CSF's quarterly report (January – March 2025)

Team milestones

Transition to a new structure and other organisational changes, establishment of two new units (IT and HR), streamlining of a number of processes.

Completed

We started 2025 with some organisational changes. During autumn 2024 and winter 2024-2025, our team almost doubled in size, from around 30 members to over 60. Such rapid growth required a transition to a more stable and branched structure that would allow us to make more effective use of the skills and efforts of all members, train newcomers, and cope with the flow of information, which had also increased several times over in such a short period of time.

After a series of discussions, it was decided to transition to a team structure consisting of four units, each consisting of two to three departments with similar tasks. The units are headed by unit managers who have previously proven themselves in their roles as heads of units. Their responsibilities include developing all subordinate departments and ensuring interaction between them in case of projects implemented by several departments. The process of establishing departments was slow due to numerous issues that had to be overcome along the way, but it was successfully implemented by spring 2025.

There was a need to establish two additional units that would primarily support the five core units. Thus, an HR Unit was established to recruit new members, and an IT Unit was established to provide technical support to three units of the team: scientific, analytical, and communications. Approaches to training newcomers also changed, in particular, a lot of training materials were created and updated. Thanks to these innovations, we managed to ‘digest’ the rapid growth of the team.

The first unit to be created was the Educational Unit (January 2025), followed by the Units of Communications (February 2025). The last was the Scientific Unit (March 2025).

The Units of Communications has become much more stable and productive. A new official CSF website and brandbook were published, which would serve as the basis for our public activities and help in training new members of the Units of Communications.

The HR Unit began its work by systematising existing questionnaires, creating a number of new ones and conducting the first interviews. Work with interns also became more balanced.

The IT Unit started by assisting the Scientific Unit with the automation of a number of processes.

The Wikipedian Unit held its first offline event in Odessa as part of the annual Wikimarathon. The aim of the event was to attract newcomers to the Wikipedian Unit team and spread information about CSF. The event itself was organised and conducted successfully, but in practice we found that the Wikimarathon format is not suitable for long-term engagement, and we ourselves were unable to recruit any participants to the team. The ‘traditional’ component of the unit’s activities – writing status articles – yielded further positive results.

The Analytical Unit began to receive the first results of its research, but it later turned out that they contained many errors. As a result, they had to be redone.

The Scientific Unit launched a series of projects called ‘Star Hunters,’ which aim to attract a large number of people to astronomy by conducting simple scientific research. To this end, the search for new variable stars and basic calculations regarding them were chosen. Thanks to the simplicity of the project and the relative ease of scaling it, it was possible to immediately attract a large number of participants and successfully complete the first iteration.

Not completed

The Educational Unit was still unable to record videos for the Variable Stars Lectures course within a reasonable time frame, despite a significant increase in new participants. The pace of work remained the same as before – 1 video per 1-1.5 months. At least the quality of the videos themselves improved; from now on, they were no longer ‘dry’ collages, but became much more dynamic.

Numerous problems arose in the activities of other units, although most of them were minor and we at least had the resources to solve them. However, they still required a significant amount of time to resolve, so the overall efficiency was far from what was expected. The biggest challenge was the sharp increase in the amount of information coming to the team's management: results, problems, events, transfer of information from one unit to another, etc. This was expected, and we began to prepare as soon as the scale of the growth became clear, but we still underestimated this challenge. As a result, communication within the team deteriorated significantly, and other components began to decline as well.

Conclusions

Within January-March 2025, the team successfully transitioned to a new structure, created units and two new departments, improved training for new employees, and stabilised key areas of work. This made it possible to streamline growth, strengthen communication processes, and launch new projects. Internal problems began to be solved much more effectively, in particular thanks to the renewal of the team, which now includes many motivated and interested participants with new and progressive ideas.