Diversity, equity and inclusion activities in database conferences: A 2024 report

The database community's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative began in 2020 as the Diversity/ Inclusion initiative [1]. This report highlights our activities from 2024. Our goal as a community is to make all DB conference attendees feel included, regardless of their scientific views or personal backgrounds. As a leadership team, the DEI group supports DEI chairs across conferences, preserves institutional memory of DEI efforts, shapes a shared vision, and fosters collaboration to advance inclusion. These efforts are carried out by core members (Figure 1) and liaisons from each conference's executive committee (Figure 2). The initiative was relaunched in January 2024 with a new structure based on five key actions: COORDINATE, to support collaboration between core members, liaisons, and DEI chairs; SCOUT, to gather best DEI practices from other communities; ETHICS, to create and promote ethical guidelines for writing and reviewing; MEDIA, to collect and share digital content from DEI@DB events [4]; and DIVERSIFY, to analyze data on diversity, accessibility, and the adoption of DEI principles in research and academia. DBCARES1 is now officially part of the DEI initiative. The mission of DBCARES is to create an inclusive and diverse Database community with zero tolerance for abuse, discrimination, or harassment. As part of this integration, we unified the Code of Ethics and introduced clear guidelines for DB conference organizers. Several conferences-including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and EDBT-continued using CLOSET [2] to ensure fair and transparent reviewer assignments.