Announcing Birdaro, a new initiative to support scientific open-source projects

In June, we announced Birdaro, a new sub-brand of CSCCE under which we will be expanding our work with scientific open source (OS) communities and projects. Thanks to new funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we will be specifically focusing on the challenges and opportunities that develop as projects consider scaling, and their paths to sustainability. We’ll be designing new training opportunities, creating and curating resources for open source leaders, and providing opportunities to come together and share experiences.

Connecting with existing projects
But we’re not looking to do this alone! Birdaro means “flock,” and we envision Birdaro as an opportunity to connect and collaborate across projects that share common challenges and goals, so that we continue to move forward together, in community. We’re currently part-way through a listening tour, learning more about existing efforts to support open-source leaders in various ways, and we’re excited to share what we learn and start a series of community conversations about the findings later this summer. If you’d like to talk to us, please reach out to info@birdaro.org!

New resources about using GitHub to build community
We regularly take the approach of supporting emerging conversations and the creation of useful artifacts. And this month we’re publishing some new resources from our 2023 Tools Trial series, which showcased some of the tools used for community management in OS and OS-supporting communities via a series of 90-minute online community calls. One of the tools that came up over and again was GitHub, and in a new collection of resources published last week we’ve worked with community managers in a range of contexts to describe six different examples of GitHub in action (including organizing community events and co-creating community documentation).

Stay in touch with Birdaro
To receive updates about Birdaro, you can sign up for our new mailing list. And, if you are interested in partnering with us to power the creation of resources, training curricula, or other community activities, please get in touch by emailing info@birdaro.org. We’re currently working on branding for Birdaro, so you can expect a new website to emerge soon!

Also in this month’s newsletter:

Register for one of our upcoming Mini-workshops on convening online meetings and events
Find out more about the work we’ve been doing with two of our clients: CZI’s Rare as One Network and rOpenSci
Take a look at our new org chart, and find out more about the evolution of the CSCCE staff team
Catch Lou and Camille at the Science of Team Science meeting and find out about the Navigation Fund’s new open science program

New resources describe ways of using GitHub to build community

In 2023, we hosted a series of Tools Trials that focused on the online tools community managers use to support scientific OS communities. Over the course of the series, GitHub came up over and again, and we explored various different ways of using the platform to build community (including coordinating conference planning, collaborating on creating new resources together, and building out new technical documentation). We’ve consolidated what we learned from this series into a new “Tech Tip Sheet” and six “Tech Case Studies,” all of which are available to download for free under a CC BY license.

VIEW AND DOWNLOAD

News and updates

Birdaro – a new project to support scaling and sustainability in OS

Thanks to new funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we are expanding our work with scientific open-source projects and establishing a new sub-brand of CSCCE: Birdaro. Through Birdaro, we will begin addressing common, predominantly human infrastructure-related challenges faced by open-source projects as they consider whether to scale.

Find out more about the project
Sign up for the Birdaro mailing list

Facilitating collaboration and decision-making with the Rare As One Network

In mid-May, CSCCE hosted a three-part workshop series at the annual meeting of CZI’s Rare As One Network. 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.

Fostering equity and leadership with the rOpenSci Champions Program

As part of our work with longtime client and partner rOpenSci, we’ve been supporting the development of a champions program 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. In our latest co-authored blog post, we describe more about the selection process for the program – including using a rubric to review applications.

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

Over the past couple of years, our staff team has expanded and evolved. In a new blog post on the CSCCE website, we talk about some of the changes related to our growth that got us to where we are today and unveil a new org chart that aims to better-describe how each member of staff contributes to CSCCE’s core areas.

CSCCE Mini-workshop series for anyone convening online meetings and events

CSCCE Mini-workshops are 90- to 120-minute sessions that introduce discrete ideas in community management or go deeper on a core framework.

Making a PACT for engaging virtual meetings and events

In this Mini-workshop, you will discuss the opportunities and challenges of virtual meetings and explore the “Making a PACT” framework (Purpose, Attendees, Community management, Tech tools) for effective meeting design. You will apply the framework directly to example scenarios so that you leave feeling empowered to use the framework in your own community management.

Wednesday, 7 August 2024 from 11-1pm EDT / 3-5pm UTC | Register

Designing for effective decision-making during virtual meetings

Meetings and virtual events often involve asking attendees to make decisions. Decision-making invokes numerous considerations, including how to negotiate power dynamics, empower everyone to express their opinions, and actually reach the outcome(s) you desire. In this Mini-workshop, you will explore four broad decision-making modes (authority rule, consultation, voting, and consensus) and then use the PACT framework to plan a decision-making process. You will leave prepared to deploy decision-making processes in a way that invites all attendees at your meetings and events to contribute.

Wednesday, 9 October 2024 from 11am-12:30pm EDT / 3-4:30pm UTC | Register

Selecting supplementary tools for virtual meetings and events

Community managers regularly use online tools to support the needs of community members in virtual meetings and events. With so many possible needs to solve for, and so many potential online tools to use – how can you quickly determine which tools to explore and then use? In this Mini-workshop, you will apply CSCCE’s BASICS framework and SCORE method to determine an appropriate tool for a provided use case scenario. You will also test two online tools in a “sandbox” setting to explore functionality and usability, preparing you to select and implement tools for your own virtual meetings and events.

Wednesday, 6 November 2024 from 11am-12:30pm EST / 4-5:30pm UTC | Register

Other activities

In funding news around collaboration practices, The Navigation Fund announced their new Open Science Program to support transformative ideas that will reshape the future of open science. They are “looking to support projects that have the potential to modernize or disrupt current scientific collaboration practices and drive significant change.”

Current focus areas include:

Improving data infrastructure
Novel publishing models and infrastructure: Shifting the narrative
Improving the persistent identifier ecosystem and applications
An undercurrent of AI for science

And at the end of this month, Lou and Camille will be attending the Science of Team Science conference online (30 July – 2 August 2024). They will be presenting our evaluation of the impact of Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals, which we published earlier this year. If you’re planning on attending, we’d love to connect with you – let us know!

CSCCE

c/o Community Initiatives,
1000 Broadway Suite #480,
Oakland, CA, 94607, USA
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info@cscce.org

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