Events Archives - Page 2 of 9

CSCCE Training Update – General registration courses and Mini-workshops!

General registration is now open for Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF24W), Creating Community Playbooks (PBK24W), AND some of CSCCE’s new Mini-workshops! In this blog post, we highlight some key dates and deadlines, as well as answer some questions you might have about your participation (see the FAQ section at the end).

Please note that priority access to PBK24W and all CSCCE Mini-workshops is given to participants in our Community Manager Certification Program. This means that there are a limited number of spots available (we cap participation at 25). So, if you’re interested in taking any of these trainings, don’t delay in signing up!

If after reading this post you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out to training@www.cscce.org and a member of our training team will get back to you ASAP.

Join us for CEF23F! Head into the new “school” year with some updates to our foundational training course

Today we opened general registration for the next offering of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), our foundational course on community management in STEM. This course is relevant to anyone convening communities in the STEM ecosystem, whether new to the work or more experienced.

Sign up by 4 August and enjoy a 25% early bird registration discount (use the code EARLYCEF23F at checkout)!!

CEF23F will run on Tuesdays and Fridays starting on 8 September and ending on 27 October. More information about the course can be found here.

If you have any questions about CSCCE’s professional development training courses – including about information in this post – please email training@www.cscce.org.

New CSCCE tip sheet highlights 12 guiding questions to improve the accessibility of your next virtual event

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed virtual events. Connecting online suddenly became the only way to convene groups large and small, for short meetings or multi-day conferences, and community managers often found themselves developing new meeting formats or learning to use new platforms and tools.

Fast forward to June 2023, and a lot has changed. Platforms have evolved (and sometimes dissolved), event organizers have mastered their own suites of engagement tools, and, as participants, we’re more seasoned (although “you’re on mute!” remains a frequent refrain in Zoom meetings!).

We’ve also gained a much deeper appreciation for what it means to host a truly accessible online event. While online events opened up spaces to many people who’d previously been excluded (e.g., through reduced registration, travel, or childcare costs), for others, it made it even harder to participate.

In a new resource we’ve been working on with community members Rebecca Carpenter, Sara Kobillka, Casey Wright, Yanina Bellini Saibene, and Hao Ye, we offer 12 guiding questions to help you think about the ways that you could improve the accessibility of your community events. And in this blog post, we share our three top tips.

DOWNLOAD THE TIP SHEET HERE

Planning and launching a new champions program – and online community platform – at the Michael J Fox Foundation

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with Josh Gottesman and Leslie Kirsch at the Michael J Fox Foundation to plan a new online community of practice intended to support conversations about the sharing and reuse of data related to Parkinson’s Disease Research.

As is the norm for many community projects, we’ve been taking a phased approach to the launch of this Data Community of Practice (DCoP) – working to understand the needs of the nascent community and then identifying a small group of community champions to help test the online platform and seed initial conversations before opening the community to a wider membership.

In this blog post, we share more about how we supported MJFF through member research, the selection and design of a new online community platform, resource creation and scaffolding for their new Data Community Innovators (DCIs) program, and the planning and hosting of a DCI kick-off meeting at MJFF’s offices in NYC.

Preparing for large, multi-stakeholder collaborations – a two-part CSCCE workshop

In May 2023, CSCCE’s Director, Lou Woodley, and Director of Learning, Camille Santistevan, ran a two-part workshop as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)’s Central Science Training Series. The series included training and discussion on topics related to leadership, career development, science communication, and more, with a range of experts sharing their knowledge and experiences.

The workshops Lou and Camille developed, which ran for 2 hours each on 10 and 24 May, focused on preparing for large, multi-stakeholder collaborations, with a particular focus on the beginnings of projects as a crucial time for establishing collaborative relationships, understanding expectations, and defining working norms.

In this blog post, we share a little more about the workshops. If you’d be interested in taking these workshops as an individual, or contracting with us to offer them in your organization, please let us know by emailing training@www.cscce.org.

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.

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.

February Community Call Recap – Creating accessible community spaces online

This month our community call focused on the accessibility of community resources and programming – emphasizing practical actions we can all take to support the participation of members with disabilities. We heard from two members of our community of practice; Sara Kobilka (of Renaissance Woman Consulting and co-creator of the Digital Engagement Accessibility Toolkit) and Rebecca Carpenter (Virtual Academic Community Manager of the Deaf STEM Community Alliance at Rochester Institute of Technology); held space for questions and discussion, and finished the call with a “show and tell” of some tools that can aid in the accessibility of slide decks, websites, Zoom calls, and written content.

In this blog post, we share an overview of the call, including recordings of Sara and Rebecca’s presentations, as well as a number of helpful resources that you can take a look at. We’re also working on a short resource to help guide STEM community managers specifically, and if that seems like something you’d like to be involved in making, please let us know by emailing info@www.cscce.org.