How did the pilot Birdaro training program go? Feedback from participants – and our learning program design
For 12 weeks at the end of 2025, CSCCE hosted a pilot cohort of a new online training program for leaders in scientific open source projects. The Birdaro training program, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, set out to address some of the human challenges related to the sustainability of OS projects and how they scale; interpersonal dynamics, documentation debt, governance, and more.
As we worked to recruit an initial cohort of OS leaders, we asked them what their most pressing needs were, and responsively designed a pilot training module that focused on governance and documentation.
We received applications to participate from twice as many projects than we could accept in just a short period of time. We take this as a sign that there is a large appetite for this kind of training in the STEM OS ecosystem – and in a future blog post we plan on sharing more about our vision for Birdaro as a series of related training modules and collaborations that result in new resources to benefit the community at large.
But, for now, we wanted to share how the pilot cohort went, and in what ways participants found value in the program. If you would like to talk to us about Birdaro, including suggestions for future sponsors of the program, please reach out to info@birdaro.org.
“This training helps build an understanding of the important social aspects to technical work. The specific regard to distributed team work and coordination in open source technical projects is unique.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
OS x CSCCE = an exploration of the interpersonal dynamics that build successful projects
The Birdaro training program applies a lot of the work we’ve done over the years at the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement to build inclusive, engaging and highly practical online training courses that nurture network-centric leaders. We emphasize making the bridge between learning shared language and common frameworks and putting those concepts directly and effectively into action, whatever your project context. We increasingly think of our learning community as being comprised of individuals across a range of roles who take a systems-thinking view of how work gets done, and center community engagement in their activities.
We’ve had a lot of positive results with supporting STEM and STEM-adjacent communities and are increasingly identifying similarities with OS projects, such as:
- They’re often volunteer-powered
- They’re made up of a range of member types with varied interests, availability, and skills
- They tend to be distributed, and bring together individuals with different cultural backgrounds, languages, and/or expectations
These similarities were becoming increasingly apparent to us as we worked with several scientific OS clients (find out more about CSCCE’s consultancy offerings), and through Birdaro we saw an opportunity to support projects on a much larger scale. The feedback from our pilot cohort has been resoundingly positive:
“The amount of effort, care, and love you put to this program is so inspiring, I could see that from day 1. Your dedication and how you reach to people felt very welcoming, and motivating.The professionalism you put in the creation and carrying of the classes is so great. That is not something I see everywhere. My experience with the program has been extraordinary. If something, I regret not having more time to focus a bit more on it.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
Pilot cohort: A focus on project teams
For the first cohort of Birdaro, we chose to focus on training small teams of project leaders. We prioritized applications from projects who could send at least two (or up to four) team members to our regular live Zoom training sessions. Our motivation for doing this was to remove one of the barriers people often face when returning from an inspirational professional development experience – their colleague’s resistance to (or unfamiliarity with) new frameworks, vocabulary, and mental models. By training small teams, we reasoned, we would make it far easier for the projects taking part to put what they learned into practice:
“Most value so far: having the time to develop shared language and framework with my team, and to be able to start thinking about implementing these concepts into our existing projects.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
You can read more about our participant selection process in this blog post.
Welcoming participants into the CSCCE online training environment – a community of practice, in practice
All participants in the Birdaro training program were given access to materials via Canvas, which has been the coordination hub for CSCCE’s online trainings since 2023. We carefully curated background readings, slides, resources, and logistical information, and to kick off the training we hosted an orientation session.
“The attention to guidance documents, general organization, workflow of the Zoom calls, sharing of slides and materials is unmatched to any training program I’ve done before.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
Our training philosophy has always included taking opportunities to model what’s possible, not just talking about it. For many of our trainings, that includes modelling community-building practices – something we did for Birdaro by hosting an online networking session at the beginning of the training period. While this might seem like a small thing, one of the features of Birdaro that participants appreciated most was the connections they made along the way.
“”I feel more connected to a community of like-minded people” I was coming to learn but I think I’ll have gained even more than that with the new connections.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
“…hearing that other projects, regardless of funding or maturity level, are also tackling similar questions has been really useful.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
“The chance to hear and learn about other projects outside our immediate community has also been inspiring and I’d like to have more opportunities to learn and meet with others in the cohort.“ – Birdaro 2025 participant
Structuring the training: A balance of participant needs, interests, and availability
Any professional development training program serving an international group of adult learners needs to address the range of experiences, expectations, time zones and scheduling constraints that busy participants bring to the mix.
To meet some of these challenges, we designed the pilot cohort in two halves and with a range of different session formats. The first half of the program focused on topics related to governance and team work, including a mix of mini-workshops and lightning talk sessions. The second half of the program focused on creating and maintaining documentation via a multi-week course. For a couple of teams, this made it possible to join us for the second part of the program despite their scheduling constraints for part one, and they were able to earn a digital badge for the course rather than the program as a whole.
We were heartened to learn that taking this mixed approach created positive impacts across all of the participating project teams – even if some teams didn’t have all of their preferences addressed in entirety.
Mini-workshops
The governance portion of the pilot training module included five Mini-workshops that addressed governance – how decisions are made and power is distributed – at different levels of scale (individual, team, community and project) and via different formats (modes, activities, structures and programs):
- Workshop 1: Giving and receiving feedback
- Workshop 2: Making collective decisions
- Workshop 3: Community governance structures
- Workshop 4: Designing for collaborative activities
- Workshop 5: Working with volunteers
Some of the outcomes of these workshops included:
“We’re actively replanning our basic documentation to incorporate what we’ve learning about feedback, decision making, and community structure. Not just updating our language into a consistent vocabulary with the new terms we have but also some structural changes in the future.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
“Two concrete examples:
1. We’ve updated our Code of Conduct and plan to link to it from relevant places like the contributing guide.
2. We are planning to write a guide for core team members (maintainers) with guidance on code reviews, largely based on the SOTA and ACE frameworks.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
Lightning talks
The first half of the program also included weekly lightning talk sessions, each themed around a different topic, which gave teams the opportunity to share their expertise and build deeper connections with other participants interested in similar topics.
“I really enjoyed the lightning talks. Hearing how others have solved problems and what motivated them to join the training provided valuable context. Even if a strategy presented may not be relevant to my work/project, I still took away useful ideas and inspiration.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
For this cohort, we created the lightning talk session themes based on the topics each project indicated a proficiency in:
- Session 1: Successfully scaling teamwork
- Session 2: Using events to scale project contributions
- Session 3: Supporting community member contributions via mentoring, scaffolding, and feedback
- Session 4: Scaling community participation across your ecosystem – governance, time zones, multi-lingual materials, and more
- Session 5: Organizational governance and identifying structures and processes to support open-source projects
You can find more information about each individual teams’ lightning talk, including links to recordings, where available, on the Birdaro website.
Creating Community Playbooks
For the remaining six weeks of the program, we guided participants through a multi-week, workshop-style training to create or refine a playbook for their project. We’ve written at length about the impact of this portion of the training in another 2-part blog post, which you can read here. But, in summary, this training resulted in all 24 project teams making progress towards creating a contributor guide, user handbook, community playbook, or a similar piece of core documentation, and since the program concluded, multiple teams have published and implemented their completed playbooks.
“I really valued getting to see others’ progress on their playbooks throughout the course. Regardless of how their project status related to mine, it was helpful context to see how people thought about building and sharing their playbook.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
“The course gave me the information I need to define and organize the governance of our community.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
General feedback about the Birdaro training program
By far, the two most commonly identified outcomes of participating in the program were:
- Feeling inspired to implement a new or improved approach (77.1%)
- Learning about other projects with similar challenges (75.0%)
“It has been interesting to see how different members apply the frameworks to different contexts according to their area of focus, although it means we’re not always working in sync, it shows the frameworks are flexible and a useful shared language for approaching problems.”- Birdaro 2025 participant
Additional common outcomes included adoption of shared frameworks (60.4%) and shared language (52.1%); access to new and relevant resources (56.3%); connection to a community of like-minded people (58.3%), and increased professional confidence (43.8%).
“Thank you. I don’t know who else would offer such an important and impactful course like this.” – Birdaro 2025 participant
Acknowledgements
The pilot cohort of the Birdaro training program was developed and delivered by staff at CSCCE with funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Lou Woodley was the program director, and co-created all training curricula and materials alongside Camille Santistevan. Lou and Camille led all of the Mini-workshop sessions. Katie Pratt directed training materials development, onboarding, and communications with participants, with support from Alli Lindquist. Lou and Katie worked together to develop and facilitate the Lightning Talk sessions. Canvas was designed and implemented by Adrienne Gauthier, with input from Lou and Katie. Alli provided ongoing Canvas management and logistical support to participants throughout the training.
To get in touch with the CSCCE team, please email info@cscce.org.
