🌿The Spore

Brought to you by the team at Organizational Mycology

Happy New Year! You haven’t heard from us in awhile, and that’s because our end of 2024 was all about reflecting on the work we’ve done across a bunch of work streams: holding community calls for CZI’s Essential Open Source Software program, helping projects like Astropy and JupyterHub learn from and improve their communities, and participating in wonderful meetings and conferences with open science leaders.

Across all these work streams, we learned that leading open science organizations is HARD. The people we’ve interviewed and spent time with routinely tell us that they struggle to anticipate and adapt to the non-technical aspects of leading a project. Many of them stumbled into leadership positions, unaware of the new skills they’d need to learn: Managing people, adopting a financial model, ensuring sustainability, and developing an overall leadership style. 

With these learnings in mind, we’re excited to launch a new program–Foundations of Open Science Leadership (FOSL)–in 2025! This cohort-based, eight week course aims to have participants come away better prepared to run an organization and be better connected to peers and mentors who can offer help when leadership challenges arise.

Does this sound like you? Are you hoping to improve your leadership skills and connect with other open science organization leaders (and emerging leaders!) this year? Check out our Expression of Interest Form and we’ll keep you updated on registration and content.

Short updates 

• 🌿 Beth has been working on a personal project called Everyday Flourishing where she’s connecting ecological principles with everyday life: http://www.everydayflourishing.org/ The resource she built is openly available and there will be workshops once a month for the year of 2025. The first workshop will be on January 20th at noon PST and you can sign up here. 
• We’re rounding out our collection of resources from 2024 CZI EOSS Community Calls. Check them out, and please feel free to share, adapt, and contribute! We’ll be holding calls again in 2025, so be sure to check back for additional resources.