10 ms·

The British Ruby Conference has been cancelled

57 points by andrewnez 14y ago

matthewrudy 14y ago
Can anyone explain what happened?
- andrewnez 14y ago
  It seemed because of complaints regarding race/gender diversity of speakers on twitter. I think it started with this tweet: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264 https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264
  - veeti 14y ago
    Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup? He's making this up in his own mind. Who's the real discriminator here?
    - blacktulip 14y ago
      Their sponsor gave up on those twitter trolling
    - masklinn 14y ago
      > Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup? According to https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 sponsors pulled out. It's not mentioned at all in TFAA though, so I'd don't know if the explanation's legit (and why they went with a non-explanation instead if it is)
  - hmc 14y ago
    It only seems to be white males that are complaining.
    - olgeni 14y ago
      They probably are the most brainwashed and obsessed with the issue, and possibly believe they are scoring points in some imaginary and self-deprecating game. Sane people of different hues are probably doing something more interesting - reading Ruby books, writing Ruby code, or just having a life.
      - fearoffish 14y ago
        I'm not sure that's the attitude that helps either side in this kind of situation. I call your troll-iness.
        olgeni 14y ago
        Indeed, that was a bit on the trollish side. I'd better go back to coding something myself.
      - hmc 14y ago
        I would say more misguided than brainwashed, someone needs to tell these guys inclusivity is not the same as positive discrimination.
- tomstuart 14y ago
  A Twitter search for “britruby” should clear it up. Short version: they’d invited all white male speakers; people complained about it on Twitter; the organisers got disheartened and called the whole thing off. ETA: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264 https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264, https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360 https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360
  - matthewrudy 14y ago
    I'm surprised there was nothing on LRUG. Seems like a rush decision to cancel.
    - tomstuart 14y ago
      It only just happened. From the language and timing it looks like a snap emotional decision rather than a rational one; I assume the organisers got blindsided by the negative feedback and didn’t want to deal with it any more. ETA: “@Rebeccask Due to sexist & racist remarks made on twitter last night got way out of hand. Sponsors pull out. No money no conf” (https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912)
      - mgkimsal 14y ago
        It's too bad that this 'no money no conf' meme continues to dominate. You can have something more than an 'unconf' or 'barcamp'-style event, even with no or minimal sponsors, especially with a team of organizers/planners to share any overflow expenses that do not get covered by ticket prices.
        adambyrtek 14y ago
        So you suggest that on top of volunteering time the organizers should also cover "overflow expenses" from their pockets? Sounds excessive to me.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
blacktulip 14y ago
I am a ticket holder. I can not understand even a little bit the reason why it get cancelled. If I get it right, the reason is there are not enough female speakers? Seriously, if that is not gender inequality then what is?
riazrizvi 14y ago
Awesome example of awful business writing.
typicalrunt 14y ago
Reading the twitter stream (https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264 https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264), I find it odd that one person comments that the lineup is "100% white guys", and then all of a sudden it's a foregone conclusion that the BritRuby organizers are sexist. Even @johnsusser is a bit much with his comment: @BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female? IMHO, I find that sentence insinuating that, unless you start with diversity as your goal, you are just racist/sexist/-ist. This is the wrong approach from the start; just perform a call for papers process and take the best ones. If one looks at the speaker list, they seem to be from non-3rd world countries. Where are the dirt poor people speaking at this conference? I'm going onto Twitter to state that BritRuby is class-ist. And while we're at it, I'm pretty sure (but I'm guessing here) that all of the speakers can speak. That's quite discriminatory to those people who cannot speak, but can code in Ruby. Should I continue or can we just get on with the conference and be inclusive, instead of this faux discrimination bullshit?
- thisduck 14y ago
  If you don't have diversity as one of your goals (either from the start or tacked on at the end) you are part of the system that perpetuates racism, whether you like it or not. 2010: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist." 2011: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist." 2012: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist." Yeah, okay.
  - danenania 14y ago
    Actually, selecting speakers without regard to gender or race and ending up with 100% white guys (which is easily possible, since they are very overrepresented in the field) isn't racist or sexist, whereas selecting people specifically based on these traits would be racist and sexist, by definition. I think diversity is a worthwhile goal for a conference, but we shouldn't throw around these labels so freely (and incorrectly).
hopeless 14y ago
I'm pretty furious about this. I was really forward to having a reasonably-accessable world-class ruby conference in UK. I'm really only care about whether the speakers are interesting and that I can learn from their talk. I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the quality of speakers.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Race and gender can be (generally are) used by potential attendees to determine what comfort level they'd have at an event like that. The more people you can get to your event, generally the better the outcome will be - increased connections, networking and exchange of ideas from a broader range of people. I made an earlier comment about my recent experiences organizing a conference, and linked to my blog which touched on this very reason.
  - hopeless 14y ago
    Thanks, I hadn't considered that, and it's a good point. Although perhaps I'm an oddity: I rarely see myself as among the speakers so I don't look at them as a guide. Also, I've been to "gender-equal" conferences where almost the only women there were speakers. So speakers != audience
    - mgkimsal 14y ago
      Speakers != audience all the time - the audience won't be an exact match for the speaker demographics. But having done this for a bit, I've had enough feedback that indicates that having a more balanced/diverse set of speakers is a signal to a wider audience that there will more likely be a wider range of attendees to socialize and network with. Again, yes, not 100% all the time. FWIW, at indieconf we had about 30% of the speakers were female. About half of the attendees were female as well. Interestingly 30% answered the 'gender' question as female - 30% answered 'male', 30% left blank - I'm assuming based on names given about half of the remaning were also female - that's where I'm getting the ~50% were female.
- rplnt 14y ago
blacktulip 14y ago
https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/270221926490857474 https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/270221926490857474 "#BritRuby’s decision to cancel was thought-out and based mainly on financial implications that arose from what happened on Twitter"
micmakarov 14y ago
They should have invited Matz
- blacktulip 14y ago
  They did, Matz has not replied yet https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/269853833503588352 https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/269853833503588352
betageek 14y ago
This is very disappointing, the community has moved from calling out concrete examples of sexism to dog piling on anything where a circumstantial case can be made. Not very MINSWAN* The only solution I can see is to make the process 100% transparent and show all invitations and refusals online - maybe even move to a voting system a la SXSW. *Matz (the inventor of Ruby) is nice so we are nice
mlvljr 14y ago
Will we finally see sponsors listening to conf attenders complaining that there are exactly zero hot women giving talks? ;)
instakill 14y ago
People will whine about anything, unfortunately they'll do so into the amplifier that is Twitter. On behalf of everyone that was going to go (myself excluded), thanks for nothing you whinging, impatient keyboard-slacktivists.
mgkimsal 14y ago
Having just finished a conference yesterday - http://indieconf.com http://indieconf.com - I feel like throwing in a few words on speaker selection. OK, maybe a whole bunch, as I blogged about this a couple weeks ago: http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-speakers/ http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-speak... For my perspective, the idea of only opening up a call for speakers and just 'picking the right ones' doesn't work very well. Or at least, I don't think it works very well for conferences just starting off which don't have a lot of reputation to fall back on. Borrowing some of this reputation by getting some 'superstar' speakers might help a bit, but if you do that before a CFS, you've already done some preselection. From year one, I had a call for speakers process open, but I also had some particular speakers I wanted to talk on specific topics. I had probably half the speakers/topics nominally on board (not officially at that point) during the first year CFS, and fleshed out the rest of the slots with submissions - some of which were really good angles I hadn't thought of. However, imo, the role of a conference organizer is largely curation of an experience, and you have to have an idea of what you want that experience to look like early on. And for me, gender is a factor - it's not a major one, but I made sure to encourage some females in my network to submit. At the same time, there were some submissions and applications from females that I didn't bring on board the conference this year, because they didn't quite fit the vibe I was shooting for. Anyhow, sorry to see they've cancelled this. I know all too well how hard it is to organize something, and to be discouraged enough to pull the plug like this was certainly not fun or easy for the organizers. I wish them luck in future projects like this. EDIT: Couple more thoughts - how you run the event the first year has an impact on how people view your event in subsequent years. I get props every year on the food, but mostly because I take the extra 10 minutes to organize vegan and gluten-free options, and I get people coming back partially based on the fact that I've done that (had people buy tickets and tell me that). Example: https://twitter.com/alanstevens/status/269856351214268416 https://twitter.com/alanstevens/status/269856351214268416
vidiviciveni 14y ago
"Diversity" has cancelled a conference where white guys try to improve the world we live in? You know who's responsible for this, right? "Diversity" == non-white
tinco 14y ago
Black people and women are so linguist. Not submitting talk proposals to Ruby conferences is just disrespectful. edit: Just found out raganwald submitted a talk proposal to BritRuby. Turns out my racist general remark was entirely misguided and black people might actually not be linguist at all. A shame his talk wasn't accepted. I'd like to hear more about method combinators :)
- petercooper 14y ago
  It's irrelevant anyway since BritRuby didn't get a chance to pick proposals and announce speakers. They were criticized on their invite list rather than their chosen proposals which were never made public :-(
  - tinco 14y ago
    Wow.. that's even more sad than I thought. btw, thanks for scrolling down to see my comment, it was lonely down here :D
    - petercooper 14y ago
      Haha, I did see it at the time, but on a revisit I noticed your update so I thought it was worth pointing out ;-)
peteforde 14y ago
I was the curator and co-organizer of RubyFringe and FutureRuby in Toronto. I'm really sorry to hear that folks organizing BRC felt so beat down by negativity that cancelation was the best option. Most people simply do not appreciate the hundreds of unpaid hours of work that are required to pull off a good event. Several aspects of this controversy don't sit well with me, however. First off, since when does the curation of a conference have to follow someone else's value system? It's very simple: the people that organize an event should work hard to put together the most interesting line-up they can. It's then up to the potential attendees to decide if the event is worth their time to attend. That's it; there are no more rules! If you want to solicit proposals for talks, go ahead. If you like some of them, give them a shot at speaking. If you decide that none of them match your curatorial agenda, then thank them warmly for their submission and move on. You aren't obligated to take proposals at all, and you're certainly not obligated to make your decision process transparent or part of some laborious community democracy. In fact, I would guess that one strongly opinionated curator will put together a far more coherent line-up than any popularity contest ever could. If you're looking for inspiration, consider asking attendees from previous years if they'd like to consider "leveling-up" to speaker. When I put together our speaker lists, it wasn't arbitrary and much like test driven development we didn't just start emailing random smart people. We started with strong themes for the entire event, ideals that could pull together folks and be both entertaining and challenging. Those themes directed our branding, our choice of talks and the after-hours entertainment, which in our world is just as vital to the conference experience as anything else. Not all meritocracy is bad. Conference curation is one such domain where winning has far more to do with subject diversity, pacing and the element of surprise than arbitrary quotas for gender, race, age or class ever could. I'd say that the best metaphor for future curators to use is building a deck of Magic the Gathering cards. You need the right balance of mana, summon and sorcery cards. There are five colors but to be effective you choose 1 or perhaps 2 at most. And most importantly, you design your deck around a theme which is based on a hypothesis for winning which you think brings something new to the table. Most of the strategy for winning at MtG happens before game play starts, and if everyone had a say in how you built your deck, it wouldn't be very fun to play with such an unnecessarily shitty deck. You could call it the "Stop Hitting Yourself!" deck. There's a difference between fighting for a developer community free of sexist bullshit, and pretending that a conference built on arbitrary values for diversity is automatically better than one where you nail a theme and everyone leaves happy. Those who disagree are likely to simply skip my conferences, and that's perfectly fine. Finally, we did both of those events with no sponsorships. We cost less than an O'Reilly-backed RailsConf event and we provided logo-free swag, great wifi, amazing food, three nights of entertainment with an open bar and we helped speakers with travel and lodging while still managing to break even. It's simply not true that you can't do a successful conference without sponsors. You just have to charge money to attend, and be prepared to help those who are having financial issues find ways to volunteer. http://www.rubyinside.com/rubyfringe-success-and-roundup-956.html http://www.rubyinside.com/rubyfringe-success-and-roundup-956... http://unspace.ca/blog/rubyfringe-what-now http://unspace.ca/blog/rubyfringe-what-now http://railspikes.com/2008/7/27/rubyfringe-recap-and-slides http://railspikes.com/2008/7/27/rubyfringe-recap-and-slides RubyFringe and FutureRuby are two of the things in my life that I am most proud of. My heart goes out to the organizers of BRC, and I encourage you all to try again next year but ignore the noise and focus on building the best deck ever seen.
mjg59 14y ago
Paying attention to diversity doesn't mean picking worse proposals. It means ensuring that minority groups in your community submit proposals in the first place. It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to sound less confident and may understate the value of their content. It means ensuring that your conference has a clear statement of supporting members of minority groups who may feel uncomfortable in a space dominated by white men. If your defence against claims of your conference lacking diversity is "Well, all our proposals came from white men", that's your fault. Countless other technical conferences around the world can attract proposals from community minorities. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.
- markshead 14y ago
  >It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to sound less confident and may understate the value of their content. Why do you assume that the color of someone's skin will make them less capable of writing a good, confident proposal for a conference. You are suggesting that you weight the value of the proposal based on the race of the person who submitted it.
  - mjg59 14y ago
    Because there's strong social pressure that encourages anyone other than white men to sound less confident about their ability. Failing to take that into account means that you're not actually engaging in meritocracy.
    - twoodfin 14y ago
      There is? Is that pressure getting stronger or weaker? How will we know when it no longer exists?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- tomwalker 14y ago
  And I assume that you would want to be speaking at a conference because you have a great talk to give, not for anything else. The conference could be all white, the conference could be all female, the conference could be all black. These details do not matter. It should be the best speakers.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
juliendorra 14y ago
These two posts from actual successes building more gender balanced tech conferences will give a better perspective on the core issue (gender and ethnic diversity): "Beating the Odds — How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012" http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got-25-percent-women-speakers.html http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got... They were themselves inspired by: "How I Got 50% Women Speakers at My Tech Conference" http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-my-tech-conference/ http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake... To summarize, it takes lot of effort and thought. But it's totally doable with outreach + anonymization.
nihar 14y ago
Here's a thought - why not make the speaker selection process double blind, like medical trials. Whoever is reviewing submissions, should not have access to the authors' info. Though this is not perfect, it does provide a way for conference organizers to silence all criticism about demographics... #justathought
nathan_f77 14y ago
It's sad how much damage can be caused by the ripple effect. First the sexualized presentations and sexist invitations, and now the TSA-style response to every hint of sexism. Conference organizers shouldn't have to worry about forcing diversity into their line-up. It starts with schools and universities, and every child having equal opportunities to tinker with computers. Does anyone have evidence that the @BritRuby organizers intentionally excluded anyone? Has anyone ever said 'I am an experienced Ruby developer and speaker, but I feel that I was excluded based on my race or gender"? If you really care about the issue, then there are far more productive ways to shift the balance than posting comments on twitter. I think the cancellation is a ridiculous over-reaction, and I still don't understand why 100% white males is a big deal. My Ruby meetup group is diverse, but noone is there because they feel the need to represent their race or gender. We're just all interested in Ruby!
JimmyL 14y ago
If you're a conference organizer and struggling to find local women to speak at your event, it's often worth putting in a call to your local Google office. If you can show that your event has a decent level of organization & chance of success, they have a well-established Diversity Grant program where they'll give conferences funding to fly in and house prominent female speakers which smaller conferences often wouldn't have the budget to do. Interestingly, it's run totally separate from their normal event sponsorship program. A friend was organizing a local Ruby conference and couldn't get any monetary sponsorship from Google (they said they needed six to eights months lead time to budget for it), but in a month or so turned around a diversity grant package to bring in female speakers and attendees that was worth several times the financial sponsorship that was initially asked for.
fjfish 14y ago
I worked with what became the Brit Ruby team on the Magrails conference last year, which did have a female speaker in the form of the excellent Rachel Davies, who is a leading Agile coach I know the guys had the (perhaps unstated) ambition to get as many of the Ruby Rogues in a room and create the largest conference in Europe. The Rogues are all men, but if you listen to the podcast you will know that they all care deeply about these issues and have taken steps themselves in events they organise to make sure that there is no bias. I was the old guy in the corner with Magrails and it was me who originally mooted the idea. I do remember we had some pressure from sponsors to do things like drive traffic to their websites, I was all for returning the cash and doing without their support because it was so annoying, we were creating a space for the community to gather and talk about Agile development using Rails and if we weren't driving traffic maybe they needed to make their product more compelling instead of blaming us. ;) If I had still been on the team I would have been arguing strongly to tell the nay sayers to get their own ass in gear and submit proposals, or shut up, assuming they weren't themselves the white guys they seem to see everywhere. The reason for sponsorship was to keep the ticket cost somewhere affordable by the jobbing developer, while still being able to pay for accommodation for the speakers. I know that a lot of people will come and talk anyway, self funding, but it's a big ask if you want some of the leaders from the US to come. Plus the cost of decent sized venues in Manchester is not cheap. Putting on Magrails cost a lot, let me tell you, and we have less than £100 left in the bank account.

57 points by andrewnez 14y ago

matthewrudy 14y ago

Can anyone explain what happened?

andrewnez 14y ago
It seemed because of complaints regarding race/gender diversity of speakers on twitter. I think it started with this tweet: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264 https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264
- veeti 14y ago
  Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup? He's making this up in his own mind. Who's the real discriminator here?
  - blacktulip 14y ago
    Their sponsor gave up on those twitter trolling
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup? According to https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 sponsors pulled out. It's not mentioned at all in TFAA though, so I'd don't know if the explanation's legit (and why they went with a non-explanation instead if it is)
- hmc 14y ago
  It only seems to be white males that are complaining.
  - olgeni 14y ago
    They probably are the most brainwashed and obsessed with the issue, and possibly believe they are scoring points in some imaginary and self-deprecating game. Sane people of different hues are probably doing something more interesting - reading Ruby books, writing Ruby code, or just having a life.
    - fearoffish 14y ago
      I'm not sure that's the attitude that helps either side in this kind of situation. I call your troll-iness.
      - olgeni 14y ago
        Indeed, that was a bit on the trollish side. I'd better go back to coding something myself.
    - hmc 14y ago
      I would say more misguided than brainwashed, someone needs to tell these guys inclusivity is not the same as positive discrimination.
tomstuart 14y ago
A Twitter search for “britruby” should clear it up. Short version: they’d invited all white male speakers; people complained about it on Twitter; the organisers got disheartened and called the whole thing off. ETA: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264 https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264, https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360 https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360
- matthewrudy 14y ago
  I'm surprised there was nothing on LRUG. Seems like a rush decision to cancel.
  - tomstuart 14y ago
    It only just happened. From the language and timing it looks like a snap emotional decision rather than a rational one; I assume the organisers got blindsided by the negative feedback and didn’t want to deal with it any more. ETA: “@Rebeccask Due to sexist & racist remarks made on twitter last night got way out of hand. Sponsors pull out. No money no conf” (https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912)
    - mgkimsal 14y ago
      It's too bad that this 'no money no conf' meme continues to dominate. You can have something more than an 'unconf' or 'barcamp'-style event, even with no or minimal sponsors, especially with a team of organizers/planners to share any overflow expenses that do not get covered by ticket prices.
      - adambyrtek 14y ago
        So you suggest that on top of volunteering time the organizers should also cover "overflow expenses" from their pockets? Sounds excessive to me.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

blacktulip 14y ago

I am a ticket holder. I can not understand even a little bit the reason why it get cancelled. If I get it right, the reason is there are not enough female speakers? Seriously, if that is not gender inequality then what is?

riazrizvi 14y ago

Awesome example of awful business writing.

typicalrunt 14y ago

Reading the twitter stream (https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264 https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264), I find it odd that one person comments that the lineup is "100% white guys", and then all of a sudden it's a foregone conclusion that the BritRuby organizers are sexist. Even @johnsusser is a bit much with his comment: @BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female? IMHO, I find that sentence insinuating that, unless you start with diversity as your goal, you are just racist/sexist/-ist. This is the wrong approach from the start; just perform a call for papers process and take the best ones. If one looks at the speaker list, they seem to be from non-3rd world countries. Where are the dirt poor people speaking at this conference? I'm going onto Twitter to state that BritRuby is class-ist. And while we're at it, I'm pretty sure (but I'm guessing here) that all of the speakers can speak. That's quite discriminatory to those people who cannot speak, but can code in Ruby. Should I continue or can we just get on with the conference and be inclusive, instead of this faux discrimination bullshit?

thisduck 14y ago
If you don't have diversity as one of your goals (either from the start or tacked on at the end) you are part of the system that perpetuates racism, whether you like it or not. 2010: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist." 2011: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist." 2012: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist." Yeah, okay.
- danenania 14y ago
  Actually, selecting speakers without regard to gender or race and ending up with 100% white guys (which is easily possible, since they are very overrepresented in the field) isn't racist or sexist, whereas selecting people specifically based on these traits would be racist and sexist, by definition. I think diversity is a worthwhile goal for a conference, but we shouldn't throw around these labels so freely (and incorrectly).

hopeless 14y ago

I'm pretty furious about this. I was really forward to having a reasonably-accessable world-class ruby conference in UK. I'm really only care about whether the speakers are interesting and that I can learn from their talk. I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the quality of speakers.

mgkimsal 14y ago
Race and gender can be (generally are) used by potential attendees to determine what comfort level they'd have at an event like that. The more people you can get to your event, generally the better the outcome will be - increased connections, networking and exchange of ideas from a broader range of people. I made an earlier comment about my recent experiences organizing a conference, and linked to my blog which touched on this very reason.
- hopeless 14y ago
  Thanks, I hadn't considered that, and it's a good point. Although perhaps I'm an oddity: I rarely see myself as among the speakers so I don't look at them as a guide. Also, I've been to "gender-equal" conferences where almost the only women there were speakers. So speakers != audience
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    Speakers != audience all the time - the audience won't be an exact match for the speaker demographics. But having done this for a bit, I've had enough feedback that indicates that having a more balanced/diverse set of speakers is a signal to a wider audience that there will more likely be a wider range of attendees to socialize and network with. Again, yes, not 100% all the time. FWIW, at indieconf we had about 30% of the speakers were female. About half of the attendees were female as well. Interestingly 30% answered the 'gender' question as female - 30% answered 'male', 30% left blank - I'm assuming based on names given about half of the remaning were also female - that's where I'm getting the ~50% were female.
rplnt 14y ago

blacktulip 14y ago

https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/270221926490857474 https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/270221926490857474 "#BritRuby’s decision to cancel was thought-out and based mainly on financial implications that arose from what happened on Twitter"

micmakarov 14y ago

They should have invited Matz

blacktulip 14y ago
They did, Matz has not replied yet https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/269853833503588352 https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/269853833503588352

betageek 14y ago

This is very disappointing, the community has moved from calling out concrete examples of sexism to dog piling on anything where a circumstantial case can be made. Not very MINSWAN* The only solution I can see is to make the process 100% transparent and show all invitations and refusals online - maybe even move to a voting system a la SXSW. *Matz (the inventor of Ruby) is nice so we are nice

mlvljr 14y ago

Will we finally see sponsors listening to conf attenders complaining that there are exactly zero hot women giving talks? ;)

instakill 14y ago

People will whine about anything, unfortunately they'll do so into the amplifier that is Twitter. On behalf of everyone that was going to go (myself excluded), thanks for nothing you whinging, impatient keyboard-slacktivists.

mgkimsal 14y ago

Having just finished a conference yesterday - http://indieconf.com http://indieconf.com - I feel like throwing in a few words on speaker selection. OK, maybe a whole bunch, as I blogged about this a couple weeks ago: http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-speakers/ http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-speak... For my perspective, the idea of only opening up a call for speakers and just 'picking the right ones' doesn't work very well. Or at least, I don't think it works very well for conferences just starting off which don't have a lot of reputation to fall back on. Borrowing some of this reputation by getting some 'superstar' speakers might help a bit, but if you do that before a CFS, you've already done some preselection. From year one, I had a call for speakers process open, but I also had some particular speakers I wanted to talk on specific topics. I had probably half the speakers/topics nominally on board (not officially at that point) during the first year CFS, and fleshed out the rest of the slots with submissions - some of which were really good angles I hadn't thought of. However, imo, the role of a conference organizer is largely curation of an experience, and you have to have an idea of what you want that experience to look like early on. And for me, gender is a factor - it's not a major one, but I made sure to encourage some females in my network to submit. At the same time, there were some submissions and applications from females that I didn't bring on board the conference this year, because they didn't quite fit the vibe I was shooting for. Anyhow, sorry to see they've cancelled this. I know all too well how hard it is to organize something, and to be discouraged enough to pull the plug like this was certainly not fun or easy for the organizers. I wish them luck in future projects like this. EDIT: Couple more thoughts - how you run the event the first year has an impact on how people view your event in subsequent years. I get props every year on the food, but mostly because I take the extra 10 minutes to organize vegan and gluten-free options, and I get people coming back partially based on the fact that I've done that (had people buy tickets and tell me that). Example: https://twitter.com/alanstevens/status/269856351214268416 https://twitter.com/alanstevens/status/269856351214268416

vidiviciveni 14y ago

"Diversity" has cancelled a conference where white guys try to improve the world we live in? You know who's responsible for this, right? "Diversity" == non-white

tinco 14y ago

Black people and women are so linguist. Not submitting talk proposals to Ruby conferences is just disrespectful. edit: Just found out raganwald submitted a talk proposal to BritRuby. Turns out my racist general remark was entirely misguided and black people might actually not be linguist at all. A shame his talk wasn't accepted. I'd like to hear more about method combinators :)

petercooper 14y ago
It's irrelevant anyway since BritRuby didn't get a chance to pick proposals and announce speakers. They were criticized on their invite list rather than their chosen proposals which were never made public :-(
- tinco 14y ago
  Wow.. that's even more sad than I thought. btw, thanks for scrolling down to see my comment, it was lonely down here :D
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Haha, I did see it at the time, but on a revisit I noticed your update so I thought it was worth pointing out ;-)

peteforde 14y ago

I was the curator and co-organizer of RubyFringe and FutureRuby in Toronto. I'm really sorry to hear that folks organizing BRC felt so beat down by negativity that cancelation was the best option. Most people simply do not appreciate the hundreds of unpaid hours of work that are required to pull off a good event. Several aspects of this controversy don't sit well with me, however. First off, since when does the curation of a conference have to follow someone else's value system? It's very simple: the people that organize an event should work hard to put together the most interesting line-up they can. It's then up to the potential attendees to decide if the event is worth their time to attend. That's it; there are no more rules! If you want to solicit proposals for talks, go ahead. If you like some of them, give them a shot at speaking. If you decide that none of them match your curatorial agenda, then thank them warmly for their submission and move on. You aren't obligated to take proposals at all, and you're certainly not obligated to make your decision process transparent or part of some laborious community democracy. In fact, I would guess that one strongly opinionated curator will put together a far more coherent line-up than any popularity contest ever could. If you're looking for inspiration, consider asking attendees from previous years if they'd like to consider "leveling-up" to speaker. When I put together our speaker lists, it wasn't arbitrary and much like test driven development we didn't just start emailing random smart people. We started with strong themes for the entire event, ideals that could pull together folks and be both entertaining and challenging. Those themes directed our branding, our choice of talks and the after-hours entertainment, which in our world is just as vital to the conference experience as anything else. Not all meritocracy is bad. Conference curation is one such domain where winning has far more to do with subject diversity, pacing and the element of surprise than arbitrary quotas for gender, race, age or class ever could. I'd say that the best metaphor for future curators to use is building a deck of Magic the Gathering cards. You need the right balance of mana, summon and sorcery cards. There are five colors but to be effective you choose 1 or perhaps 2 at most. And most importantly, you design your deck around a theme which is based on a hypothesis for winning which you think brings something new to the table. Most of the strategy for winning at MtG happens before game play starts, and if everyone had a say in how you built your deck, it wouldn't be very fun to play with such an unnecessarily shitty deck. You could call it the "Stop Hitting Yourself!" deck. There's a difference between fighting for a developer community free of sexist bullshit, and pretending that a conference built on arbitrary values for diversity is automatically better than one where you nail a theme and everyone leaves happy. Those who disagree are likely to simply skip my conferences, and that's perfectly fine. Finally, we did both of those events with no sponsorships. We cost less than an O'Reilly-backed RailsConf event and we provided logo-free swag, great wifi, amazing food, three nights of entertainment with an open bar and we helped speakers with travel and lodging while still managing to break even. It's simply not true that you can't do a successful conference without sponsors. You just have to charge money to attend, and be prepared to help those who are having financial issues find ways to volunteer. http://www.rubyinside.com/rubyfringe-success-and-roundup-956.html http://www.rubyinside.com/rubyfringe-success-and-roundup-956... http://unspace.ca/blog/rubyfringe-what-now http://unspace.ca/blog/rubyfringe-what-now http://railspikes.com/2008/7/27/rubyfringe-recap-and-slides http://railspikes.com/2008/7/27/rubyfringe-recap-and-slides RubyFringe and FutureRuby are two of the things in my life that I am most proud of. My heart goes out to the organizers of BRC, and I encourage you all to try again next year but ignore the noise and focus on building the best deck ever seen.

mjg59 14y ago

Paying attention to diversity doesn't mean picking worse proposals. It means ensuring that minority groups in your community submit proposals in the first place. It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to sound less confident and may understate the value of their content. It means ensuring that your conference has a clear statement of supporting members of minority groups who may feel uncomfortable in a space dominated by white men. If your defence against claims of your conference lacking diversity is "Well, all our proposals came from white men", that's your fault. Countless other technical conferences around the world can attract proposals from community minorities. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.

markshead 14y ago
>It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to sound less confident and may understate the value of their content. Why do you assume that the color of someone's skin will make them less capable of writing a good, confident proposal for a conference. You are suggesting that you weight the value of the proposal based on the race of the person who submitted it.
- mjg59 14y ago
  Because there's strong social pressure that encourages anyone other than white men to sound less confident about their ability. Failing to take that into account means that you're not actually engaging in meritocracy.
  - twoodfin 14y ago
    There is? Is that pressure getting stronger or weaker? How will we know when it no longer exists?

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tomwalker 14y ago
And I assume that you would want to be speaking at a conference because you have a great talk to give, not for anything else. The conference could be all white, the conference could be all female, the conference could be all black. These details do not matter. It should be the best speakers.
- deleted 14y ago
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juliendorra 14y ago

These two posts from actual successes building more gender balanced tech conferences will give a better perspective on the core issue (gender and ethnic diversity): "Beating the Odds — How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012" http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got-25-percent-women-speakers.html http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got... They were themselves inspired by: "How I Got 50% Women Speakers at My Tech Conference" http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-my-tech-conference/ http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake... To summarize, it takes lot of effort and thought. But it's totally doable with outreach + anonymization.

nihar 14y ago

Here's a thought - why not make the speaker selection process double blind, like medical trials. Whoever is reviewing submissions, should not have access to the authors' info. Though this is not perfect, it does provide a way for conference organizers to silence all criticism about demographics... #justathought

nathan_f77 14y ago

It's sad how much damage can be caused by the ripple effect. First the sexualized presentations and sexist invitations, and now the TSA-style response to every hint of sexism. Conference organizers shouldn't have to worry about forcing diversity into their line-up. It starts with schools and universities, and every child having equal opportunities to tinker with computers. Does anyone have evidence that the @BritRuby organizers intentionally excluded anyone? Has anyone ever said 'I am an experienced Ruby developer and speaker, but I feel that I was excluded based on my race or gender"? If you really care about the issue, then there are far more productive ways to shift the balance than posting comments on twitter. I think the cancellation is a ridiculous over-reaction, and I still don't understand why 100% white males is a big deal. My Ruby meetup group is diverse, but noone is there because they feel the need to represent their race or gender. We're just all interested in Ruby!

JimmyL 14y ago

If you're a conference organizer and struggling to find local women to speak at your event, it's often worth putting in a call to your local Google office. If you can show that your event has a decent level of organization & chance of success, they have a well-established Diversity Grant program where they'll give conferences funding to fly in and house prominent female speakers which smaller conferences often wouldn't have the budget to do. Interestingly, it's run totally separate from their normal event sponsorship program. A friend was organizing a local Ruby conference and couldn't get any monetary sponsorship from Google (they said they needed six to eights months lead time to budget for it), but in a month or so turned around a diversity grant package to bring in female speakers and attendees that was worth several times the financial sponsorship that was initially asked for.

fjfish 14y ago

I worked with what became the Brit Ruby team on the Magrails conference last year, which did have a female speaker in the form of the excellent Rachel Davies, who is a leading Agile coach I know the guys had the (perhaps unstated) ambition to get as many of the Ruby Rogues in a room and create the largest conference in Europe. The Rogues are all men, but if you listen to the podcast you will know that they all care deeply about these issues and have taken steps themselves in events they organise to make sure that there is no bias. I was the old guy in the corner with Magrails and it was me who originally mooted the idea. I do remember we had some pressure from sponsors to do things like drive traffic to their websites, I was all for returning the cash and doing without their support because it was so annoying, we were creating a space for the community to gather and talk about Agile development using Rails and if we weren't driving traffic maybe they needed to make their product more compelling instead of blaming us. ;) If I had still been on the team I would have been arguing strongly to tell the nay sayers to get their own ass in gear and submit proposals, or shut up, assuming they weren't themselves the white guys they seem to see everywhere. The reason for sponsorship was to keep the ticket cost somewhere affordable by the jobbing developer, while still being able to pay for accommodation for the speakers. I know that a lot of people will come and talk anyway, self funding, but it's a big ask if you want some of the leaders from the US to come. Plus the cost of decent sized venues in Manchester is not cheap. Putting on Magrails cost a lot, let me tell you, and we have less than £100 left in the bank account.