Tools Trials Archives

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

CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 4 Recap: GitHub and Bitergia to support research and developer communities

For the fourth of our open-source Tools Trials, we took a closer look at some of the specific needs of research and developer communities.

In this blog post, we briefly recap what we learned about how to use GitHub to collaborate on technical documentation, how GitHub teams can support member management, and the kinds of user metrics Bitergia Analytics can gather so that you can stay informed about the health of your community activities. You can also watch each of the presentations from the call, and access a collection of related resources.

CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 3 Recap: OpenReview

The third Tools Trial in our open-source series focused on OpenReview – an open-source platform that supports open peer review, primarily for conference abstracts but with the ability to be customized and applied to other situations. OpenReview PI Andrew McCallum and Senior Software Engineer Melisa Bok joined us to share some history about the platform, along with a demo of some of its key features.

We’re working on a series of tip sheets to consolidate much of the technical learnings from the entire series of Tools Trials, but in the meantime, if you missed the call you can watch the recordings and read a brief recap of the call below.

You can also read/watch recaps of Tools Trial 1, which highlighted various ways of using GitHub to support community activities, and Tools Trial 2, which focused on tools to support events.

Our next Tools Trial in this series will take place on Wednesday, 11 October at 10am EDT / 2pm UTC. We will be returning to GitHub, with presentations about how the Zarr community uses it to collaborate on technical documentation, how Rosetta uses GitHub teams to manage contributors, and how the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics team uses Bitergia to measure contributor analytics. More information | Add to calendar

GitHub and Bitergia for supporting research and developer communities – CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 4

For the fourth Tools Trial in our open-source series, we’re taking a closer look at research and developer communities. Our speakers will be sharing how they use GitHub and Bitergia to connect across teams and understand member behavior.

This will be the third Tools Trial at which GitHib is making an appearance, so if you’d like a primer on the platform, take a look at the recap blog posts for Trial 1 and Trial 2. But don’t worry if you don’t have time – we’ll make sure that you have the background you need to follow the technical aspects of the presentation during the call.

Tools Trial Info:

Date: Wednesday, 11 October 2023
Time: 10am EDT / 2pm UTC
Speakers: Sanket Verma (Zarr), Paul Nagy (OHDSI), Georg Link (Bitergia), Julia Koehler (Rosetta)
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You can find all Tools Trials announcements and recap blog posts on the CSCCE blog.

CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 2 Recap: Using GitHub and HedgeDoc to organize and support community events

For the second Tools Trial in our series focusing on open-source tools, we invited staff from The Carpentries to highlight some of the tools they use to support community events like CarpentryCon. Toby Hodges (Directory of Curriculum) and Maneesha Sane (Deputy Director of Technology) took up the challenge, with Toby sharing the tool HedgeDoc, which supports collaborative note taking in markdown, and Maneesha demo-ing two different ways of setting up a GitHub repo (one to host a website, the other to solicit conference session proposals).

In this blog post, we’ve curated the video recordings of Toby and Maneesha’s presentations, as well as CSCCE staff member Emily Lescak’s introduction to the session, the resources that were shared during the session, and a brief overview of some of the key themes and discussion points.

Exploring OpenReview and its various applications – CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 3

In the third Tools Trial of our series focused on open-source tools for community building, we’re taking a look at OpenReview, an open-source platform that supports open peer review, primarily for conference abstracts. Andrew McCallum and Melisa Bok from OpenReview will be joining us to take us through the key features of the platform, and CSCCE’s Emily Lescak will share an overview of some of the different ways it has been used in STEM communities – including for reviewing grants, and program applications.

Tools Trial Info:

Date: Thursday, 28 September 2023
Time: 11am EDT / 3pm UTC
Speakers: Andrew McCallum and Melisa Bok (OpenReview), and Emily Lescak (CSCCE)
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You can find all Tools Trials announcements and recap blog posts on the CSCCE blog – including a summary of the first Trial in this series which focused on GitHub.

CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial Recap: Using GitHub to facilitate community activities

On Wednesday, 30 August 2023 we held the first of our new series of five Tools Trials focused on open-source tools for community-building. The series is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is intended for anyone interested in exploring open-source tools – including community managers who’ve never tried them before!

In this first trial, we focused exclusively on GitHub – one of the go-to platforms developers use to share and build open-source software. At CSCCE, we often say “meet your members where they are,” and for open-source communities, that often means you’ll find them using GitHub.

In this blog post you can find the recordings of all of the presentations from the call, as well as a summary of some of the (really interesting) discussion that took place both in the Q&A at the end of the call and in the chat and the shared virtual notes doc. Over the next few weeks, CSCCE staff will also be collaborating with the presenters to create a tip sheet that distills some of the key takeaways from the call; especially technical tips and tricks to help you explore implementing some of these GitHub-based community solutions.

Tools to support conferences and events – CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 2

Continuing our series of Tools Trials sessions focused on open-source tools that can be used for different aspects of convening and collaborating, in the next session on tools to support conferences and events, we’re going to take a look at some of the ways community managers can use GitHub and HedgeDoc.

In this interactive session, we’ll hear how The Carpentries uses GitHub to solicit proposals to CarpentryCon and HedgeDoc to facilitate collaborative note taking. This Tools Trial, part of an ongoing series funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, builds off of the first session in this series on ways that Github repositories can be used to facilitate community collaborations.

Tools Trial Info:

Date: Wednesday, 13 September 2023
Time: 11AM US EDT / 3pm UTC
Speakers: Maneesha Sane and Toby Hodges (The Carpentries)
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Facilitating community activities using Github – CSCCE Open-Source Tools Trial 1

In the first Tools Trial of this new series exploring open-source tools that support community building in STEM, we’re going to take a look at three use cases for how Github repositories can be used to facilitate community collaborations.

Github is one of THE platforms for open-source software developers, a place where they share code, fix errors, and suggest new features. However, you don’t need to be an expert developer to reap some of Github’s benefits as a place to manage distributed collaborations “out in the open.” – and indeed many OS community managers have found ways of using the platform to meet their coordination needs, and meet their members where they’re already working.

In this Trial, we’ll start with a short intro to Github in case you’re new to the platform. Then, we’ll hear how three different communities, Data Umbrella, The Turing Way, and rOpenSci, are connecting and collaborating in Github to create a community-sourced blog, organize community events, and plan engaging community calls, respectively. There will be plenty of time for Q&A and discussion, so come prepared to engage with our speakers!

Tools Trial Info:

Date: Wednesday, 30 August 2023
Time: 11am US EDT / 3pm UTC (90 minutes)
Speakers: Reshama Shaikh (Data Umbrella), Anne Lee Steele and Danny Garside (The Turing Way), and Yanina Bellini Saibene (rOpenSci)
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Investigating open-source community platforms – CSCCE Tools Trials return!

Online platforms are continually appearing and evolving, and as a community manager it can feel like a constant effort to stay up to date with what’s out there. We started CSCCE Tools Trials in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic instigated a large-scale shift to online convening, as a way of working together to figure out how best to use online tools for community building. And we’re bringing them back (again!) to gain a deeper understanding of the range of open-source tools that support communication and connection in STEM.

Starting in August, with the support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we’ll be convening a series of Tools Trials to explore various community-focused OS platforms (think Github, Jitsi, or Mastodon). And we’d love to hear from you if you would be interested in sharing your experience convening STEM communities using open-source tools, or if there are specific tools that you are interested in learning more about. Please email info@www.cscce.org if you would like to get involved.