scientific community engagement resources Archives

5th Birthday Series: CSCCE resource downloads reach 50k!

CSCCE’s free PDF resources, which we make available via Zenodo, have now been downloaded more than 50,000 times! And to make this milestone even more special, it’s also our 5th Birthday this October.

In this blog post, one in a series we’re working on to celebrate our birthday and reflect on the ups and downs of the past five years, we highlight our “top 5” resources. We love hearing how you’re using these resources in your work – whether it’s adapting one of our scaffolding templates or implementing a new engagement strategy based on the CSCCE Community Participation Model!

We also want to say a big THANK YOU to those of you who helped make these resources. While some of our resources are developed by CSCCE staff, many were co-created in collaboration with the members of our community of practice.

Lastly – we’d love to hear from you if there’s a resource you need but haven’t found anywhere else. Maybe we can partner with you and other community managers in STEM to make it! Send us an email (info@cscce.org) with your idea.

2022 CSCCE Resource Guide

CSCCE’s Community of Practice, which we host in a Slack workspace (find out more and request to join here), contains a wealth of information. Over the years, our members have shared hundreds of blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, and other media about a multitude of topics, from how to write inclusive content to hosting engaging and accessible events.

Whether you’re a member of the community and could use a reminder, or you’ve been wondering what tips our members have, we’ve curated some of 2022’s highlights in this blog post. Below is a list of 49 resources that garnered some of the most engagement in our Slack community over the past year.

Re-introducing the CSCCE blog – An orientation to what’s here and how you can contribute!

CSCCE’s blog is a wealth of information on scientific community management. But, we realized, for many folks new to CSCCE, that information is somewhat buried in the archives. So, this week we decided to take a look back* at some of the blog posts we’ve** shared over the years, curating them so that you can easily find certain topics or collections, and invite you to add your thoughts as a guest blogger.

A photo of dozens of books open to random pages. Some of them overlap. — Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

New section of the CSCCE glossary focuses on virtual events

One of the many resources we curate here on the CSCCE website is a glossary of terms related to community management in STEM. We’ve just added another 60 terms, all related to running virtual events!

This list of new glossary terms was co-created with members of our community of practice during our May 2022 community call. We’ve added them to our searchable glossary, and you can also download a PDF of the collection from Zenodo.

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Opportunities to co-create with CSCCE in 2022

Co-creating resources with members of our community of practice is an important part of what we do here at CSCCE. It adds depth and breadth to the resources we publish while also being an opportunity for members to both gain a citable publication and give back to the community. In many cases, working on a CSCCE project also leads to new professional connections and working relationships that persist long after we publish the final product.

So, as we continue our series of forward-looking blog posts, we’re thinking about the co-creating and collaboration opportunities that will exist over the next few months. If any of these opportunities pique your interest, let us know by emailing info@www.cscce.org.

Co-create with us! Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

New CSCCE resource explores the role of champions in building and sustaining communities in STEM

Our latest guidebook explores the importance of supporting and encouraging the work of community champions, emergent leaders who take on additional roles within a community to ensure its success. The guidebook builds on our Community Participation Model, which describes how community members engage with community programming and the ways community managers can design activities and events that meet members where they are. It forms part two in a growing series of foundational resources, with more to come later this year.

What is a community champion?

We define a community champion as:

An emergent leadership role within a community in which a community member takes on more responsibility for the success, sustainability, and/or running of the community.

New CSCCE resource helps you find the right tool for your next virtual meeting or event

Since the global pivot to online working and convening, we’ve been working to create resources that help community managers and facilitators make their virtual meetings and events more engaging. The first two parts of our guide to facilitating engaging virtual events, a recipe book of event formats and a curated selection of resources are already helping thousands of people to thrive online.

In the newest section of the guide, selecting and testing online tools, we offer a framework to guide how you decide what online tool(s) to use. You can download this section, as well as the earlier two sections, for free.

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New virtual events resource alert! A DEI tip sheet and a new section of our Virtual Events Guidebook

This week we published two new free resources to help you with planning and delivering successful virtual meetings and events: a DEI tip sheet and the next part of our Virtual Events Guidebook. In this post, we tell you a little more about how these resources came to be, and ask you what you’d like to co-create with us next year.

DEI Tip Sheet: Captioning, subtitles, and transcription for virtual meetings and events

One of our recent Community Tools Trials focused on how to caption online events, making them more accessible to participants with hearing impairments, varying language fluency, or commitments that require them to multi-task. We discussed a variety of use cases, including captioning live events without incurring major time or financial costs and how to edit transcripts when an AI didn’t understand jargon or a speakers’ accent. This hour-long session, involving several knowledgeable members of our community of practice, highlighted that there was no one, easy-to-use guide available to help community managers or meeting facilitators choose between the tools or methods currently available. And so we created one!

CSCCE’s Community Profiles Project: First round of profiles now out!

Today we’re launching the first outputs from a project that we’ve been working on this year to better characterize communities in science – and to support scientific community managers, their leadership, and funders to meaningfully compare some of the current activities taking place across the broad landscape of STEM community projects.

The CSCCE community profiles project has resulted in the creation of an initial collection of 13 community profiles – two page PDFs capturing core features of each community from staffing to programming and funding sources. We collected the data using a custom, detailed survey and then translated what we found to a standardized profile template, which was specifically created for this project. The resulting profiles, which incorporate CSCCE’s own frameworks for describing communities and community member engagement, allow easy comparison between different scientific communities.

In this post we introduce the rationale for the project and highlight the first 13 profiles. In Thursday’s post, we outline how the project was carried out.