CodeMash 2018 CFP Wrap-Up

So, after a crazy month-and-a-half, we come to the end of the CodeMash CFP process. Our CFP opened on 8/15, closed on 8/31, and today the speakers were announced. Most may not believe us, but the selection process seems to get harder each year… meaning, for a given track with 13 slots you may have 20-30 high-quality talks… each of which should be included. When you look at the 14th item on that list… it wasn’t that it was really any worse than #13, or that #13 was that much better… It often comes down to the breadth of topics to be covered within a track, the opinion of the committee as to which topics are important to cover, etc. We are quite proud of the session line-up this year. The topics are great, the selection of talks we had to choose from, etc. I think (content-wise) it is going to be one of the best conferences yet.

Each year we try to share some of the data behind the process. As a community-run/community-focused conference we try to be as transparent with everyone as possible. This year, we collected more data than in the past and we also went back into the archives to review all of the data from every CodeMash to date so we could ascertain whether we were trending in the way we wanted to. I think the numbers below speak for themselves. We can always do better, and we aim to do better each year.

Session Submissions: 1,117 (down ~200 from last year)

Available session slots: 238 (21% acceptance rate)

Review Committee Members: 13

Average Reviews/Member: 172 (each session is reviewed by at least two people)

Individual Potential Speakers: 512

Selected Speakers: 189 (36%)

Gender Acceptance Rate: Male 151, Female 38 (20%)

Gender Submission Rate: Male 422, Female 90 (17.5%)

Returning Speakers: 91 (48%)

New (to CodeMash) Speakers: 98 (51.8%)

Total (all time – 12 years) CodeMash Speakers: 834

Average Years each Speaker has Spoken: 1.78

One metric we have been asked about quite a bit over the past few years is the % of female speakers. While we never want to accept a speaker simply because of his/her gender, we do want to ensure we are both inviting to all speakers and that all who apply are equally considered. This chart shows significant progress over the past four years.

As a note: We don’t ask for gender as a data point during the session submission process. We want to make it clear that gender isn’t a data point in the selection process. The data referenced in this post is based on the submissions, so we had to guess a speaker’s gender based on name, online avatars, etc. It isn’t a perfect system, but the hard numbers/scientific accuracy aren’t what is important. The trend in those numbers is what is important. We do gather gender data (voluntarily) when a speaker confirms their selection, and registers to be a speaker at CodeMash. If you have questions, or comments, please reach out to us. We are always open to finding better ways to do things.

This last chart is more just general interest… it shows the total number of speakers for each year of the conference. You will notice a steady growth as the conference went from being relatively small in its first few years to significantly larger today. We did have slightly fewer speakers this year than last – mostly due to some scheduling adjustments which reduced our total session count a little.