CSCCE CoP Archives

January/February 2025 Community Call Recap: An update from CSCCE and a community conversation

A big thank you to everyone who joined us at our first community call of 2025. We appreciated the opportunity to share a “big picture” view of how CSCCE’s training, consultancy, and community work is evolving as we pass the 5-year mark of operating as a fiscally-sponsored nonprofit.

We are also grateful to those of you who were able to stay for the second part of the call, where we discussed some of the challenges currently facing the STEM ecosystem. We hope to continue these conversations in Slack and at future community events, so if you were unable to attend this time, we hope you’ll join us in the future.

In this blog post, we recap some of the news Lou, Camille, and Katie shared in the “updates from CSCCE” section of the call.

January’s community call – An update from CSCCE

Happy New Year! CSCCE is now five years old as a STEM nonprofit, and as the year turns we’ve been reflecting internally about where we go next as an organization. At this month’s community call, we’d like to invite you to join the conversation!

On the call, Lou, Katie, and Camille will take a look back at some of the milestones we’ve celebrated so far, and then share some of the big projects that we’ll be focusing on in 2025. Throughout the call, there will be opportunities to share your feedback, and learn how you can participate in CSCCE community programming over the next 12 months.

We hope you’ll join us!

Date: ~~Wednesday, 29 January 2025~~ POSTPONED until Wednesday 19 February 2025

Time: 11am EST / 4pm UTC

Zoom link to join

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

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!

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.

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.

May Community Call Recap – The who, what, when, where, why, and how of making a community playbook!

This month’s community call was an opportunity to talk about community playbooks, and the impact they can have on a community or team.

We were joined by three members of the CSCCE community of practice, each of whom recently created a playbook as part of their participation in our newest online course Creating Community Playbooks (PBK): Allie Lau (American Physical Society), Martin Magdinier (OpenRefine), and Sophie Bui (National Center for Supercomputing Applications).

In this blog post you can watch recordings of each of the presentations and find out more about the questions and discussion their talks inspired. We’ve also included more information about the PBK course – registration for our next cohort closes on 21 June 2024! If you have questions about the course, do reach out to training@www.cscce.org.

April Community Call Recap – The impact of short-form professional development training in STEM

At this month’s community call, we were talking about the impact of short-form professional development trainings – focusing not only on how individuals use what they learned during a training in their day to day work, but also considering how such trainings may result in changes at the level of the STEM ecosystem by affecting common practices and connecting learners across projects and organizations.

The call included an overview of the Bicycle Principles, a framework for designing and evaluation inclusive and engaging trainings, as well as presentations about two different methods for gathering and analyzing impact.

In this blog post, you’ll find recordings of the three presentations from the call, as well as a brief summary of what each talk focused on. Do join us for our call next month, Wednesday 29 May at 12pm EDT / 4pm UTC, when we’ll be taking a closer look at the application and utility of community playbooks (a.k.a. Collaboration guides, lab handbooks, and more). Add to calendar.

Three bicycles stand on a set of concrete steps, with long grass on either side. The bicycle in front is pale blue with white wheels, the one behind is white with black wheels, and the one in back is black with yellow wheels. — What do bicycles have to do with short-form training? Read on to find out! Photo by Solé Bicycles on Unsplash