CSCCE news Archives - Page 6 of 10

CSCCE partners with the National Microbiome Data Collaborative to promote metadata standards adoption

CSCCE is wrapping up a project with the National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC) to support their inaugural cohort of NMDC Ambassadors, who are raising awareness and adoption of metadata standards.

The National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC) is an open science platform through which scientists can deposit and find microbiome data. NMDC staff are working to support the adoption of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data and metadata practices by the researchers who use their platform. One of the ways they are doing this is through the establishment of a champions program: the NMDC Ambassadors program.

Champions programs are ways of empowering emergent leaders within a community to take on additional roles and push forward the mission of the community. At CSCCE, we regularly work with clients on what an effective ambassadors program might look like in their context, and off support and best practices for getting a program off the ground.

Welcome to Adrienne Gauthier – CSCCE’s new Trainer and Learning Program Manager

This week we welcomed Adrienne Gauthier to the CSCCE team. She joins us as our new Trainer and Learning Program Manager, and will be working to help us expand our portfolio of professional development offerings and devise programmatic pathways through them for the range of STEM community managers that we support. In this blog post, find out a little bit more about Adrienne, and why we’re so excited to have her on board!

About Adrienne

Adrienne is an instructional design expert who comes to us from Dartmouth College, where she spent almost a decade working with STEM faculty to design courses for undergraduate learners. Through consultations, thought-partnership, collaboration, and faculty development workshops and events, she shared and promoted a learner-focused and inclusive teaching philosophy. During her time at Dartmouth, she was the program manager for the Learning Fellows Program, supporting and guiding faculty and undergraduate peer learning mentors in collaborative learning environments.

CSCCE team trains eLife Ambassadors: Empowering community champions in STEM

The CSCCE training team took to the virtual road in mid-March to work with the current cohort of eLife Ambassadors. In two, 90-minute sessions tailored to the eLife Ambassadors program, Lou Woodley and Camille Santistevan are sharing best practices and actionable tactics for STEM community engagement.

About the eLife Ambassadors

The eLife Ambassadors program was created to “enable early-stage researchers to build lasting support networks and to help them innovate solutions and work together to overcome the many barriers and issues that their research communities face.” [See the current call for applications for next year’s program].

5 guiding questions to help you support community volunteers

On 3 March 2022, CSCCE Director Lou Woodley gave an invited talk for the Code for Science & Society Digital Infrastructure Incubator about best practices when engaging volunteer labor. Her 60-minute session included opportunities for participants to reflect on their own work with community volunteers, and how they might refine the support they offer to them in the future.

With so many community managers in STEM looking to mobilize community members in a volunteer capacity, we thought we’d share an overview of Lou’s “5 guiding questions” for supporting unpaid contributions.

Welcome to Alice Martinic – CSCCE’s newest Trainer and Curriculum Assistant

This week we welcomed a new full time staff member to the CSCCE team: Alice Martinic. Alice joins our growing training team, headed up by Director of Learning, Camille Santistevan, and will be involved in administering and delivering our professional development courses.

She’ll work with Camille, and Founder and Director Lou Woodley, as we build out several new courses coming later this year. Read on to find out more about Alice’s background in learning management and connection to the STEM ecosystem.

About Alice

Before joining the CSCCE team, Alice was Associate Director of New Mexico State University’s Teaching Academy. In that role, she oversaw university-wide programming to support instructors as they developed engaging and inclusive lessons and labs. Initially, her work focused on in-person classes, but with the pandemic-induced pivot to online learning, Alice created trainings tailored to the virtual space.

Community calls coming up in Q1 of 2022

CSCCE community calls are a monthly opportunity for shared learning and connection. Members of the community of practice as well as anyone interested in the topic under discussion each month are all welcome to join, and we encourage you to spread the word among your own networks!

In this blog post, we share our plans for the first three calls of 2022. We also talk about the ways that we chose topics to highlight, the different kinds of formats we have hosted in the past, and how you can propose topics and/or present on future calls.

What’s coming up in Q1+ for CSCCE’s professional development courses?

CSCCE is the leading training organization for community managers in STEM and this year we’re looking to build upon our successful existing courses by adding some new options – and new technology – to the mix. Plus, we’ll be experimenting with an Accessibility Fund to support broader participation. Read on for the details!

Reflecting on some highlights from 2021

Happy new year! We hope that you got a bit of a break over the holiday period. Before we outline what’s coming up at CSCCE in 2022, we wanted first to reflect on 2021 and another busy 12 months for the CSCCE team.

While this post summarizes a few of CSCCE’s “greatest hits,” from the year, it has also been an emotionally and logistically challenging year, with many of us operating under conditions of radical uncertainty and yet always trying to show one another care. As we continue to operate in the midst of a global pandemic, we want to acknowledge that while it’s important to celebrate our successes, 2021 has been difficult too.

Before we dig in, a heartfelt thank you to everyone we’ve worked with over the past year; members of our community of practice, learners in our online trainings, and clients and colleagues. We appreciate every joyful opportunity to learn and grow alongside you as we work to professionalize and institutionalize the role of the community manager in STEM.

We’d also like to thank our major funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for their continued support, guidance, and commitment to the importance of building communities in STEM.

CSCCE to collaborate with rOpenSci on CZI grant to empower historically excluded groups as community leaders in scientific open source projects

This post originally appeared on the rOpenSci blog, and is cross-posted with permission from the authors, Stefanie Butland, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, and Maëlle Salmon. We’re excited to be partnering with the rOpenSci team to create a champions program to support new leaders in their community. Read on for more background on the project.

rOpenSci has been awarded new funding as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science program’s education and capacity building strategy. This $400K grant will support a new project 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.

We’re hiring, but the position depends on you!

If you’re a regular reader of the CSCCE blog or monthly newsletter, you’ll have seen our recent announcement that we’re looking for a new team member to take on the role of Learning Program Manager. We thought, and still believe, that the job we advertised for is someone’s dream job. But, unfortunately we still haven’t found that person!

So, we’re adding a little more flexibility to our search now, and while we still welcome applications from anyone interested in becoming our Learning Program Manager, we’re also open to hiring at the Trainer and Curriculum Assistant level. This will ensure that we can support you in your journey on our team with adequate training and time.

Read on to find out more about the position, and why we’ve decided to be a little more flexible in our current hiring process.