Goals of the project

The word “community” has been broadly adopted by many organizations to describe groups that range from newsletter recipients to highly active working groups. Different community configurations may reflect different goals, stages of maturity, and levels of community management support. So how can you as a community manager, senior manager or funder know what’s possible with the resources you have available? We initiated this project in order to:

• Support existing scientific community managers in finding information and inspiration from other community efforts – including community managers to reach out to.
• Start standardizing the way that scientific communities are described to allow easier comparison and setting of expectations – by community managers, senior managers, funders and evaluators.
• Share observations and make recommendations based on what we learn from our taxonomy development and data curation.

How the project was carried out

Planning for the CSCCE Community Profiles started in 2019 and the work on the first round of 13 profiles took place in 2020. Data was gathered using a custom survey – developed with feedback from the CSCCE community profiles working group – and translated into a standardized profile template to allow comparison between the featured communities. The resulting profiles, which incorporate CSCCE’s own frameworks for describing communities and community member engagement, are available for download from the links below.

We revisited the profile format and the survey in 2021, making updates which resulted in the current three-page profile format of the phase two profiles below. All of the profiles in this growing collection are now listed alphabetically on this page and you can use the publication date to determine which phase the profile was created in.

We welcome feedback on these profiles and hope to expand and update the collection, based on demand. We will be releasing additional profiles in September 2021.

If you would like to work with us to create a profile about your own community please fill out this short form, or contact us at info@cscce.org with any other questions.

Special collections

We partner with clients to create special collections of community profiles that focus on specific domains or projects within the STEM ecosystem. If you are interested in learning more about how to work with us in this way, including adding a profiles project to your grant proposal, please email info@cscce.org.

Special collections to date:

• Collaborative collection on hardware and the open science ecosystem | Created in collaboration with staff from the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program.

Further information

• Overview of the project
• How the project was carried out
• The CSCCE Community Participation Model – this model is used in the Programming section of each of the profiles to describe different activities taking place within each community.
• Further analysis and discussion materials are forthcoming

CSCCE Community Profiles 

CSCCE Community Profiles are currently listed alphabetically.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, U

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

I

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

U

Community calls

On our September 2020 community call, Lou and Sara shared an overview of this project:

Three of the community managers who took part in this project (Leslie Hsu, Steve Van Tuyl, and Mate Palfy) also shared the impact creating a profile for their community had on their work:

Our July 2021 community call also featured this project, with three more community managers (Kathe Todd-Brown, Lena Karvovskaya, and Jody Peters) sharing their profiles: