The SCaLE Program Committee is ~40 volunteer members who come together to review proposals and create the program you ultimately see at SCaLE. We wanted to share some behind the scenes details about what the committee does and give you some insight into this, sometimes messy, process.

Some committee members lead specific tracks or have other significant roles in planning the conference. For others this is their only volunteer involvement with the conference. Members typically volunteer for 2-5 tracks and are expected to vote on every submission for those tracks. 

If you have not submitted yet, the SCaLE 24x Call for Presentations is open through November 1, 2026. This post is about what happens next.

The pool is big

For SCaLE 23x we received ~650 proposals across all tracks and co-located events.

That number is the single best argument for clarity in your abstract. A reviewer working through a hundred proposals cannot advocate for a talk they cannot quickly understand. While we sometimes reach out to you for clarification if an idea seems promising, we can’t do that for every case. If your first few sentences do not generate interest, the reviewer is unlikely to spend a lot of time on the rest of the proposal.

Submissions are also not spread evenly. Some tracks draw four or five times as many proposals as others. However, don’t take the track size as odds you can game. Smaller tracks generally have fewer slots to fill, so a thin track is not automatically an easy one. Also, we often move talks between tracks during consideration so the one you submitted to may not be the one it is ultimately stacked up against.

Review

Program Committee members often work through hundreds of proposals in their selected tracks to ensure we have a good number of votes on each proposal to make meaningful decisions. They will score each one and leave notes where further discussion is needed.

Once voting has settled this leaves each track with a stack rank of proposals, but that is only the starting point. Initially this yields is 3 rough buckets:

  1. Talks consistently voted highly we’re likely to want.
  2. Talks with a middling score.
  3. Talks consistently with very low scores.

 

However, nobody trusts stack ranks, us included. We need to check those rough buckets for ways that scores can be misleading. Great proposals typically score high consistently. Middle scores might be due to wide variation in scores which could signal where reviewers have a different understanding of the talk or different ideas about what we’re looking for this year. Very low scores might also be due to a misunderstanding or some sort of submission issue. We may need a followup discussion to see if a clarification will move the score up or down. 

Reviewers are also told to pay close attention to anything in the Message to Reviewers field. If you have a constraint, a question, or context that does not belong in the public abstract, that is where it goes.

Building the tracks

Once we’re satisfied with the voting, track leads take the reviewed pool and assemble a proposed schedule for their track. We start from the highest scored proposals, but this is where a lot of decisions get made that have nothing to do with any individual proposal's quality. 

Selections are constrained not only by the number of high quality talks we receive but also by the physical rooms and days we have to allocate for the tracks.

Leads are trying to build a track that works as a whole: coverage across subtopics, a mix of beginner and advanced material, no three talks that are all secretly the same talk.

Leads are also balancing who is on stage. We check speaker employers during selection. We are not going to schedule four consecutive hours of speakers from the same company, so there is a practical ceiling on how many talks from any one organization make the program. If several of your colleagues are submitting, coordinating with them or spreading across tracks will serve you better than all submitting the same thing.

Trading between tracks

Because topics overlap heavily, track leads swap talks. For example, a highly scored session on running Kubernetes at scale might sit comfortably in Cloud Native or Systems & Infrastructure. The leads will negotiate over it - one needs more coverage in an area, another has too many proposals in the same niche.

The same negotiation happens with speakers who submitted to multiple tracks. Two leads may both want you, and there is a deduplication step near the end where they work it out. Our default preference is one talk per speaker, so that you can put all your energy into making it good, but exceptions happen.

Final selection

This is the last chance for reviewers to advocate for a talk. If someone reads your abstract and thinks "I want to see this at SCaLE," they can argue for it with the rest of the committee. 

The committee meets to resolve any final issues, review the proposed schedules and finalize the program before anyone is notified. The proposed schedule has to fit into the rooms and scheduling constraints of the venue and the overall conference. There are almost always talks we would like to accept that just don’t fit.

Our goal is to get acceptance notifications out by December 1, 2026 so you can make plans before the holidays and 2027 budgets start. However, sometimes people cannot accept or their employer withdraws permission or travel budget. In that case we may send a late acceptance to one of those talks that didn’t quite fit the schedule before. For that reason we typically send rejections a bit later.

Regardless, everyone who submits gets an answer eventually, including a clear no. We started doing that after hearing from people that silence was worse than rejection. If you do not hear from us when you expect to, email cfp@socallinuxexpo.org and ask. We would rather field the question than leave you guessing. Also, please check your spam folders and add cfp@socallinuxexpo.org to your contacts. We’ve had people miss their acceptance email before.

If you are not selected

It very often is not a judgment on the quality of your proposal.

Programs are finite. A track with 60 submissions might have room for a handful of talks. Balance constraints, employer diversity, speaker diversity, topic overlap, and scheduling all cut proposals that were perfectly good. Every year we turn down talks we genuinely wanted.

If it helps: submit again. Several of our regular speakers were rejected before they were accepted.

If you are accepted

We will email you asking to confirm, and we do need a reply. Acceptance is a two-way handshake, not an announcement.

In that reply we will ask about scheduling constraints, A/V needs beyond a standard projector and microphone, and any accommodations you need just in case you forgot to put them in the Message to Reviewers. We’ll do our best to shuffle the schedule if we have to but tell us early if there are days you cannot present.

A few things worth knowing:

  • Speakers attend free. We register you automatically using your submission. Your badge is waiting at speaker check-in, and there is no separate registration step.
  • List your co-presenters. If someone is presenting with you and is not listed as a speaker on the submission, they will not get registered.
  • We accept a speaker and talk together. Swapping in a different presenter later requires committee approval and is not guaranteed, so please know who is giving the talk before you submit.
  • We will help you promote your talk. You will get graphics for your session and a discount code you can share with your community.
  • Talk sessions are recorded and posted to our YouTube channel. Workshops are not recorded.

 

You can keep editing your abstract and bio after acceptance. We’ll let you know the deadline when the program goes to print. Once your talk is on the public schedule, that text is doing a different job - it is now convincing attendees to pick your room over the others running at the same time. It is worth another pass.

 

The SCaLE 24x CFP closes November 1, 2026. The conference runs April 1-4, 2027 at the Pasadena Convention Center.