> Speaker Selection Driven by Influence: Many rosters feature the same familiar faces year after year. This isn't exactly unique to Go. I used to attend a big

> Speaker Selection Driven by Influence: Many rosters feature the same familiar faces year after year. This isn't exactly unique to Go. I used to attend a big Java conference once per year and some of the main speakers would be there year after year. And to be honest, I didn't think they were very good speakers in that most of what they peddled was opinion, flavor-of-the-year style talks and advice that lacked specificity and often wasn't actionable. Some of the bigger names would routinely present pseudo-research fooling gullible developers to believe in things that were not true. But the conference was well-attended. The thing is: conferences are expensive to organize and are financially risky. You need to attract an audience. The easiest way to do this is to have a roster of well known names. If none of the speakers are familiar to most of the audience, it will be harder to sell tickets. If you want to change this there is one thing you can do: give talks yourself or recruit someone with something interesting to say and get them to give a talk. Complaining about conferences being conferences doesn't help. You are just stating the obvious.