CSCCE news Archives - Page 2 of 10

An update about the CSCCE staff team: We have a new org chart!

As Octavia Butler’s famous quote goes, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change,” and that has certainly been true for us over the past couple of years at CSCCE.

Our training offerings have expanded, our client list has grown, and our community of practice has continued to mature – all as we’ve continued to learn and grow as an organization and as individuals. Alongside some of these milestone shifts, we’ve made some changes internally by implementing new technological infrastructure, and continuing to develop and discuss internal team processes and culture. All of this supports us in figuring out how to navigate showing up everyday as people who believe in the power of collaborative work and co-creating together in a complex world. Yes, like you, we’re working on that daily too! 🙂

As a function of all of this, our staff team has expanded and evolved and, in this post, we share our new org chart. It now includes a new “table of functions” to describe how each of us contributes to CSCCE’s core areas – and we talk a bit in the post about how we ended up here. If you’re interested in discussing the inner workings of a small STEM nonprofit in more detail, do reach out to info@www.cscce.org. We’re always interested to hear from others working in a similar context.

Facilitating collaboration and decision-making: A workshop series for the Rare As One Network annual meeting

In mid-May, CSCCE was honored to host a three-day workshop series for the Rare As One Network’s annual meeting. The meeting’s attendees had a shared interest in developing strategies to support large-scale collaboration and collaborative decision-making, topics that we regularly offer trainings on, and we were delighted to share our frameworks in this highly interactive online workshop setting.

This blog post offers a summary of the series. If you are interested in learning more about commissioning a similar training for your organization or community, please reach out to training@www.cscce.org. (Review a full list of workshops in our catalog.)

Fostering equity and leadership: The rOpenSci Champions Program selection process

This post is adapted and abridged from the original, which appeared on the rOpenSci blog and was authored by Francisco Cardozo, Yanina Bellini Saibene, Camille Santistevan, and Lou Woodley

As part of our work with longtime client and partner rOpenSci, we’ve been supporting community manager Yanina Bellini Saibene with developing their champions program.

The goal of the rOpenSci Champions Program is to enable more members of historically excluded groups to participate in, benefit from, and become leaders in the R, research software engineering, and open source and open science communities. This program includes 1-on-1 mentoring for the Champions as they complete a project and perform outreach activities in their local communities.

This blog post focuses on how participants are selected from a pool of applicants for the rOpenSci Champions Program – a multi-step process intentionally designed to ensure a diverse cohort of Champions and Mentors.

An update about how we’re using Zoom at CSCCE

This post was authored by CSCCE’s Director of Community, Alycia Crall.

The CSCCE relies on a number of communication platforms to support programming in our community of practice. One of the primary platforms we have adopted is Zoom, and we currently have two Zoom accounts. One that is used for external programming, training, and events. The second is used internally for staff meetings and other communications.

Background on changes to Zoom

In August 2023, Zoom updated their terms of service that suggested they could use meeting audio, video, chat, screen sharing, and other content to train their Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. At CSCCE, we value making our programming accessible in a range of ways AND we want our learners and community members to feel comfortable speaking freely without any concerns for their privacy. Due to privacy concerns, closed captioning was activated on a case by case basis as we examined how our team and community of practice might be impacted by these changes.

How does CSCCE online training impact community managers and their organizations? Read our report to find out!

Thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we recently completed a medium-term evaluation of our foundational training course, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF). We’ve just published a report that summarizes the results of this work, which shows impact across three levels of scale – the individual, their community/organization, and the wider STEM ecosystem.

In this blog post, we’ll recap some of the rationale for the report and a high level overview of our findings. Subsequent posts will share more about our user-centered design approach to creating professional training courses, what we learned about the impact of CEF at each level, and how this work will impact our ongoing training offerings.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

Welcome to Talisha Sutton – CSCCE’s new Assistant Director of Operations

Another new hire joins our team this month – welcome, Talisha Sutton! Talisha is joining us as Assistant Director of Operations, initially in a part-time position, and brings depth to our team in developing internal processes and nonprofit administration.

In this blog post, we’ll share a little more about Talisha’s experience and background, as well as what her role here will entail. In a future post, we’ll talk more about how CSCCE’s staff team has evolved over the last few months, and unveil our new org chart.

About Talisha

Talisha joins us from The Carpentries, where she served as Deputy Director of Business and coordinated a range of internal operations activities for the past 5+ years. Prior to joining The Carpentries, Talisha worked in various technical positions in the biomedical research sector, managing research laboratories and providing administrative and financial support. Her background is in biochemistry, and she holds a Masters degree in Pharmacology and Toxicology from Michigan State University. So, like many of us at CSCCE, Talisha brings a combination of a science background, an appreciation for collaboration and teamwork, and additional complimentary skills to the team!

Welcome to Alycia Crall – CSCCE’s new Director of Community

This week, we welcomed Alycia Crall to the CSCCE staff team as our new Director of Community. We’re thrilled that Alycia, a long time member of our community of practice and frequent collaborator, has decided to join us and bring her wealth of experience as a community manager in STEM to CSCCE! In this blog post, we introduce you to Alycia, and explain a little more about her newly-created role.

About Alycia

Alycia comes to us from an interim position at the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA), where she served as Director of Community. Prior to joining ADSA, she was Director of Community at The Carpentries, and was instrumental in developing a new strategic plan for the organization that centered around community engagement.

More than 300 learners have graduated from Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals!

This month we celebrated a very exciting milestone – more than 300 STEM community managers (305, to be exact!) have now successfully completed our foundational training in community management, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF).

Congratulations to all of our graduates – many of whom are featured on this page of our website – and if you’re interested in taking part in the course yourself, registration is open for our fall 2024 cohort (registration deadline: 23 August). But hurry! It’s more than half full already.

“The course provides essential information to support community work whether you are just beginning or seeking to expand your community engagement activities. It provides resources to help you develop a strategy and tools to support implementation of your ideas. This course demystifies many aspects of community engagement and helps to ensure your community is built to last.”
CEF24W participant

Evaluation project underway to assess the impact of CSCCE’s foundational training, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals

At CSCCE, one of the ways we support scientific community managers is through professional development training courses and workshops. Our 8-week online course Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) is our longest-running training option, and has reached more than 250 community managers over the past three years across a total of 15 cohorts (with another currently in session).

Two of these CEF cohorts were private offerings for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and late last year they asked if we could assess the mid- to long-term impact of CEF training on the individuals that took the course. CZI, like us, were particularly curious about the impacts of the course on the learners – as well as the wider impacts on their organizations and communities, and beyond in the STEM ecosystem more generally. And so, in December 2023 we surveyed graduates from 12 general registration CEF cohorts, 2 CZI cohorts, and a cohort that ran in an Australia-friendly time zone.

In this blog post, we share a little more about what we’re hoping to learn as we start analyzing the data, as well as how we’ll be sharing the outcomes of this study in a couple of months’ time. If you have any questions, or you’re interested in engaging us as consultants on your own evaluation program, please reach out to info@www.cscce.org.

The Bicycle Principles – CSCCE collaborators, community members, and staff consider short form training best practices

In a new publication, which came out in November in PLOS ONE, CSCCE community of practice member Jason Williams (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Rochelle Trachtenberg (Georgetown University), and co-authors describe the Bicycle Principles for short form trainings in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine), as well as a series of recommendations for their successful implementation.

The work is an output from a conference that took place at CSHL’s Banbury Center and online in May of 2022. The conference convened 30 experts in short form training, including CSCCE’s Director Lou Woodley and several collaborators and members of our community of practice: Melissa Burke (Australian Biocommons), Allissa Dillman (NIH Office of Data Science Strategy), Maria Doyle (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre), Christina Hall (Australian Biocommons), Kate Hertweck (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), Kari Jordan (The Carpentries), Lisanna Paladin (EMBL Heidelberg), Tracy Teal (RStudio, now Posit).

In this blog post, we offer a short overview of the Bicycle Principle and associated recommendations, but for more detail, please download the paper and check out bikeprinciples.org.