[Scale-planning] SCALE 13x Call for Papers Questions

[Gareth J. Greenaway]

Hey everyone,

I hope this email finds everyone doing well.  The scale-planning list
unfortunately doesn't see too much traffic but our goal is to change
that as much as possible and to ensure that the planning of SCALE is
more transparent, open and allow more people to participate.

One of our goals with SCALE has always been to ensure that our speaker
pool as well as our attendee audience is an diverse as possible.  Along
those lines, the SCALE 13x Call for Papers will be launching soon and
we're excited to see the submissions flood in.  We are considering a
change to the CFP this year, not the process but more specifically
around the type of questions that we ask to better gauge how we as an
organization are doing on recruiting speakers.

The proposal for SCALE 13x is to include two *optional* questions for
potential speakers. 

The first would be age, the goal here obviously would be to see
statistical information about the age of the speakers and what topics
they're submitting talks on.  Since we've introduced the TNG track at
SCALE, we've had a good number of talks from the youth in the free &
open source community.  It will be especially interesting to see that
continue in the future and how many of those speakers submit talks into
the other SCALE tracks.

The second additional question would be gender.  In the past, SCALE has
received feedback that gender diversity is an issue to be addressed. 
Therefore we are considering asking potential speakers to answer the
*optional* question to indicate their gender, to allow us to better
gauge the number of speaker submissions that we receive from both men &
women.  This information will be used purely for statistical analysis
and will not be used as the basis of whether a speaker is accepted or not.

Once again both of these questions would *optional* questions and will
include a request stating that the speaker has Decline to Answer the
question.  During the CFP review process the answers to both of these
questions would be hidden from the reviewer and would only be available
after a talk has been accepted and published.  The information from
these questions would also not be published.

Thanks everyone for your time and I welcome any & all feedback.  If
anyone is not comfortable providing feedback to the list at large then
feel free to respond to me privately.

Thanks!
Gareth