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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Database Conferences@

2020 SIGMOD/pVLDB initiative – 2024 - beyond

https://dbdni.github.io

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Why a DEI initiative?

  • To come together as a community around an important topic
    • Make diversity, equity and inclusion a first-class citizen in our conferences
  • To guide our community to adopt a more inclusive mindset toward different individuals
    • Help our community members voice their concerns, needs, ideas
    • Establish a feedback loop to understand our standing concerning all underrepresented groups better
  • To have a concerted effort that goes beyond a single conference

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DEI initiative today

  • Data management community is committed to the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion in all aspects of our professional activities
  • Celebrate the diversity in our community
    • age, gender identity, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, country of origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, education, and work experience
    • Welcome people and opinions of all political persuasions iff they abide by the ACM policy against harassment
  • Coordinate DEI efforts across the data management community with DEI chairs
    • 11 conferences: SIGMOD, VLDB, ADBIS, WISE, DASFAA, MEDES, SoCC, EDBT/ICDT, CIDR, MDM and ICDE, DEBS
    • Developing activities, interventions, survey design, and assessing the effectiveness of different activities

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How does it work?

1. Webpage: https://dbdni.github.io/

2. Mailing list: dbdni2021@googlegroups.com

3. Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GF8K_op_6RqqT1ewtpWoyc8Mv-4joOKZ?usp=drive_link

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4. Meetings: about 4 a year: All meeting minutes are recorded on our drive.

5. Reports: 2021, 2022, 2023 SIGMOD Record

6. DBCares handles cases of harassment

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Organisation and missions

Core members

Liaisons

Conference organisers –

DEI Chairs

  • Support: financial planning of DEI activities at conferences
  • Include
  • Inform
  • Organise
  • Reach out
  • Coordinate: coordinating among
  • core members, liaisons & DEI chairs
  • Scout: collating DEI efforts from other
  • communities
  • Ethics: establishing and promoting ethics guidelines for paper writing & paper reviewing
  • Media: reserving and disseminating the digital media produced by DEI@DB events
  • Diversify: understand community diversity through pre & post conference data collection
  • Individual executive bodies
  • TCDE,VLDB, EDBT, PODS-ICDT, SIGMOD

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2023 actions

  • DBCARES1 now officially part of the DEI initiative
  • We consolidated our Code of Ethics and created guidelines for DB conference organisers
  • Some of our venues continued to use CLOSET2 towards fairer reviewer assignments
  • Several of our actions have become mainstream and will no longer be managed by the DEI initiative
  • Tools
    • CLOSET: A comprehensive tool for the detection and management of conflict of interest (COI) in peer-reviewed venues
    • GAP - Gender Analysis for Publications: A tool to analyse the gender distribution in scientific publications

1 https://sigmod.org/sigmod-pol

2 Sourav S. Bhowmick. CLOSET: data-driven COI detection and management in peer-review venues. Commun. ACM, 66(7):70–71, 20

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Core members

Coordinate

Genoveva

Ethics

Jesús

Scout

Madhulika

Scout

Nelly

Media

Panos

Media

Sana

Diversify

Roee

Diversify

Soror

Former core

members

Alexandra

Victor

Fatma

Wang-Chiew

Sujaya

Avrilia

Sourav

Juliana

Sihem

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Liaisons

Meihui

Angela

TCDE

VLDB Endowment

EDBT Endowment

Genoveva

PODS & ICDT

Juno

SIGMOD executive committee

Divy

ADBIS steering committee

Jérôme

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