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 The information from these questions would also not be published.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
I want to highlight what I believe is the most important part of Gareth's email:
On 08/15/2014 08:40 AM, Gareth J. Greenaway wrote:
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.
I believe that gender (and diversity in general) in our industry is an issue we all are trying to work on. And anytime you have a problem, the way to start tackling it is by quantifying that problem, and you do that with data.
If we're getting 50% submissions from women and only 5% of talks are from women, that's a different problem than if 5% of submissions are from women and 5% of the talks are from women. (I'm making up numbers here, ftr).
SCALE has a long, long history of promoting diversity. For many years we hosted Women in Open Source mini-conference. It helped in many ways, evidenced by the fact you see a larger percentage of women at SCALE - even now that WOIS is gone - than at most other technical conferences (by my personal observation).
I would like us to gather this optional data and publish the statistics. I hope that this will encourage others to do so as well. Doing that will shed light on the problems we have and the problems we don't have, and enable all of us to work together.
I discussed this with Gareth - and I suggested making sure staff couldn't see gender or age before all acceptances were chosen - which he ran with. We both believe this is an important issue to start addressing in new ways. The reason we discussed this, is because we want to do this in a way that makes everyone feel safe from discrimination.
So if you have concerns or ideas to improve this, we want to hear it. Further, if you think this is a good idea, *please* speak up. Not everyone agrees this is a good idea, and support from our female population (and our young population) will be useful in showing we're on the right path.
Thanks!
scale-planning@lists.linuxfests.org
-
Gareth J. Greenaway -
Phil Dibowitz