butterflies buzz and flutter, stopping now and then to take a sip of nectar while unknowingly hauling pollen from flower to flower.

Just like a garden, a community is made up of different member types, who bloom and flourish at different times, and who prefer different environments. And just as a gardener works to nurture and maintain the plants in their garden, so a community manager scaffolds activities and provides key resources to support community members in their activities.

February Community Call Recap – Community-engaged content and its informational roles

Communities rely on content – from websites describing purpose and personnel to documentation guiding activities, gatherings, and collaboration.

Creating content that serves these purposes well, and inspires ongoing connection between members, is therefore something that community managers are often tasked with. It’s also the topic of our advanced training course Content Design (CODE), and on this month’s community call we shared one of the frameworks we’ve developed to demystify the process of creating community-engaged content.

In this blog post, you’ll find an overview of the call and some of the topics covered in it. It would be impossible for us to condense a 6-week training into a single 90-minute community call, and even less likely that a single blog post could capture all of the nuances of content creation for STEM communities. If you’d like to go deeper, we encourage you to sign up for CODE. Registration is currently open for a Spring 2024 cohort of the course, however if April/May is not a great time for you to participate, please use this form to let us know when might make more sense for you.

January Community Call Recap – Burnout, exhaustion, and fractals of care

For January’s community call, we hosted a “salon” – a loosely scaffolded group discussion for sharing experiences and generating new ideas – so that our members could come together and talk about care.

We’d been noticing (and we were not alone) an increasing sense of tiredness and overwhelm among STEM community managers, accompanied by an uptick in conversations about boundary-setting and self care. If this was happening in our own community of practice, we wondered, what was going on in the communities our members were trying to manage?

An illustration showing a person with their head on their desk, apparently asleep, clutching a coffee cup. — Adapted from an image by Storyset on Freepik

January’s Community Call: The intersection of self care, community care, and community management

Pervasive in western culture at the moment is the concept of self care. Of setting boundaries at work and in personal relationships, of saying “no” more often, of striving for the perfect work-life balance. It’s important, in a world where we often feel compelled to be the best at everything – at work, as caregivers, even at our hobbies – to take care of ourselves. But how does self care intersect with community care? And if you increasingly see your community members stepping back from attending events or volunteering on committees, how do you continue to effectively manage a community?

This is something the CSCCE staff team has been considering for a couple of months now. If it’s something that’s been on your mind, too, we hope you’ll join us for a “salon-style” conversation at our first community call of 2024.

Date: Wednesday, 24 January 2024

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join

Add to calendar (or contact us at info@www.cscce.org to be automatically added to CSCCE calendar updates)

December Community Call Recap – Reflecting, connecting, and looking ahead at our annual community potluck!

On Friday, 15 December 2023 we convened our last community call of 2023 – a community potluck for members of our community of practice to take a moment to look back on the highs and lows of 2023, and think a little about what’s coming up next year.

This was our fourth annual community potluck, and this year’s gathering was as kind and generative as always. A big thank you to everyone who came and shared a dish (which took the form of a reflection or a learning)! In this blog post, you’ll find a taste of what we talked about – including some suggestions for your own end-of-year reflection.

A screenshot of the gallery view in Zoom, where everyone is smiling and some people have added visual effects to their video so they have festive hats or accessories. — *A screenshot of some of the potluckiest STEM community managers around! Image credit: CSCCE*

New CSCCE concept booklet explores the house party metaphor for community engagement

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been sharing blog posts that use the metaphor of a house party to discuss various aspects of community management. And last week, at our monthly community call, we scaffolded a discussion of the metaphor, which thanks to the enthusiastic participation of our members led us all to think about community management in new and creative directions.

Now, we’ve compiled these ideas and reflections into a “CSCCE concept booklet” which you can download for free, refer to as needed, and easily cite!

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