Cultivating community management skills with the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement
From consultations with life scientists to developing infrastructure, community and collaboration are core to what the BioCommons and our partners do. That’s why BioCommons recently contracted US specialists in the engagement of scientific communities to deliver training to the Australian research infrastructure workforce.
The Australian BioCommons team and partners from Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Bioplatforms Australia, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Sydney Informatics Hub, Australian Genomics, University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research (UMCCR), and the Australian Access Federation (AAF) recently joined the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) for an Australian-timezone friendly offering of their popular Community Engagement Fundamentals course.
This eight week professional development opportunity recognised and consolidated the (often invisible) skills our engagement teams bring to our collaborative projects and provided frameworks that we are now using to plan for our own scientific communities.
We loved the interactive way that the course got us talking and thinking about how we create space for our communities to flourish. The course left us feeling energised, inspired and more confident in our work as community managers.
“I now appreciate the enormous and highly diverse skill sets required to undertake a community manager role. I’m embracing that it will take time to develop a true community for my project and enjoying the ride!” - Sarah Thomas, AAF
Weekly readings, resources, frameworks and activities helped us think deeply about our communities and put new skills into action.
“Understanding the community life cycle and the community participation model were an eye opener for me. My community is still in the ideation stage and the course was a great help to form my opinions/strategies about what needs to be done.” - Farah Zaib Khan, Australian BioCommons
The chance to discuss and think out loud about our communities with others was equally as valuable. Even though the course is now finished we plan to keep meeting up to share ideas and support each other in our community management roles.
“It was liberating to have so much time to think about my community and their needs and to talk this through with others. This helped generate a new focus for my community that will cater for the needs of all of the members” - Andy White, ARDC
CSCCE supports the professionalisation and institutionalisation of the community manager role within science. Find out more about their research, courses and consultancy offerings, as well as their international community of practice for STEM community managers.