DEI Organizing Collective

Queryable Equity Database

The goal of this team is to establish a database of demographic and climate information for the DPP that can be used to evaluate and monitor equity gaps in the community. We require the database to be searchable by members of DPP committees, such as the Executive Committee as well as program and awards committees etc., such that these committees can use the database as a tool to evaluate historic and current equity in representation across the community in general and for specific nominee pools for honors and awards. Central to establishing this tool is the need for strict protection of community members’ private information, so as to ideally prevent the risk of harm to individuals due to volunteering potentially sensitive information. This task will be complete when we have identified the database requirements and a suitable entity to build and curate the database, and then presented that information to the DPP ExComm for further action.

The members of this team will neither handle member private information nor actually create the database.

What will this database do and not do?

Will do: A committee can submit the names of winner pool and look at dis-aggregated demographics of the entire pool.


Example: The DPP Program committee wants to track demographic changes of invited talk winners in a given category. They can submit the pool of names of invited talk winners for each year, and then get the demographic statistics for that year. If they do this going back several years, then can look for trends in how the demographics are changing.

Won't do: A committee cannot look up all the members of a given demographic or the demographics of a specific person. That would violate member privacy.

Example: An awards committee wants to increase the committee diversity next year, so the Chair wants to look up the demographics of all the suggested new committee members. If the Chair was able to do that, they may discover that one of the suggested members is bisexual, even if that person isn't out to the community. To prevent this, the QED will have safeguards in place so that no-one can submit a query with few enough names that private information about any member can be linked to that person.

To-do list: (Updated as we complete tasks)

  1. Plan out the tasks that this effort needs to undertake
    1. Set a timeline and meeting schedule or contact protocol
    2. Distribute responsibility for each of the tasks.
  2. Review Background on Data Curation Practices and Institutional Repositories
    1. Establish requirements for creating a database while protecting member privacy
  3. Identify needs of database storage queries, and privacy
    1. What information should we collect?
    2. How will information be tied to member identities?
    3. What types of queries do we need to database to handle?
    4. What limits are necessary to keep queries from accidentally divulging member identities in cases of small demographic statistics?
  4. Identify entities to curate and be a repository for QED
  5. Convey information on suitable entities to the DPP Executive Committee

Link to sign up coming soon...



Home             EBP Toolkit             QED              Diamond Model              HRC & BIP