CSCCE news Archives - Page 3 of 10

How do you measure the impact of a community champions program?

This post was co-authored by Yanina Bellini Saibene and CSCCE Staff, and can also be found on the rOpenSci blog.

How do you measure the impact of a community champions program? This was the central question of a working session at CZI’s Accelerating Open Science in Latin America workshop, convened by rOpenSci’s Community Manager Yani Bellini Saibene and attended by CSCCE’s Founder and Director, Lou Woodley.

Measuring the impact of any kind of community program presents a series of challenges :

What is the impact that you’re hoping your program will have?
Is the impact you hope the program will have something that can be measured?
What types of instruments can be used to measure impact? (e.g., surveys, focus groups, etc.)
How many times can you reasonably ask your participants to give feedback?
How do you (or can you?) reliably follow up with participants months or even years after a program has concluded?

CSCCE offers a private CEF cohort “in Australia!”

Earlier this year, we had the pleasure of delivering a private cohort of our foundational training for STEM community managers, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), in collaboration with the Australian Biocommons.

This was the second private CEF cohort we’ve offered, having run one for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source Software program last Summer (and a second CZI cohort will start in early July). CEF cohorts are always unique, and custom cohorts are particularly engaging, allowing colleagues and collaborators to explore concepts in community management, and their own shared goals and challenges, together.

We’re hiring! Lead Trainer, with open-source experience, for the POSE Training Program

If you’ve been keeping up to date with CSCCE news lately, you’ll know that our staff team has doubled over the past year (meet Cat, Emily, and Maya!). It’s a really exciting time to join our team, especially if you have a background in open-source scientific software, open-source STEM hardware, or open data and are keen to grow as a trainer.

TL:DR

We’re looking for a Lead Trainer and Curriculum Developer to join our team and work with us to continue developing and delivering the POSE Training Program.
Key skills: Experience training in a virtual setting; experience developing curricula; and a background in open-source STEM applications.
The deadline for applications is Friday, 26 May 2023, with interviews in June and an ideal start date in July.
To apply, send your resume or CV (no more than two pages) plus a cover letter describing why you are interested in this role at CSCCE to info@www.cscce.org.

CSCCE hosts kickoff meeting for new CZI-funded collaboration

In December 2022, CSCCE received funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as collaborators on a grant to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service for bioscience researchers in Latin America and Africa. The project is being led by 2i2c, and also involves The Carpentries, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science (OLS).

CSCCE has two main roles on the project. Firstly, we are supporting the international, multi-stakeholder team in establishing how they want to work together – and will be sharing some of those learnings externally so that other complex projects might benefit. And secondly, as part of the strategy team (with 2i2c, OLS and IOI), we’ll be considering the models for community engagement and governance being used in delivering the project locally. Again, we hope there will be much to share about localized community engagement as the project progresses.

We’re excited by the opportunity to be very intentional about setting up and reviewing how complex, collaborative work takes place, and this post is our first reflection on what we’ve learned so far.

Welcome to Emily Lescak – Project and Community Manager for the POSE Training Program

This week, Emily Lescak joined the CSCCE staff team. She is taking on the role of Project and Community Manager for the POSE Training Program, working to support program participants and ensure smooth operations behind the scenes. We’re so happy to have Emily join our team! Please read on for a little more about her work, past and future.

About Emily

Emily Lescak, a white woman with dark hair tied back. She is wearing a black top patterned with white birds.

Emily comes to CSCCE from the Wikimedia Foundation, where, as Senior Research Community Officer, she developed a multi-year strategy for growing, diversifying, and supporting the global community of researchers working on Wikimedia projects, co-organized an annual virtual research workshop, and co-developed a new funding program to support international cohorts of researchers. Previously, she developed and managed Code for Science and Society’s Event Fund. She took CSCCE’s Community Engagement Fundamentals course in 2021 and has been an active member of the community for more than three years.

New publication highlights NMDC Ambassador Program

A new paper published today in Nature Microbiology, co-authored by CSCCE staff members Camille Santistevan and Lou Woodley, reports on the success of the National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC) Ambassador Program.

The success of this pilot cohort of NMDC Ambassadors highlights the outsized impact community champions programs can have in culture change initiatives that rely on a change in community norms – in this case, the definition and adoption of metadata standards to aid the reuse of microbiome data. In this blog post, we offer a high-level overview of the project, but we encourage you to read the new paper, which is available here.

The POSE Training Program begins: Spring 2023 pilot session

CSCCE is currently partnering with Karthik Ram at UC Berkeley on an NSF grant to provide a training program for awardees of NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems program. The pilot version of the POSE Training Program began in April 2023, with more than 60 POSE awardees joining Training Program staff for a six-week program of workshops and webinars. You can find out more about the pilot syllabus on the pose.training website.

In this blog post, we share more about how we onboarded participants to the pilot program, and how we are gathering their feedback to ensure future iterations of the program are meeting the needs of leaders in open-source ecosystem creation and sustainability.

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.

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.