---
layout: post
title: 'CFP By The Numbers'
status: publish
type: post
published: true
categories: news
tags: '2018'
---

The 2018 SeaGL Call For Proposals (aka CFP) has closed and our team of reviewers is hard at work reading all of the excellent proposals we received. How did the CFP go this year? Here are some numbers for you…

## 166

The number of proposals we received. This broke our 2017 record of 153 proposals!

## 24%

The percentage of proposals that are for the shorter 20 minute time slot. In 2017, 23% of the proposals were for this length of talk, so this holds steady in popularity.

## 10

The number of proposals that are from who self-identify as first-time speakers. This is the first year we've tracked this statistic, and we're hoping to increase this number in future years. One of SeaGL's missions is to help more people get involved with Free Software and open source, so helping new people share their FOSS stories is very important to us.

## 32

The number of talks in the track with the most proposals, _Systems, sysadmin, ops, DevOps_. The breakdown of all of the proposals by track/topic:

* Systems, sysadmin, ops, DevOps: 32
* People: 30
* Programming: 29
* Something different: 21
* Security, Information Security: 19
* Education: 9
* Hardware, IoT: 8
* Data, AI, ML: 6
* Design, UX, UI, Accessibility: 5
* Documentation: 4
* Legal, Licensing: 2

The final schedule of the conference is _very_ unlikely to reflect these numbers. Our aim is to provide value to the SeaGL audience. As the audience is diverse, so much be the schedule. We'll aim to balance things as much as possible so there's something good in there for everyone.

And speaking of diversity…

## 35%

The percentage of proposals that were submitted by people who self-identify as a member of a group under-represented in technology.

This is the first year we've tracked this statistic as well, and as with the first-time speaker stat, we also hope to increase this percentage in future years. We want our speaker line-up to look like the people who love Free Software and open source (read: every colour, gender, ability), but that's only possible if our proposals come from a rich diversity of individuals. Maybe in 2019 we can reach 40%? Or even higher? That would be excellent.

## What's next?

Like I mentioned earlier, our reviewers are diving into their task right now. They should be done reviewing near the end of the month, then we'll have a call to discuss the proposals. After that, it's up to the program committee chair (me) to build the schedule.

We promised to let all proposers know the status of their proposals no later than September 3rd. So far we're on track to do that. We won't have information sooner than that, in any case, so please hang tight.

In the meantime, we plan to share the proposal review criteria and instructions that we gave our reviewers. Stay tuned for that blog post in the next week.
