Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and how it’s helping us shape the PASS Data Community Summit session program

June 07, 2022

The Events Team at Redgate are passionate about creating a more inclusive and diverse PASS Data Community Summit. In March, we formed a dedicated team of people to focus on the future of DE&I at PASS Data Community Summit. The team’s purpose is to brainstorm and work on strategies to encourage a more diverse speaker pool, as well as look at how to make the event more inclusive and accessible overall. Our objective is that this will improve year on year.

We recently started to expand the team, to include people from outside Redgate who we believe will bring valuable insights and make the future of DE&I at Summit stronger. As our plans develop and are solidified, we’ll be sharing them with the community – and we expect you to hold us accountable.

Because transparency is important to us, we’d like to clarify our approach and commitment to diversity among Summit speakers.

In 2021, we asked speakers to share their pronouns with us and provide their ethnicity, gender and any disability information. While this was optional, we felt it was a step in the right direction as it allowed us to gather at least some information and have a benchmark to continually improve upon. By tracking the diversity of our sessions and speakers, we hope to offer a wide variety of content, presented by a diverse group of speakers.

For PASS Data Community Summit 2022, we’re committed to improving the diversity representation. Our goal is to welcome and encourage more people from under-represented groups to be involved in the conference as speakers, volunteers, attendees, sponsors and organizers.

Six of the 14 community pre-conference speakers were invited by the Summit Program team to present a session, primarily because these speakers had been requested by the community in our 2022 insights survey. The rest of the pre-con speakers were selected blind from the Call for Speakers by our volunteer Program Committee.

While we understand our current pre-con speaker line-up lacks some diversity, this is only a small portion of the overall program. The full list of pre-cons, which will feature partner/sponsor speakers and the full conference speaker line-up has not yet been finalized. Last year’s online event was the most diverse Summit, and this year we’re expecting to have even more representation overall.

Redgate prides itself on its collaborative culture, and your feedback on this subject is valuable and important to us. As a result of the feedback we’ve received so far this year, we already have plans to evolve the process for future pre-con selection.

We encourage you to get in touch with any suggestions to help us improve our approach to diversity at Summit. The best way is to email us at info@passsummit.com.

We’d like to assure you that we’re committed to creating a Summit for everyone. Our intentions are positive and we’re excited to take things into the future.