EARTH Community Forum Administrator

Position Overview

EARTH is developing a community-forward online platform to serve as the primary digital entry point for its public, industry-facing, and access-controlled stakeholder engagement. The EARTH Community Forum is envisioned as more than a document repository. It will combine public information, member-restricted resources, curated source materials, discussion spaces, announcements, event follow-up, and user support into a managed digital environment for industry members, academic partners, students, researchers, advisory groups, and approved external stakeholders.

The platform is intended to support reliable access control, organized content stewardship, member onboarding, and ongoing interaction across EARTH’s research, workforce development, and technology translation activities. To address this challenge, a new NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC):
Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH) is creating a “sustainable refrigerant lifecycle” to address technical, environmental, and societal challenges facing the HVACR industry. EARTH is a multi‑institution, multi‑disciplinary team from the University of Kansas, University of Notre Dame, University of Hawai’i, University of Maryland, University of South Dakota, and Lehigh University.

This is a 100%, twelve‑month, benefits‑eligible, regular appointment that reports directly to the ERC EARTH Administrative Director. Currently, the position is designated as on‑campus. Alternative and flexible work schedules will be evaluated as per ERC EARTH policy and center guidelines. This position should be classified as a mid‑level professional staff role requiring operational platform experience, judgment, and independent execution. The EARTH Community Forum Administrator is responsible for administering and maintaining EARTH’s external community platform and associated website content operations.

The role requires independent judgment, access‑control discipline, stakeholder‑facing communication, platform administration experience, content workflow management, and the ability to coordinate across academic, industry, public, and administrative functions. The position is operationally autonomous within defined policy boundaries and supports the growth of the platform into a broader community engagement asset.

• Administer the community forum platform, including user accounts, groups, permissions, discussion categories, content areas, notification settings, and platform configuration within delegated authority.
• Maintain public, member‑restricted, and limited‑access areas consistent with approved access policies, membership categories, and stakeholder needs.
• Configure and maintain discussion spaces, resource libraries, announcement areas, member‑facing pages, working group spaces, and other approved platform areas.
• Coordinate with platform vendors, university information technology personnel, communications staff, and EARTH leadership to resolve operational issues and support platform enhancements.
• Maintain platform housekeeping practices, including archiving obsolete content, reviewing navigation structures, managing outdated pages or categories, and escalating issues requiring policy or leadership review.
• Support implementation of platform features such as member profiles, announcements, discussion boards, event follow‑up spaces, curated content collections, and stakeholder resource areas.
• Maintain administrative documentation sufficient to support continuity of platform operations.

• Support and maintain approved EARTH website content as part of the broader community forum effort, including public pages, member‑facing resources, announcements, events, staff information, industry‑facing information, and other approved web content.
• Coordinate content intake, review, approval‑routing, posting, revision, and retirement workflows for website and forum materials.
• Work with EARTH staff and subject matter experts to translate approved source materials into organized, accessible, and user‑friendly website or forum content.
• Maintain basic content…