# SSI Community Building Study Group (CBSG)

:::info
The group meets once a month on the 3rd Wednesday from 14:00-15:00 UK time to discuss things related to community building, with dedicated space to BYOC: Bring Your Own Community issues/questions.

(Note that these are separate to the [SSI Fellows Community Calls](https://bit.ly/3eu7NjT) where we hear updates relating to Fellows' activities.)

Join Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/91556497634

Previous notes document: https://hackmd.io/CYFbyfKVR6OtDupWWlRMSA
:::

**Chairs**
* 17 December:
* 21 January:
* 18 February:
* 18 March:

**Table of content**
[TOC]

# Agenda/notes Template - Date: DD Month YYYY

**Present**

*

### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

### Notes

# 17 December 2025

**Present**

* Oscar
* Mamoona
* Sofía
* Johanna
* Cass
* Riva
* Aman

### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 10-20 minutes - Working on CBSG doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oUxr5_bPbDHkYflHdR47TyUYatRY8rYCVNpru0GqRRU/edit?usp=sharing
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

### Notes
* CW26: lighting talks/emerging talks (https://ohbm.github.io/osr2020/formats/)
* Speed friendling/collaborating
* Maybe less professionally focusing, more informal getting to know each other socially.
* Games nights.
* Purpose:
* Connecting old and new fellows
* Building relationships
* Knowledge exchange (lessons learnt)
* Realising that just knowing people is valuable
* Kinship
* Breaking down accidental silos between existing groups +1
* Unstructured activities leads to pre-existing groups forming

## 19 November 2025

**Present**

* Oscar
* Jez
* Jyoti

### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

### Notes
* Updating description of the study group
* See this [Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oUxr5_bPbDHkYflHdR47TyUYatRY8rYCVNpru0GqRRU/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.kxeau7lk53of)

## 15 October 2025

**Present**
* Oscar Seip
* Riva
* Jez
*

#### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

#### Notes
* CBSG
* Re-poll among all Fellows for best time.
* Rotate chairs, responsible for topic or introducing their community.
* Produce mini-outputs or speedblogs after sessions.
* Communicate the value of the CBSG.

## 17 September 2025

**Present**

*

#### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

#### Notes
*
*

## 16 July 2025

**Present**
* Oscar Seip
* Samantha Wittke
* Riva Quiroga
*
*

#### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

#### Notes
* International hiring.
* During shortlisting, everyone was declined not already in the country since it is too difficult to hire. Internal practices vs external communication.
* Needs to be a lot of willingness to go to the extra mile to hire internationally. Local lawyer needs to check the contract, took a month.
* Organisations hosted in the UK face difficulties about international transfers, once even blocked their account.
* International hiring has additional costs and time that needs to be budgetted in, especially around moving money.
* Retracting offers being made after the hiring manager or organisation faces unexpected hurdles.

## 18 June 2025

**Present**
* Oscar
* Catherine Inglis
* Robert Chisholm
* Yo
* Jyoti Bhogal

#### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

#### Notes
*
*

## 21 May 2025

**Present**

- Yo Yehudi / Chaos agent
- Jannetta
- Jez
- Iain Barrass
- Jyoti Bhogal
- Catherine Inglis

#### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

#### Notes
* https://ellakaye.github.io/community-building-handbook/
* Goal is to be a practical handbook.
* Will it merge with other books?
* The Turing Way has some materials around this, but slightly different approach. Turing Way focuses on Research community manager skillsets and careers.
* The markdown does make it easy enough to migrate to Turing Way or other places easily enough!
* Turing way could be a little bit too big ;)
* *This* guide is for people whose main job _isn't_ community building, e.g. RSE, dRTP.
* **User persona**: Uhoh, I'm a community manager. What do I do now?!

**Question:** Do we want to integrate the guide into these meetings?
- A: yes, in a loose way - don't make it too heavy-lift!

## 16 April 2025

**Present**
* Oscar
* Robert Chisholm
* Yo Yehudi
* Joseph Shingleton
* Jyoti Bhogal
* Riva Quiroga
* Jez Cope
* Colin Sauze
* Mike Simpson

**Apologies**
* Shoaib Sufi

#### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Welcome and updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 10 minutes - AOB
* 5 minutes - Closing

#### Notes
* R-Ladies rebranding to R-Ladies+ (https://rladies.org/news/rebranding-rladies/)
* Not able to communicate their mission clearly enough, not only women but also other marginalised communities. Sought feedback from community about the name change. Also had useful conversations about the Code of Conduct.
* General consensus to rebrand the community, but with the demise of Twitter as a central tool for communication, not everyone will know about it.
* Benefits: Maintains name recognition and kept control of their original name. Kept the change optional for communities in other countries where certain sexual identities are illegal and would compromise them or endanger them.
* Moving off twitter
* Mastodon/Bluesky
* Spanish language communities primarily moved to LinkedIn
* OLS decided to focus on higher quality content on single platform they had (LinkedIn)
* Make it easier to keep track of interactions etc
* Different platforms have different formats/length limits
* If using a syndication tool (e.g. Buffer), it may truncate for certain platforms (bsky ~300, mastodon ~500)
* But saves duplicating effort for things such as img alt-text
*
* Mailing Lists
* Many platforms require alot of personal data at sign-up, e.g. office address, due to GDPR
* Paid platforms will end when money runs out
* Google groups, via SocRSE, works however non-google accounts can't self sign-up
* JISC has a platform, used by GreenRSE SIG, just looks very dated but works
* OLS use a paid CRM (customer relationship management) platform, more of a business solution ties in with finance etc
* https://civicrm.org/
* https://civicrm.com/spark/
* OLS experimenting with more frequent small emails, rather than traditional longer form newsletters.
* SSI mailing list exceeded 2000 users on their Mailchimp subscription (Following maintenence fund announcement), this has led to need to increase paid package (e.g. £1k/year).
* Forum vs Email interface
* Sourceforge->yahoo groups->google groups
* Switching platform will lose people, especially with GDPR requiring consent.

## 19 March 2025

**Present**

* Oscar
* Robert Chisholm
* Catherine Inglis
* Yo / agent of chaos
* Riva Quiroga

#### Agenda
* 10 minutes - Updates
* 35 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* YY: What happens when community beliefs collide?
* 15 minutes - AOB

#### Notes
* What do you do when community beliefs collide?
* How do you deal with conflict about beliefs

## 19 February 2025

**Present**

* Oscar Seip
* Robert Chisholm
* Sophia Batchelor
* Catherine Inglis
* Samantha Wittke

### Agenda

* 10 minutes - Who / what
* 20 minutes - Outreach
* 15 minutes - BYOC (Bring your own community issues/questions)
* 15 minutes - AOB

#### Notes
What the purpose of the Community Building study group is
would it be a "good" idea to start capturing the group knowledge that is held by the Community Building study group (ala. The Turing Way)
JS: runs a workshop series @ Glasgow that invites people to talk about different topics related to research software (2-3 hours)
The attendance skews towards the engineering groups
How have folks managed their outreach so that folks from arts and humanities also engage
SW suggestion: the language that is used in the spaces is often niched to the field and acts as a barrier and creates a less welcoming environment.
SB: Example of a talk at the Natural History which used a glossary of terms they’re not using/translated.
Domain topic which is interesting to a range of people from different backgrounds.
JS: Hackathon - Humanities scholars bringing topics that might benefit from computational solutions.
RC: How do you make unknown unknowns, known unknowns (i.e. how do you support teams that don’t know that their problems are solvable by a different group).
hackathon may also be a scary big word that does not reach people who do not see themselves as tech people
Link to a “bias finder” in job ads - fueled by research on how women are more likely to apply for jobs where they meet all the requirements; https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/
Eli: I missed the meeting but I’ve seen “CoFest” (short for CollaborationFest) as a less-techie alternative. e.g. https://galaxyproject.org/events/gcc2024/cofest/
Using Lightning talks as those often feel more accessible to give
Suggestion: have a less democratic process for deciding topics
Piggybacking onto existing communities and co-hosting events or workshops so that there’s an existing community
Similar to how the SSI identified “community brokers”

#### Pre-CW25 networking event
Gamification of networking with a goal: Bingo card - same institution, same domain, etc.
Distributed social event: multiple options (but could also be in the same place)
Games, drinks, etc.

#### Suggestions/Ideas/Actions
Adding a “purpose of the group” and “what to expect” summary at the top of the new 2025 HackMD file that we need to start
Need to start it because the previous file reached the max limit of content (100,000)
Start a new HackMD in a neutral account that the SSI managed so that the info is less likely to be lost