I think this list could be improved. If you look at the current form, you'll often see people submitting the same CFP in 5 or 6 categories because they aren't sure where it best fits. Also, since potential users have to come to the site to find CFPs, multiplying your categories improves your odds of getting eyeballs on your cFP

Great point, Zach. This type of controlled disciplinary description relates some work that Patrick Murray-John (http://www.patrickgmj.net/blog) has been doing. His ontology is likely too complex, but I agree that it's worth reconsidering this list.

I think actually it is worth expanding the list, I am thinking folksonomy as a classification method not taxonomy. So each CFP can have 5 (?) tags associated with it along with one category. I say 5 to limit so people don't just check all of them, but the five most important. And then by category I think of things that are mutually exclusive, like national conference, regional conference, journal/book, and grad conference.

I generally like the folksonomy method, too, with categories such as regional, national, etc. The Penn CFP list seems like an artifact of another era and a pretty discipline-specific depiction of the field. Note, for example, that film and television are listed as a single discipline.

Another vote of the folksonomy method plus another suggestion: it would be great if users could browse (and submitters could tag) CFPs by location so that people can essentially ask at any given time "What academic stuff is going on within a 100-mile radius of me?" I can't tell you how many conferences I've missed that were taking place more or less in my own backyard that I wished I would have either submitted to or simply attended. This strikes me as an especially important feature for graduate students who may not be able to afford to travel, or who, when they know they're going to be home for the holidays or over the summer or something, could find conferences in their area.

One issue with the way these CFP lists are organized that I have run into is the tyranny of the notion of "CFP." I chair a film festival that I advertise through UPenn and H-NET and there is never an honest option for advertising a call for film and media submissions. As I write this I am also realizing there's no way for creative projects like literary journals to advertise their need (I ran into this when I edited a literary journal - no reliable place to advertise).

I would like to see an expansion of what the CFP actually is and make this a one stop shop for all kinds of announcements for academic participation.

I agree that folksonomy is absolutely the right way for this to take place. With an RSS feed for each tag, people can mix and match to get the CFPs that they need.

And we can certainly transmogrify CFP into Tanner's "call for participation."

I also vote for folksonomy.

Another vote for folksonomy, especially if one could combine multiple tags like Brian suggests. I'm thinking this would be especially useful for people who work in more than one field. One of the most irritating things about the current CFP site is seeing the same CFPs in different categories, but still having to visit each category to make sure one hasn't missed the non-redundant entries. But I think tagging would also help deduplicate the CFPs -- so that if a given CFP is tagged, say, 19th century and British and Science, someone creating a combined feed for "Science" and "19th Century" won't see it twice. (Assuming we end up with something along the lines of Delicious's RSS feeds, which let you subscribe to combinations of tags.)

May be a bit late, but the more general "call for participants" works for me as well.