120225meetingminutes

12-02-2025 Team:Content Meeting

Minutes taken by Dany

In attendance

Katzazi, Nicolas, Jos, Kirils Erik, Dany, Mara

Link to meeting

https://meet.hack42.nl/teamcontent

Link to pad 22-01-2025

https://pad.ifcat.org/9R_PKQZnSK68zIrHZGs4UA?edit#

Other relevant links

CFP version 1.0: https://pad.ifcat.org/wf2Vhq-1R-OXCO4s0REvWw?edit Speaker wishlist: https://pad.ifcat.org/JwvzKdvfSvKG_GVnKsTsmQ?edit

Notes from last meeting

See last meetings pad: https://pad.ifcat.org/9R_PKQZnSK68zIrHZGs4UA?edit#

Agenda Items

• Incoming mails
  • Request from Team:Entertainment for adding entertainment option to the CFP (Done, might need some tweaking in session types)
  • Feedback on speakerdesk things at MCH
  • Request from Nancy to reach out to potential speaker
  • Application for speaker desk role
  • Idea for speaker from Robert/Number3
  • Scholarship sponsoring for workshop
• Update speakers FAQ on the website
• Who/how to handle incomming requests can keep track? Using Zammad (need to get an instance from Sysadmin?
• Did we already start sending mails actively inviting speakers?
• Promoting diversity in speaker line-up: how to accomplish? Ideas from the signalchat:
  • Ask for gender (and other diversity traits) in the CFP
  • Actively promote the event and the CFP at places where we might find diverse speakers
• Set up Teams in Pretalx, who has rights?
• Demo from Erik's plugin for grouping similar talks together

Meeting Notes

• Erik has created a plugin that uses an llm to group together similar talks or similar subjects and list them togehter in pretalx. It's not super fast but this isn't much of an issue as we don't need to run this often. Work in progress
• Handling emails: we need a zammad instance from sysadmin for ticketing and stuff
• Kirils should have the correct rights to create teams and add people in Pretalx
• Diversity of speakers:
  • Question raised by Mara: how do we promote speaker diversity in the past, was that succesful, what are our plans for this year.
  • Input: having a more diverse content team would likely help, a blind review will also help
  • We didn't collect data on gender etc, but we tried to pick diverse speakers when similar topics were submitted
  • We actively asked diverse people to submit to cfp
  • Proposal: ask people to volunteer information about their gender or minority (not required information in CFP form)
  • Not everyone will be comfortable giving such information. We should ask for diverse topics that would attract more diverse people.
  • Most important thing is that the content is appealing, what is fair to reject in i.e. male vs female speaker
  • MCH was 19% female speaker (~~estimated~~ data by Mara)
    

Note from Dany: the following three paragraphs of minutes (up untill the To Do's Here header) were not taken by me, but added to the minutes pad sometime between the conclusion of the meeting on 12-02-2025 at 20:00 and 19-02-2025 at 20:00.

Mara came into the room without being greeted by any of the six team members for half an hour. Then Mara asked in the chat about a discussion on diversity tools, and then Mara was introduced as “the difficult theme.” Mara mentioned the lack of support and asked if this is a closed or an open team.

Mara spoke about possible steps to have a diverse CFP process: having a diverse team, setting a clear objective, collecting data—all were rejected by the team.

Until then, Mara had been a member (signed up on the mailing list) since December but had not received any emails or information on the process, and not days later after the meeting. Mara had asked several times for help and support for ideas on what tools on diversity the team is using in Signal chat, with no answer. Additionally, asking for help on diversity data modeling was not supported.

To do's here

• Request Zammad (Nicolas)
• Set up email template (Nicolas)
• Ask WICCON presenters to submit for WHY (Dany)
• Answer mail on scholarship (Kirils)

Things to report in Orga meet

• CFP has been extended with Entertainment option
• How to promote the event for more diversity in visitors and speakers? Can Team:Info help in promo?

Next Meeting

• 26-02-2025