clients and collaborations Archives - Page 2 of 3

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.

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.

New project: Open science cloud infrastructure and training for communities in Latin America and Africa

This article is cross-posted from the 2i2c blog with additional text describing CSCCE’s role.

We are excited to announce that the team and proposal described in this blog post has been awarded funding by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative!

Our goal is to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service that enables community-based cloud-native workflows in the biosciences. We will promote values of open and inclusive community practices, infrastructure that enables these practices, and a “train the trainers” approach that empowers community leaders to share expertise in cloud infrastructure with others in their communities. Our focus will be on communities in Latin America and Africa, and we hope to learn how this model could be extended to other global communities that are historically marginalized from large-scale scientific infrastructure projects.

CSCCE will be working with all of the partners involved in the grant to identify a model for running Open Science Cloud Services (OSCS) for global communities that is generalizable, sustainable, and replicable. We’ll be hosting a series of project kickoff meetings to align everyone around shared vocabulary and best practices for working together, which will be codified into core documentation such as a team playbook. And we’ll be supporting a newly-hired program manager for the project.

This is a collaborative effort between 2i2c, The Carpentries, CSCCE, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science. For more detailed information, see the blog post with our full grant narrative.

CSCCE partner hire: URSSI is looking for a community manager

The US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), a fiscally sponsored Code for Science & Society project, is looking for a community manager. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in working with the research software community in the US and building a community of practice.

The new hire will also be working closely with CSCCE staff as we work to build a training program for NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) grantees (find out more about that project).

If you have any questions about this role with URSSI and how it connects with CSCCE, please contact info@www.cscce.org.

View the full job description

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.

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.

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.

CSCCE to work with Bioconductor on a new grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

As part of the latest cycle of grants under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)’s Essential Open Source Software for Science program, CSCCE will be working with the software nonprofit Bioconductor as they develop a new training program and community platform for their users.

About Bioconductor

Bioconductor is built on the R programming language, and is an open source platform for the statistical analysis of genomic datasets.

What do community members want? CSCCE partners with the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network (EDSIN) to learn how member needs have changed in the age of COVID

Over the course of the past 20 months, scientific communities have worked hard to pivot their member engagement strategy to support meaningful interactions in the digital space. Earlier this year, CSSCE worked with the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network to reassess their members’ needs and ensure that the content and programming provided is responsive to them.

Launched in 2019, EDSIN’s mission is to facilitate and support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within the environmental and data science fields. EDSIN was established during an in-person conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and its leadership was planning a second in-person workshop to develop long-term sustainability plans, which was cancelled due to the pandemic.