11 ms·

Why Brit Ruby 2013 was cancelled and why this is not ok

134 points by seanhandley 14y ago

betageek 14y ago
TL;DR "kicking up a shitstorm on Twitter these days is easy"
danso 14y ago
A commenter on the OP said: > This is awful. The accusations are a disgrace. Have considered suing for libel? This may be actionable on Brit soil where libel laws are tougher, but not as likely in the U.S., which is a good thing. As far as I can tell from the OP, the circumstances were: 1. The lineup was indeed all white and male 2. People alleged that the organizers of being racist and sexist. The OP used the word "allegations"...and if every allegation based on the reading of the facts were grounds for libel, then most of HN discussion would be shut down. (Think about every time Zynga, Groupon, or even Apple, is discussed.) It's disconcerting to see the hacker community so blithely call for the courts to step in when freedom of expression infringes upon their viewpoint.
- ceol 14y ago
  Github comments are getting closer to YouTube in terms of quality— especially when an issue or gist is linked on reddit. You'll see a flood of image macros and memespeak derailing any meaningful conversation. It doesn't surprise me to read such comments. It just saddens me.
keeran 14y ago
I wish you could sue the muppets slinging mud around on Twitter etc.
- petercooper 14y ago
  It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may be surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types. There have been a lot of crossed wires, misinterpretations, and faux pas here which probably wouldn't have occurred in real life (or even video). Online communications, especially on Twitter, is so woefully inadequate when dealing with social issues :-(
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    "It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may be surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types." But the net result is loss of coding/development related activity in Manchester, sponsor getting wet feet, loss of credibility for future events &c Seems a shame. Note for US readers: UK is small island(s) and most of the fun stuff happens in London (my perception).
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      > Note for US readers: UK is small island(s) and most of the fun stuff happens in London (my perception). Yeah, the UK really needs events like this, because it has (in my perception, as an American) been bypassed by a lot of the latest technological advances, in terms of business opportunities. The only big British technology company I can name off the top of my head is ARM, and that's not one that your average consumer would be familiar with anyway. And ARM was founded 20+ years ago - I can't think of any recent British startups or software companies that have achieved worldwide fame.
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        Umm, isn't last.fm younger?
        r4vik 14y ago
        Datasift
    - petercooper 14y ago
      Oh, totally. But I think those are separate issues. The curious thing is it was the first serious attempt to have what I'd call a 'full scale' Ruby conference in England (other events like Ruby Manor do a great job but are unique experiences or unconference type events). Scotland Ruby Conference has done pretty well, but it's very odd that England (and London, in particularly) hasn't had any success with a large Ruby event given the huge market.
- amurmann 14y ago
  I wish you couldn't sue anyone for anything they say or any information they distribute. May it be a bullshit opinion or nuclear launch codes. Free speech is under attack enough. We don't need to start suing people because they voice their potentially oversensitive concerns about equality. If that happens, we soon won't be able to say anything without fear of being suit!
matthewowen 14y ago
Do people realise how offensive it is when they say things of the form "we shouldn't include a speaker who isn't a white male because that would just be tokenism, and tokenism is bad"?
- angersock 14y ago
  Agreed. Thankfully, the author made a somewhat subtler point--that being included because of some identity instead of skill is to be avoided. It's a small, but important, difference.
  - matthewowen 14y ago
    That was actually the point that I was making, thanks. When white men say "we shouldn't include people just because of some identity" the reality that lies behind it is often that they've made no attempt to reach out to people who aren't white men. It's a perfectly reasonable argument - but it is frequently made inappropriately in an attempt to counter criticism that it doesn't really offer a valuable defence against. It's an attempt to shift the terms of the debate. I don't like it.
- GuiA 14y ago
  That's not what they're saying. What they're saying is: "We reached out to the best, and it turns out that the ones who accepted our offer were white males. People complained about that; but we don't want to go out of our way to find a non white male just to tick a box".
  - danso 14y ago
    I wish for the OP's sake that they had included examples of non-white people they asked to attend (but who apparently couldn't make it). It'd at least give a little more insight to who they think is a good panelist. But turning the detractors' argument from "Hey, there's just white guys on this panel!" to "Hey, please include a minority so that no one's feelings are hurt" was probably the least useful way to counter the detractors.
  - 14y ago
mgkimsal 14y ago
"Yes, gender equality and racial equality are important. But the team's motives were to get the best speakers who were able to make it to Manchester. Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys. ... It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style." Why do the speakers have to be famous? Frankly, probably a lot of what they've said and think on subjects is already known - they're famous already. Why not have that be less of a factor? It would probably have reduced costs some, assuming there was financial travel costs covered, and perhaps been able to focus on 'content', without respect to the fame of the speaker.
- mythz 14y ago
  "Why do the speakers have to be famous?" To get people to go.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    Well, then they should be able to sell enough tickets to cover costs. You can't have it both ways - we want "famous" people to attract crowds (who generally pay for a ticket) but also want sponsors to cover the costs. EDIT: can't
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  Famous people draw crowds. Also, famous people use these conferences to talk about new interesting stuff that has not been revealed before. Also, discussing stuff with famous people one on one is much more interesting than doing it on a mailing list.
sgt 14y ago
Well put! I really hope the responsible trolls (e.g. John Susser, James A Rosen) on Twitter reflect on what they have done with their careless and frankly ignorant comments, and also that Brit Ruby 2013 finds new sponsors as soon as possible. I still believe there must be a chance Brit Ruby 2013 is going to be reality. Don't give up, guys.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  I'd suggest a kickstarter project for this. That way nobody is out any money until the conference is a fact. Conference goers would be given their ticket as a pay-off for sponsoring the project. Assuming that kickstarter would allow a construction like that.
  - adrianhoward 14y ago
    Unfortunately it is hard to impossible to organise a conference on that basis. You need to have money down to pay for venues, etc. well in advance.
- m0nastic 14y ago
  I can't fathom any definition of trolling that would include any of the comments that John Susser made about this issue (there's a grand total of 6 of them). I have no doubts that once the ball got rolling, people were quick to throw around all kinds of accusations of sexism and racism (which to be fair, I don't think characterizes the Brit Ruby organizers at all.) Pointing out that an otherwise interesting conference is less interesting because of a lack of diversity of the speakers isn't trolling.
  - ricardobeat 14y ago
    Why is it less interesting, why does skin color matter? Would be it be less interesting if all speakers wore plain white t-shirts too? Why do you care at all about anything other than the content/experience?
    - 14y ago
luigi 14y ago
It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake. No, that doesn't make them sexist pigs. But that's a pretty serious oversight to make for the people who are curating a Ruby conference for England in the year 2012. Their sponsors are right to pull out for such an error.
- Permit 14y ago
  >It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake. Why is diversity a noble goal in choosing speakers? Like he said, would it have been better to choose 90% of their desired lineup and then seek to fill the remaining 10% with minority speakers just for the sake of diversity?
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    luigi is not talking about filling some gender/race quota, but infers from the tone of the OP that representation of race and gender wasn't something remotely important to the organizers. It makes them indifferent to the question, not hostile. I think languages like Ruby and Python have reached a point where they are so popular and accessible that it's time to get as many people engaged in using them as possible.
    - e12e 14y ago
      > It makes them indifferent to the question, not hostile. Or ignorant of the issue. Which isn't necessarily the same as indifferent.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    You may want to consider how your second sentence reads. It seems to imply that minority speakers would not be part of the desired lineup to begin with, and that they could only possibly be included "just for the sake of diversity". Anyway, it's not about saying "gee, we better pick an Indian or two to meet our quota." It's about including minorities in the pool to be considered in the first place. That few or none were chosen indicates that that probably wasn't the case. And this isn't about calling people out as big fat racists. Hardly anyone believes, in their heart of hearts, that people unlike them are inferior. But we all have unconscious biases like that[0], and many folks are starting to demand that people account for that in their decisions. [0] Plenty of people are great at lying to themselves about it, too. Search for the phrase "I'm not racist, but" on Twitter sometime.
influx 14y ago
Why is the Ruby community addicted to drama? http://rubydramas.com/ http://rubydramas.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw... http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/ruby_ruby_on_rails_and__why_the_disappearance_of_one_of_the_world_s_most_beloved_computer_programmers_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963 http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/ It feels like an abusive relationship.
- knowtheory 14y ago
  Hey Influx. Every community has its dramas. Ruby just likes to make ours really really public :P Ruby folks like to talk about passion for coding, so unsurprisingly controversies in Ruby are equally passionate. One thing that is very much worth noting about the Ruby community is that when controversies happen, things change. Sometimes they're things like Zed Shaw flaming out of the community (which i'm still kinda bummed about), sometimes it means organizations like Railsbridge (http://workshops.railsbridge.org/ http://workshops.railsbridge.org/ ) are formed. But these are not needless controversies with no results. This stuff matters.
  - influx 14y ago
    Passion is great, but why couldn't this have happened in e-mail instead of Twitter, perhaps the OP could have e-mailed the conference organizers with some names of some great Rubyists that had been overlooked, but would give a great speech. Win-win. Instead, the conference is canceled, and no one wins. :(
__alexs 14y ago
Were they using a speaker selection system designed to try and increase equality in the line up like for example JSConf EU have in the past? 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...
galapago 14y ago
Maybe they should use double blind revision to select their talks..
SagelyGuru 14y ago
It is not ´careless words´ that caused this. After all, everyone is entitled to express their opinion. What really caused this is the climate where it is ok for women to meet without the least danger of being accused of sexism. It is the climate where it is ok for blacks to meet without any danger of being accused of racism. It is the climate where it is VERBOTEN for white guys to meet, even if the topic is something totally neutral like Ruby and the attendance is self-selected.
- luigi 14y ago
  Please tell me more about how awful it is to be a white guy in Western society.
  - SagelyGuru 14y ago
    To all of you trying to justify this, I only have this to say. I am sorry to have to repeat the obvious but it is true and it needs to be said. The best test for injustice in all these situations, if you are unable to see it staring in your face, is just to turn it round. Imagine the best rubyists just happened to be all black and their conference was cancelled because they were all black. If you still think it was justified, I have nothing more to say except: `Please, beam me up, Scotty!'
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - oh_sigh 14y ago
    Every group is concerned about their own problems. You can say the same thing to women who are fighting for gender rights "Well, you have it great, think of how bad black people have it. You have no right to complain."
  - sbuk 14y ago
    How racist of you.
danso 14y ago
OK I'm going to play devil's advocate here. The OP says: >...Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys. And: > Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided. Adding a token minority speaker is offensive to that speaker, it says "You're here because you tick a box - not because you're skilled." It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style. The second point is a strawman argument (and doesn't reflect well on the OP, unfortunately). Unless the detractors were complete reprobates, I doubt their reasoning was "You guys should include a non-white female for balance's sake!" I would hope that the line of allegation (and maybe it got muddled up in tweets, as oft is the case) was: you guys did not look hard enough to find alternative viewpoints, or: you guys have a narrow viewpoint on what makes for an interesting Rubyist. Which brings me to point 1: Ruby was invented by a Japanese national. And last time the the Ruby 2.0 announcements were posted on HN, it was in Japanese. So in terms of pure white vs. non-whites, you most definitely can't say that all of the pioneers in Ruby are white, as you might be able to with other languages. That said, I don't think (again I was only playing devil's advocate) that the organizers' intentions were bad. It's within the realm of possibility that every "minority" candidate they wanted could not make the conference. Yet it's also possible the organizers have a mostly-white circle, and without prodding, are prone to select from that group...not because they're racist, but because they happen to follow these people more and thus are more aware of their achievements. That most of these people are white males is a symptom of this natural tendency to look within your clique, without racism playing any influence at all. Case in point: if you asked me to assemble a panel of top Rubyists and if I were unaware of the language's origins...I would most likely pick mostly white males and no Japanese at all. Not because I'm racist against Japanese (FWIW, I'm Asian), but because I don't speak/read Japanese, have never been to Japan, have never met other Japanese rubyists...and thus their accomplishments don't even enter my head when brainstorming top rubyists because I'm just unaware of their existence. In that case, I'd welcome people to call me out for not ever looking up who this "Matz" character is. But I'd still probably be insulted if someone just called me a racist. So maybe in the OP's case, it's true that their circle is not large enough...and yet it's not right at all to just call them racist/sexist. The end result, I'm afraid, is that despite the well-meaning parties in this fight, the problem and problematic judgment of "tokenism" will just increase. * One more point: The OP says: > Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look beneath the surface before you retweet. I'm not going to argue whether it's fair or not to expect this: but if an organizer is facing these kinds of allegations, then they can help alleviate the issue by writing a substantial post on their criteria for selecting the speakers and some examples of people they asked but who could not make it. If all outsiders see is the list of speakers as it stands, then they have to give the organizers the benefit of the doubt...which is not always going to happen...
thedufer 14y ago
Having only white male speakers is a sign that something _might_ be wrong, but it seems that a number of people took it as a sign that something _is_ wrong. If there was evidence that action was taken to avoid having minority speakers, then sure, throw a tantrum. But saying there might have been bias, so it needs to get shut down - that's not fair to anyone.
FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
I don't know what to make of this. I tend to feel that if you want to accuse someone of racism or sexism then you have to be sure it was deliberate. The accusations can be so damaging that it's irresponsible to sling them about freely without due care or thought. I don't think that playing the discrimination card before getting your facts straight is the best way to encourage improvement. In the case of the accusations made, the people making them have contributed nothing. What they have done is deny the minorities they were supposedly defending an opportunity to speak at a large conference, because the whole damn thing has been cancelled as a result.
__abc 14y ago
So, from the outside looking in knowing this is a tough subject to "sum up" in a few paragraphs ... What's the end goal? I find it incredibly more insulting, demeaning, and counter productive to include someone JUST because they are white, black, female, asian, etc. It's just as discriminatory as excluding them. In fact, in my opinion, it's far worse. It's discrimination masquerading as equality. You want everyone treated equal? Awesome. The best speakers get in, period. You vary from that in either direction, and you are embracing inequality.
- deleted 14y ago
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  - ahelwer 14y ago
    I think HN needs to read Garann Mean's kickass blog post on "meritocracy" again: http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/ http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/
    - e12e 14y ago
      Thanks for this link, hadn't seen it before. Made me go and find: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1958oct-00003 http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1958oct-00003 Which was the only freely available on line copy of the original essay I could find.
subsystem 14y ago
More than anything it seems to be a failure to communicate their intentions and/or write contracts with their sponsors.
rlpb 14y ago
Even if we had perfect gender and ethnicity equality, probability tells us that we would still expect there to be some proportion of conferences where the best available speakers are all white and male. In this case, there is self selection too. Britain is still predominantly white. And even as I accept that there must still be factors which make women feel less welcome, I remain convinced that even if no factors of unfair discrimination existed, more men than women would self-select technology careers. These factors mean that we would expect even more conferences with all white and male speakers, still without unfair discrimination. To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is textbook selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination at all. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
- deleted 14y ago
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- anonymous3821 14y ago
  Here's a question for you (no, it's not a rhetorical one--I can see the answer going either way): Is it conference organizers' responsibility to mimic the current industry (in % minorities and all)? Or, is it conference organizers' responsibility to lead the movement and adjust for where the industry should be? If you answered yes to the first one, I would like to hear your explanation on who would be a better person to lead the movement.
jlouis 14y ago
I don't get this. What should be in focus is not your gender, nor your race. It is the talk you are going to give which should be the focus. I don't care if you are a man a woman, an indian, a japanese and so on. But I deeply care about the talk being interesting. That said, I would much prefer having diversity in the speaker lineup - it makes for more interesting talks in general. I am also for biasing toward the minority: If you have, say, only one woman who applied there should be a good reason to reject her. The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable - simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are no women in the lineup. That is, you have to weigh the chance of an all-white-male lineup to occur at random toward the fact that people where chosen to be all-white-male.
a_dent 14y ago
"Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look beneath the surface before you retweet." This is the problem I have with "free" speech. Yes you can say anything you want, but the problem is that those with the audience take no responsibility or apply any judgement to the effect. Someone yelling racist epithets on their doorstep to an audience of no one is free speech. Bill O'Reilly calling for vigilante justice on Dr. George Tiller and taking zero responsibility for it is not the intent of "free speech." "And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech." - Bill O'Reilly (2006) In a similar way, this John Susser takes no responsibility for stirring up this particular storm but the effects are real. No one got killed over it but its huge disservice to an already very contentious issue. With ignorant comments like those of John Susser we won't be able to make much forward progress.
oellegaard 14y ago
Dear God! As if it wasn't hard enough to arrange a conference, apparently you have to make sure to invite every minority as a speaker at that conference too. I'm not even in the ruby community, but judging from the python/django community, assembling a team of good speakers is hard enough already.
anonymous3821 14y ago
These HN comments are some of the most disconcerting that I've seen in a long time. The amount of ignorance displayed in some of them makes me--a white male--question this community. I could only imagine what message they would send to a minority. Here's my take on a few comments in this thread. (I don't mean to single anyone out.) >>Imagine if people were criticizing a lineup because there were too many women. If our society treated males and females equally, then this hypothetical would make sense. But in a society where females face discrimination their entire lives and barriers can often prevent from reaching their potential, I think such a hypothetical is silly to bring up. It is everyone's responsibility to try to adjust for this inequality in society. That might include going out of your way as a conference organizer to encourage more qualified minorities to apply as speakers. As some HN'ers have brought up, quality will not be jeopardized in the process. >>To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is textbook selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination at all. If you notice, no one (as far as I can tell) explicitly called this discrimination. There will always be people who question the validity of things like these, and why shouldn't there be? Conferences, if they did their share of work, should be able to hold up against arguments like these (if they're invalid). Yes, statistically some conferences might have gone out of their way to find minorities and failed to do so. Looking at any single case, though, such a scenario is unlikely. One should not just say, "Oh, statistics show that this might happen by chance, and therefore no one should question the validity of the selection process." >>The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable - simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are no women in the lineup. Like before, the problem cannot be blamed on statistics. I don't believe that there will be a lot of conferences where no qualified women could present at. If they couldn't be found, I'm guessing that--most of the times--the organizers didn't look hard enough. This is just a guess, but I'm not going to assume the utopian society that others on this page have and say that everyone tries their hardest to attain diversity. >> Dear God! As if it wasn't hard enough to arrange a conference, apparently you have to make sure to invite every minority as a speaker at that conference too. Misunderstanding the issue at hand and making outrageous claims like these does not improve my opinion of HN. >> I really hope the responsible trolls... [emphasis added] Enough said. Calling people who raise valid concerns trolls (or muppets, like someone else did) is not respectful. The fact that such an ad-hominem attack on HN got upvoted to the top is shocking. >>Why should that have been their goal? This isn't a conference about racial issues or gender issues. Taken from the BritRuby's website: Our mission statement was to encourage Ruby developers to unite and create a community, which would allow such to network, exchange ideas and provoke innovation for the future of Ruby. Britain has 51% women. Women are underrepresented in the Ruby community, but there is no reason why it should stay like that. Is not anyone's job to increase the percentage of female coders. It is everyone's. HN user luigi says it better than I ever could: The act of organizing a conference makes one a leader for their technical community. We all know we have a diversity problem. And conference organizers are responsible for helping address that problem. Leaders should lead. =========== If I were pg, I would close this thread before we make a fool of ourselves even further. People are seriously questioning this community and its views on gender imbalance in technology, minorities, etc. This is not an isolated case.
javert 14y ago
What this tells me is that a significant part of the Ruby community is racist and sexist. The proper approach is to utterly ignore the race and sex of people. Anything else is racist and/or sexist.
- eropple 14y ago
  There's a ton of literature on the topic if you care to look, but in short: this simply does not work due to societal assumptions and levels of privilege. It's a non-starter to "not care", because privileged groups automatically get their foot in the door.
  - javert 14y ago
    That's just utter nonsense. (You haven't even defined what you mean by "working" and "not working." But let's assume you mean that certain groups have an advantage in society.) I'm a white male. I'm not particularly attractive. I am not able to exhibit certain class indicators. I am not very sociable or "cool." And I don't agree with mainstream ideology. Also, I don't have many social connections. All of these are a pretty big disadvantage compared to, say, a black person with relevant social connections, or a handsome and suave white male, or an attractive female. But at the end of the day, meritocracy still rules, and if you're good enough, you can get by just fine on merit. That's just reality, and it "works" just fine. And if there is any correction I want to advocate for publicly, it's certainly towards merit and away from any other factor. Any other factor ought to be irrelevant and is just going to change the balance of unfairness rather than improve the situation. And, fortunately, in a free country (and even a semi-free country like the USA), merit is an absolutey overwhelming advantage. That doesn't mean reality is fair. It's not. It will never be. Forget "fair." What we want is for things to be just. And when you start discriminating based on race or gender, for any reason, you stop being just.
    - Total_Meltdown 14y ago
      Can we all please get over this ridiculous idea that we are perfectly rational agents in some free-market meritocratic utopia? People are irrational, biased, accident-prone, living things. That alone precludes unbiased judgements of another person's "merit". I mean, come on. We're programmers. We have jobs because of how much people screw up.
PedroBatista 14y ago
And the Al Sharptons of the web are nowhere to be seen now...
danilocampos 14y ago
Hey white dudes. I see you're pretty worked up. Non-white dude here to explain. When you're white, and you're male, technology (as a career field) is pretty accessible. And here's why. You can open up a newspaper or a tech blog or whatever, and many of the major important people in the photos staring back at you basically look like you. And that's nice, because you can be reassured that someone with your background and origins has a place in technology. If you're not male, or not white, you have to look a bit harder. Sometimes a lot harder, indeed, to find people who both look like you and are doing what you want to be doing professionally. Now, you'll give me an argument that looks just shouldn't matter. That we should look at people's minds and ideas, not their skin color, in evaluating their contributions. And while I'm sure such an ideal feels reassuring – it's bunk in this context. Diversity of "race" is really a proxy for diversity of background, experience and origins. For maximizing the varieties of life story represented. It's useful to do this because diversity of experience leads to diversity of solutions. Diversity also breeds further diversity, as people with wildly different backgrounds feel more welcome into the fold. So when we see people helping to lead a community, and some of those people aren't like the majority, that's encouraging. It says that even though a given person is "different" from the norm, they are welcome, they may be successful. Star Trek is lauded for this reason. Actor Nichelle Nichols was thinking of leaving the show. None other than Dr. Martin Luther King implored her to remain – he believed a black professional woman on television would be a crucial role model for young people. (In her childhood, Whoopi Goldberg is said to have screamed, "Hey Mom! Look! There's a black woman on the TV and she ain't no maid!") And you may argue, well, why should diversity matter? Let some people do some stuff and other people do others. And I'll tell you that position, on top of being lazy, opens us up to many missed opportunities. In technology, we want as many different sorts of humans as possible all working on our hard problems. If STEM is a country club for white guys, that leaves out a huge chunk of the population who might otherwise make great contributions. One last thing. When you say stuff like "Wull, shucks, what were they supposed to do? Find a token [non-white-male] to fill the spot?" you make it sound like you don't believe there are any people but white guys with useful things to say on the subject of the conference. Careful with that.
- Camillo 14y ago
  The barrier to entry to becoming a Ruby programmer is as low as can be: all you need is a laptop and internet access. You can become a celebrity without people even knowing your name, let alone your face: why_ (or _why or whatever) was at one point the biggest name in Ruby (AFAICT from outside), and he might have been a cat with a keyboard for all anyone knew. On top of that, there's plenty of famous and powerful non-white engineers. And if you don't want to look at the top, look at your peers: in my university in America, whites are the minority in most gradute CS classes. By all objective measures, this is the last industry where people should be subject to a witch-hunt and have their conference cancelled because of their speaker lineup.
lwat 14y ago
Here's my question: How many of the top 10 Ruby speakers in the UK are white males? What about the top 20? Top 50?
danso 14y ago
Sorry to make a different thread than the two others I've made, but FYI, here's was the proposed Brit Ruby 2013 lineup: http://lanyrd.com/2013/britruby/speakers/ http://lanyrd.com/2013/britruby/speakers/ It was important to see this list, for those of us who have never been, to understand if Brit Ruby includes only British speakers or Rubyists from all over. (it at least includes a few Americans) FWIW, here are a few other speaker lists for comparison: Ruby Conf 2012: http://lanyrd.com/2012/rubyconf/speakers/ http://lanyrd.com/2012/rubyconf/speakers/ Ruby Midwest: http://lanyrd.com/2011/ruby-midwest/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/ruby-midwest/ Ruby Madison (Wisc.) http://lanyrd.com/2011/madison-ruby/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/madison-ruby/ It should be noted that all of these conferences feature at least more than one non-"white guy"...but all have more speakers than did the announced lineup for Brit Ruby 2013.
- jufo 14y ago
  As a 60-year-old, I'm glad to see Jim Weirich in the Brit Ruby lineup :-)
willvarfar 14y ago
The big question is, who should they have invited to speak?
jballanc 14y ago
Racism and Sexism are not bad because they involve race and/or sex. They are bad because they imply that you are judging a person before first knowing that person well enough to pass sound judgment. The real lesson here is that the internet is an echo chamber for context free judgments.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
There is an old Russian joke about this: Professors of a music school gather and try to figure out who to enroll ethnicity-wise. One of them says they should accept jews for every opening because they make perfect violinists. Another one tells they should accept russians only because it's a russian state after all. Then someone offers to to accept them evenly: five jews, five russians. But then there is an argument that jews only make up ten percent of citisens and therefore for nine russians they should accept one jew. Finally, some rogue professor blames them all for being racists. What would you do!? They ask. Who to accept? "We should accept those who are the best at playing violin!" The same thing applies here, plus innocence until proven guilty. As long there are no facts that those speakers were selected by foul play, they should not cancel the conference. Anything else is racist. Regarding sponsors who pulled support: who do you think gave them this idea? I have an answer you won't like.
- fatbird 14y ago
  I don't know, who did give them this idea? I'm brave enough to hear an answer I might not like.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    People who occassionally consider race and sex of a person over everything else this person does.
adrianhoward 14y ago
There's some text up on the main http://2013.britruby.com/ http://2013.britruby.com/ - among other things it says: "We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? " I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal? In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their sex. Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota. I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049). Plenty of female speakers on the other stages too. At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year (http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013-survey/ http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013...) and the survey has already produced some great possible speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women. Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major conference. I'd be reaching out to folk like http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/ http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/, or http://www.womenwhotech.com/ http://www.womenwhotech.com/. I'd be looking to how other folk got more great women speakers at their conferences like 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.... Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding good speakers is not as effective as it should be.
deleted 14y ago
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mjg59 14y ago
https://gist.github.com/4106776#gistcomment-602103 https://gist.github.com/4106776#gistcomment-602103 is relevant, and everyone involved in this discussion should read it. The argument so far has been presented as a false dichotomy - either take the best speakers (who all happen to be white men) or accept lower quality proposals in order to ensure some token degree of representation. Those aren't the only options. It's entirely possible to obtain a larger number of speakers from minority groups in your community without compromising your conference's quality. You just need to care about things like outreach, the way you write your CFP and the presence of policies to reassure people that harassment won't be tolerated. Do that, and you'll suddenly find that you have a high quality conference with a more diverse panel of speakers.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  This is a nice example but I doubt this skill is transferrable, and anyway I don't think ruining a conference will make anybody happier. Barring a few trolls who didn't care much about Ruby in the first place.
  - mjg59 14y ago
    The person who originally complained about the speaker lineup on Twitter is an organiser of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. That conference successfully attracted a far more mixed speaker demographic. Are you implying that he was attempting to ruin the conference?
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      Well, that's what he did cause. So now he is an organiser of one conference and the ruiner (not sure English has this word) of another one. Maybe he didn't mean to. But maybe guys at the British conference didn't mean anything either.
    - youngtaff 14y ago
      To me much of this whole thing boils down to differences between the UK and the US and there respective approaches to equal opportunities and affirmative action. Similar factors were are play in the reaction to Faruk's .net article and Laura Sanders response. The US approach to diversity and equal opportunities isn't right for everyone and some people perhaps need to remember that.
danw 14y ago
What were the original tweets that caused so much trouble? I've tried to gather what I can but I don't see much 'trolling', just criticism, some polite and constructive, some less. And there's a few tweets by @britruby that have been deleted. http://www.exquisitetweets.com/collection/iamdanw/1898 http://www.exquisitetweets.com/collection/iamdanw/1898
antihero 14y ago
Greetings. As an active feminist and a Python programmer who may organise this sort of thing in the future, this is a fascinating discussion. On one hand, diversity is exceptionally important for a multitude of reasons, and there must be an effort made to make people of other ethnicities and genders feel welcome and represented. On the other hand, personally I know that "white dudes" significantly outnumber everyone else in the tech scene here in the UK. There definitely are, for instance, women who are fantastic programmers and would give amazing talks, but they may not be able to make the conference. It is also, I think, a difficult line to walk between encouraging diversity and tokenism. I think what I'll do is bring this up as a point of discussion at our next meeting (interestingly, our feminist group meets at the tech community "hub" in Brighton) and see how our members feel the best way to approach an issue such as this in a constructive and positive manner.
danw 14y ago
You are running an event. Running events is hard. You do not have money to cover upfront costs. Seek sponsorship to cover upfront costs. Sponsor is possibly concerned over conference diversity. Solutions: 1) Address sponsors concerns 2) Seek alternate sponsor without the concerns 3) Seek non-sponsorship funding (bank loan, kickstarter) 4) Cancel conference, transfer blame onto those who stated event diversity.
shawn-butler 14y ago
I guess I don't see why a conference like this even exists in 2013 anyway. If you're not trying to educate someone about some product, all these events do is serve to stroke the egos of everyone involved (see SXSWi). You don't really learn much, you pretty much network with people you already know. Just ditch this ridiculous format and the pretensions to academia or "professional" events altogether. Have a star keynote for each day, a planned, fun social "mixer", a hackathon, and space for organic groups to get together and for attendees to find them without much friction. All of this nonsense about planning for diversity is irrelevant when the activity is driven by the community and not community "leaders" (unless of course the community is actually racist which I seriously doubt in this case and which in any case disappears in the sunlight of a public event anyway).
MrKurtHaeusler 14y ago
As a white guy, I think any conference struggling to attract female speakers, probably should be canceled. It doesn't mean the conference itself or its organisers are explicitly racist or sexist, but there has to be some reason why either the topic, or the community or whatever seems so hostile to women wanting to participate. Essentially it is a symptom of a deeper issue. The fact that no women wanted to speak at the conference is a fairly clear indicator that something is sick in the community. It is just not normal. In Saudi Arabia maybe, but these days any healthy community in a modern western country should be able to attract a couple of female speakers. We have known for a while now that parts of the programming community have issues with sexism, especially the ruby community, and if it takes a few conference cancellations to get the issue discussed than that is all good. Here is an idea: The organisers should organise a Ruby Girls event or something. Main thing is, lets not pretend there is not a serious problem here, and lets do something to address it!
PaulRobinson 14y ago
Disclaimer: I know some of the BritRuby organisers personally. I haven't spoken to them in months though, so I think I can say all this without fear of being branded either an "insider" or too biased. I have been one of the most vocal critics of gender and racial bias in the programming community in the UK in the last few years. I have wrung my hands at the misogyny, the "jokes", the lack of diversity and I have spoken to as many people as I could about "what we can do to fix this". BritRuby did not - and would not - fall into this category had it proceeded with its planned line-up. There was no evidence of racial or gender bias in the line-up, because the line-up reflected the community. Are there too many fat white guys in the community? Speaking as one, yes. But conferences aren't how we fix that. To explain why that's a legitimate call, we need to look at a bit of history. First, let's go back to one of the most vocal pieces of hand-wringing - almost a milepost for critics of gender and racial diversity in conference line-ups - Chris Messina's arguments about the 2006 FOWA line-up: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-boy-clubs/ http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-bo... This piece was so controversial and so widely read at the time, that when I talked about "the fat white boy club problem" for several years later, many knew what I was talking about. As a fat white boy myself, I realised there was a germ of truth in this, but I felt Messina had tackled the problem in the wrong way. The issue of gender and racial diversity is not one that is fixable in conference line-ups. Conferences do have problems (I'll come back to that), but speaker selection at conferences is the wrong point to deal with the lack of diversity. By then - by the time somebody is qualified to talk at a conference - it's clearly too late. By definition, speakers at conferences have to be domain experts. To be domain experts they have to have worked in the domain for many years. To work in the domain for many years, they must first enter a career in that domain. To enter the domain they must be attracted to the work. In other words, if you want to increase racial and gender diversity in conference line-ups, you must first go down the stack and increase it at the entry point in the programming/tech careers. We are crap at attracting women and non-caucasians to the geek industries. So that's the problem I set out to solve (in my own small way), some years ago. I joined the Royal Society's STEMNET Ambassador programme and I went into schools around Greater Manchester (the 30-mile radius around where BritRuby was to be hosted), cheering on kids from all sorts of backgrounds to learn some coding, play with some tech under the hood, and get them to imagine what they could do. The stereotypes I had to fight were varied, and it's there the fight must take place. For example, I did a Summer school type away day programme with about 40 girls from a range of Greater Manchester schools at Salford University. Myself and the 4-5 colleagues I was working with from other companies asked them as they came into our part of the away day what careers they thought we did. One girl thought I was a crane driver (I'm a biggish bloke). When I laughed a little and explained no, I ran my own tech consultancy and helped SMEs develop ideas to go into the app store, on the web, Facebook apps, etc., etc. her jaw dropped. Later when I pointed out to another girl that she could develop her mild interest in space with perhaps a degree and career in aviation engineering and that we were about to see a boom time for people building small scale commercial space craft, I could see hope dawn on her face. Nobody had ever told her she could do that. Why was all this so odd to them? Because as a society we didn't bother telling them that these careers were for them as well. They assumed that they were out of reach for them. The news that they're for anybody came as almost a cultural shock. Another time, I did a presentation at Manchester's Muslim High School for Girls. I went in as a 30-something white fat boy agnostic with virtually nothing in common with a single person in that room. I talked about Babbage and Lovelace. I talked about Turing and the work he did a few miles up the road at Manchester University. I talked about Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates (because they're people the audience knew slightly, and knew the products they had created) and their teenage exploits. I pointed out that with a laptop or the kit in the school's computer lab and a bit a of knowledge they too could create something that could spread out over the World and change it forever. All they needed was their intelligence, their creativity and a little bit of relatively-easy-to-acquire knowledge. They ranged in age from 11-14, and I don't think a middle class white guy had ever talked to them quite like that before. The feedback after the talk I got was that they were amazed this was a possibility open to them. Imagine how my heart sank when the talk after mine that I stayed for was from British Gas telling them they could become boiler service engineers: "You get company-supplied overalls and use of a company van!" But slowly, surely, I hope through STEMNET and other programmes we'll see the number of women and non-caucasians involved in the industry increase. If every person who is reading this went and signed up for such a programme, or just phoned a school and talked about going and doing a talk, if every person who reads HN went and did this, then in 10 years time the industry would be transformed. And 10 years after that, the speaker line-ups at conferences will be transformed. And this kind of situation will never happen again. The BritRuby organisers aren't the problem. The problem is with people who aren't actively recruiting diversity into the industry. The problem is with people who think the current diversity situation is acceptable. Earlier I said there was a problem at conferences that needed addressing though. It's the content. I know the Wiki I'm about to link to gets some heat from many on HN (that heat is part of the problem, not part of the solution), but let me remind you of some of the talks that have caused us issues in the past: * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Flashbelt_slide_show http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Flashbelt_slide_show * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexist_jokes_at_JSConf http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexist_jokes_at_JSConf Fuck it, just go through these that are conf-related (there are plenty): http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents That's just the documented cases at that wiki about misogyny - race related ones aren't there (perhaps because thankfully it's less prevalent, but I'm not sure if the KKK have a programming conference arm). The number of gender and racial discriminatory incidents I've seen with my own eyes (mostly sexism rather than racism) at conferences number more than that. It's absolutely disgusting that when it's pointed out many will explain it away with the argument it's "all in the eye of the beholder" and that the critics should learn to "relax". Not cool people. Not cool. Etiquette in the Victorian sense was created as a concept that was designed to avoid embarrassing or upsetting others around you. You would eat soup a certain way so you don't make a disgusting noise everybody else had to put up with. You would bow and curtsy in different ways for different ranks of Lords, Earls and Barons to show you knew their title and their contribution to the nation. In other words, etiquette was forgetting yourself and saying to somebody else - somebody you might not even like - you matter, let's make this work, here's a little piece of theatre that shows how deep down I think you and your feelings are important to me and to everybody else. And those who were the best at etiquette became the most revered, the most liked, the most socially connected people of their era. And the society became so efficient it ended up conquering half the planet. That bit, not so good, but you get the idea. We need a little etiquette here, hackers. We need to step back and realise that whilst we might think a joke is funny, for many it is not and if we want them to feel welcome in the room, the joke should be unwelcome. You don't get to decide if the black lesbian in a wheelchair should or should not be offended by the content of a talk, you only get to decide if you care about them being offended, and so when putting together a talk, think about that. BritRuby didn't get a chance to do that. I am 100% certain any content that was discriminatory would have been canned. I am astonished they weren't given that chance, and instead were judged on an incomplete line-up. I'm hoping that in a year or two they'll try again. I'm hoping they'll get the support of the community, and if need be I'll go around the UK tech scene knocking on doors getting them some under-writing in lieu of sponsorship so they won't feel the sponsor pressure quite so much again. It's a simple pitch: "write a cheque now. It'll be returned when the conference goes ahead with full sponsor support, but your cheque under-writes them so if another Twitter furore blows up, they can ride it out". And in the meantime, let's all make sure our content isn't offensive, our doors are open, and please, please, please go out and talk to kids from a range of backgrounds about how they can get into coding: we can start today on making sure this kind of scenario is impossible to recreate in a decade.
keymone 14y ago
this is hilarious (read ridiculous) would all the pro-equality people tell me how you suggest to fix the inequality of XY chromosomes between males and females? or inequality of melanin in people's skins? or inequality of hair on our heads? demanding to have 50% male/female or black/white speakers reminds me of a joke: "- what is the chance that dinosaur will cross this road this very moment? - 50%. it will either cross or will not." rather than whine and cry about not having enough women in tech go and tell your employer to hire your female friend because she's good.

134 points by seanhandley 14y ago

TL;DR "kicking up a shitstorm on Twitter these days is easy"

danso 14y ago

A commenter on the OP said: > This is awful. The accusations are a disgrace. Have considered suing for libel? This may be actionable on Brit soil where libel laws are tougher, but not as likely in the U.S., which is a good thing. As far as I can tell from the OP, the circumstances were: 1. The lineup was indeed all white and male 2. People alleged that the organizers of being racist and sexist. The OP used the word "allegations"...and if every allegation based on the reading of the facts were grounds for libel, then most of HN discussion would be shut down. (Think about every time Zynga, Groupon, or even Apple, is discussed.) It's disconcerting to see the hacker community so blithely call for the courts to step in when freedom of expression infringes upon their viewpoint.

ceol 14y ago
Github comments are getting closer to YouTube in terms of quality— especially when an issue or gist is linked on reddit. You'll see a flood of image macros and memespeak derailing any meaningful conversation. It doesn't surprise me to read such comments. It just saddens me.

keeran 14y ago

I wish you could sue the muppets slinging mud around on Twitter etc.

petercooper 14y ago
It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may be surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types. There have been a lot of crossed wires, misinterpretations, and faux pas here which probably wouldn't have occurred in real life (or even video). Online communications, especially on Twitter, is so woefully inadequate when dealing with social issues :-(
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may be surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types." But the net result is loss of coding/development related activity in Manchester, sponsor getting wet feet, loss of credibility for future events &c Seems a shame. Note for US readers: UK is small island(s) and most of the fun stuff happens in London (my perception).
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    > Note for US readers: UK is small island(s) and most of the fun stuff happens in London (my perception). Yeah, the UK really needs events like this, because it has (in my perception, as an American) been bypassed by a lot of the latest technological advances, in terms of business opportunities. The only big British technology company I can name off the top of my head is ARM, and that's not one that your average consumer would be familiar with anyway. And ARM was founded 20+ years ago - I can't think of any recent British startups or software companies that have achieved worldwide fame.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      Umm, isn't last.fm younger?
      - r4vik 14y ago
        Datasift
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Oh, totally. But I think those are separate issues. The curious thing is it was the first serious attempt to have what I'd call a 'full scale' Ruby conference in England (other events like Ruby Manor do a great job but are unique experiences or unconference type events). Scotland Ruby Conference has done pretty well, but it's very odd that England (and London, in particularly) hasn't had any success with a large Ruby event given the huge market.
amurmann 14y ago
I wish you couldn't sue anyone for anything they say or any information they distribute. May it be a bullshit opinion or nuclear launch codes. Free speech is under attack enough. We don't need to start suing people because they voice their potentially oversensitive concerns about equality. If that happens, we soon won't be able to say anything without fear of being suit!

matthewowen 14y ago

Do people realise how offensive it is when they say things of the form "we shouldn't include a speaker who isn't a white male because that would just be tokenism, and tokenism is bad"?

angersock 14y ago
Agreed. Thankfully, the author made a somewhat subtler point--that being included because of some identity instead of skill is to be avoided. It's a small, but important, difference.
- matthewowen 14y ago
  That was actually the point that I was making, thanks. When white men say "we shouldn't include people just because of some identity" the reality that lies behind it is often that they've made no attempt to reach out to people who aren't white men. It's a perfectly reasonable argument - but it is frequently made inappropriately in an attempt to counter criticism that it doesn't really offer a valuable defence against. It's an attempt to shift the terms of the debate. I don't like it.
GuiA 14y ago
That's not what they're saying. What they're saying is: "We reached out to the best, and it turns out that the ones who accepted our offer were white males. People complained about that; but we don't want to go out of our way to find a non white male just to tick a box".
- danso 14y ago
  I wish for the OP's sake that they had included examples of non-white people they asked to attend (but who apparently couldn't make it). It'd at least give a little more insight to who they think is a good panelist. But turning the detractors' argument from "Hey, there's just white guys on this panel!" to "Hey, please include a minority so that no one's feelings are hurt" was probably the least useful way to counter the detractors.
- 14y ago

mgkimsal 14y ago

"Yes, gender equality and racial equality are important. But the team's motives were to get the best speakers who were able to make it to Manchester. Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys. ... It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style." Why do the speakers have to be famous? Frankly, probably a lot of what they've said and think on subjects is already known - they're famous already. Why not have that be less of a factor? It would probably have reduced costs some, assuming there was financial travel costs covered, and perhaps been able to focus on 'content', without respect to the fame of the speaker.

mythz 14y ago
"Why do the speakers have to be famous?" To get people to go.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Well, then they should be able to sell enough tickets to cover costs. You can't have it both ways - we want "famous" people to attract crowds (who generally pay for a ticket) but also want sponsors to cover the costs. EDIT: can't
manaskarekar 14y ago
Famous people draw crowds. Also, famous people use these conferences to talk about new interesting stuff that has not been revealed before. Also, discussing stuff with famous people one on one is much more interesting than doing it on a mailing list.

sgt 14y ago

Well put! I really hope the responsible trolls (e.g. John Susser, James A Rosen) on Twitter reflect on what they have done with their careless and frankly ignorant comments, and also that Brit Ruby 2013 finds new sponsors as soon as possible. I still believe there must be a chance Brit Ruby 2013 is going to be reality. Don't give up, guys.

jacquesm 14y ago
I'd suggest a kickstarter project for this. That way nobody is out any money until the conference is a fact. Conference goers would be given their ticket as a pay-off for sponsoring the project. Assuming that kickstarter would allow a construction like that.
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  Unfortunately it is hard to impossible to organise a conference on that basis. You need to have money down to pay for venues, etc. well in advance.
m0nastic 14y ago
I can't fathom any definition of trolling that would include any of the comments that John Susser made about this issue (there's a grand total of 6 of them). I have no doubts that once the ball got rolling, people were quick to throw around all kinds of accusations of sexism and racism (which to be fair, I don't think characterizes the Brit Ruby organizers at all.) Pointing out that an otherwise interesting conference is less interesting because of a lack of diversity of the speakers isn't trolling.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  Why is it less interesting, why does skin color matter? Would be it be less interesting if all speakers wore plain white t-shirts too? Why do you care at all about anything other than the content/experience?
  - 14y ago

luigi 14y ago

It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake. No, that doesn't make them sexist pigs. But that's a pretty serious oversight to make for the people who are curating a Ruby conference for England in the year 2012. Their sponsors are right to pull out for such an error.

Permit 14y ago
>It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake. Why is diversity a noble goal in choosing speakers? Like he said, would it have been better to choose 90% of their desired lineup and then seek to fill the remaining 10% with minority speakers just for the sake of diversity?
- kmfrk 14y ago
  luigi is not talking about filling some gender/race quota, but infers from the tone of the OP that representation of race and gender wasn't something remotely important to the organizers. It makes them indifferent to the question, not hostile. I think languages like Ruby and Python have reached a point where they are so popular and accessible that it's time to get as many people engaged in using them as possible.
  - e12e 14y ago
    > It makes them indifferent to the question, not hostile. Or ignorant of the issue. Which isn't necessarily the same as indifferent.
- nollidge 14y ago
  You may want to consider how your second sentence reads. It seems to imply that minority speakers would not be part of the desired lineup to begin with, and that they could only possibly be included "just for the sake of diversity". Anyway, it's not about saying "gee, we better pick an Indian or two to meet our quota." It's about including minorities in the pool to be considered in the first place. That few or none were chosen indicates that that probably wasn't the case. And this isn't about calling people out as big fat racists. Hardly anyone believes, in their heart of hearts, that people unlike them are inferior. But we all have unconscious biases like that[0], and many folks are starting to demand that people account for that in their decisions. [0] Plenty of people are great at lying to themselves about it, too. Search for the phrase "I'm not racist, but" on Twitter sometime.

influx 14y ago

Why is the Ruby community addicted to drama? http://rubydramas.com/ http://rubydramas.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw... http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/ruby_ruby_on_rails_and__why_the_disappearance_of_one_of_the_world_s_most_beloved_computer_programmers_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963 http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/ It feels like an abusive relationship.

knowtheory 14y ago
Hey Influx. Every community has its dramas. Ruby just likes to make ours really really public :P Ruby folks like to talk about passion for coding, so unsurprisingly controversies in Ruby are equally passionate. One thing that is very much worth noting about the Ruby community is that when controversies happen, things change. Sometimes they're things like Zed Shaw flaming out of the community (which i'm still kinda bummed about), sometimes it means organizations like Railsbridge (http://workshops.railsbridge.org/ http://workshops.railsbridge.org/ ) are formed. But these are not needless controversies with no results. This stuff matters.
- influx 14y ago
  Passion is great, but why couldn't this have happened in e-mail instead of Twitter, perhaps the OP could have e-mailed the conference organizers with some names of some great Rubyists that had been overlooked, but would give a great speech. Win-win. Instead, the conference is canceled, and no one wins. :(

__alexs 14y ago

Were they using a speaker selection system designed to try and increase equality in the line up like for example JSConf EU have in the past? 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...

galapago 14y ago

Maybe they should use double blind revision to select their talks..

SagelyGuru 14y ago

It is not ´careless words´ that caused this. After all, everyone is entitled to express their opinion. What really caused this is the climate where it is ok for women to meet without the least danger of being accused of sexism. It is the climate where it is ok for blacks to meet without any danger of being accused of racism. It is the climate where it is VERBOTEN for white guys to meet, even if the topic is something totally neutral like Ruby and the attendance is self-selected.

luigi 14y ago
Please tell me more about how awful it is to be a white guy in Western society.
- SagelyGuru 14y ago
  To all of you trying to justify this, I only have this to say. I am sorry to have to repeat the obvious but it is true and it needs to be said. The best test for injustice in all these situations, if you are unable to see it staring in your face, is just to turn it round. Imagine the best rubyists just happened to be all black and their conference was cancelled because they were all black. If you still think it was justified, I have nothing more to say except: `Please, beam me up, Scotty!'
  - deleted 14y ago
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- oh_sigh 14y ago
  Every group is concerned about their own problems. You can say the same thing to women who are fighting for gender rights "Well, you have it great, think of how bad black people have it. You have no right to complain."
- sbuk 14y ago
  How racist of you.

danso 14y ago

OK I'm going to play devil's advocate here. The OP says: >...Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys. And: > Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided. Adding a token minority speaker is offensive to that speaker, it says "You're here because you tick a box - not because you're skilled." It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style. The second point is a strawman argument (and doesn't reflect well on the OP, unfortunately). Unless the detractors were complete reprobates, I doubt their reasoning was "You guys should include a non-white female for balance's sake!" I would hope that the line of allegation (and maybe it got muddled up in tweets, as oft is the case) was: you guys did not look hard enough to find alternative viewpoints, or: you guys have a narrow viewpoint on what makes for an interesting Rubyist. Which brings me to point 1: Ruby was invented by a Japanese national. And last time the the Ruby 2.0 announcements were posted on HN, it was in Japanese. So in terms of pure white vs. non-whites, you most definitely can't say that all of the pioneers in Ruby are white, as you might be able to with other languages. That said, I don't think (again I was only playing devil's advocate) that the organizers' intentions were bad. It's within the realm of possibility that every "minority" candidate they wanted could not make the conference. Yet it's also possible the organizers have a mostly-white circle, and without prodding, are prone to select from that group...not because they're racist, but because they happen to follow these people more and thus are more aware of their achievements. That most of these people are white males is a symptom of this natural tendency to look within your clique, without racism playing any influence at all. Case in point: if you asked me to assemble a panel of top Rubyists and if I were unaware of the language's origins...I would most likely pick mostly white males and no Japanese at all. Not because I'm racist against Japanese (FWIW, I'm Asian), but because I don't speak/read Japanese, have never been to Japan, have never met other Japanese rubyists...and thus their accomplishments don't even enter my head when brainstorming top rubyists because I'm just unaware of their existence. In that case, I'd welcome people to call me out for not ever looking up who this "Matz" character is. But I'd still probably be insulted if someone just called me a racist. So maybe in the OP's case, it's true that their circle is not large enough...and yet it's not right at all to just call them racist/sexist. The end result, I'm afraid, is that despite the well-meaning parties in this fight, the problem and problematic judgment of "tokenism" will just increase. * One more point: The OP says: > Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look beneath the surface before you retweet. I'm not going to argue whether it's fair or not to expect this: but if an organizer is facing these kinds of allegations, then they can help alleviate the issue by writing a substantial post on their criteria for selecting the speakers and some examples of people they asked but who could not make it. If all outsiders see is the list of speakers as it stands, then they have to give the organizers the benefit of the doubt...which is not always going to happen...

thedufer 14y ago

Having only white male speakers is a sign that something _might_ be wrong, but it seems that a number of people took it as a sign that something _is_ wrong. If there was evidence that action was taken to avoid having minority speakers, then sure, throw a tantrum. But saying there might have been bias, so it needs to get shut down - that's not fair to anyone.

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago

I don't know what to make of this. I tend to feel that if you want to accuse someone of racism or sexism then you have to be sure it was deliberate. The accusations can be so damaging that it's irresponsible to sling them about freely without due care or thought. I don't think that playing the discrimination card before getting your facts straight is the best way to encourage improvement. In the case of the accusations made, the people making them have contributed nothing. What they have done is deny the minorities they were supposedly defending an opportunity to speak at a large conference, because the whole damn thing has been cancelled as a result.

__abc 14y ago

So, from the outside looking in knowing this is a tough subject to "sum up" in a few paragraphs ... What's the end goal? I find it incredibly more insulting, demeaning, and counter productive to include someone JUST because they are white, black, female, asian, etc. It's just as discriminatory as excluding them. In fact, in my opinion, it's far worse. It's discrimination masquerading as equality. You want everyone treated equal? Awesome. The best speakers get in, period. You vary from that in either direction, and you are embracing inequality.

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- ahelwer 14y ago
  I think HN needs to read Garann Mean's kickass blog post on "meritocracy" again: http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/ http://www.garann.com/dev/2012/you-keep-using-that-word/
  - e12e 14y ago
    Thanks for this link, hadn't seen it before. Made me go and find: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1958oct-00003 http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1958oct-00003 Which was the only freely available on line copy of the original essay I could find.

subsystem 14y ago

More than anything it seems to be a failure to communicate their intentions and/or write contracts with their sponsors.

rlpb 14y ago

Even if we had perfect gender and ethnicity equality, probability tells us that we would still expect there to be some proportion of conferences where the best available speakers are all white and male. In this case, there is self selection too. Britain is still predominantly white. And even as I accept that there must still be factors which make women feel less welcome, I remain convinced that even if no factors of unfair discrimination existed, more men than women would self-select technology careers. These factors mean that we would expect even more conferences with all white and male speakers, still without unfair discrimination. To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is textbook selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination at all. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

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anonymous3821 14y ago
Here's a question for you (no, it's not a rhetorical one--I can see the answer going either way): Is it conference organizers' responsibility to mimic the current industry (in % minorities and all)? Or, is it conference organizers' responsibility to lead the movement and adjust for where the industry should be? If you answered yes to the first one, I would like to hear your explanation on who would be a better person to lead the movement.

jlouis 14y ago

I don't get this. What should be in focus is not your gender, nor your race. It is the talk you are going to give which should be the focus. I don't care if you are a man a woman, an indian, a japanese and so on. But I deeply care about the talk being interesting. That said, I would much prefer having diversity in the speaker lineup - it makes for more interesting talks in general. I am also for biasing toward the minority: If you have, say, only one woman who applied there should be a good reason to reject her. The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable - simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are no women in the lineup. That is, you have to weigh the chance of an all-white-male lineup to occur at random toward the fact that people where chosen to be all-white-male.

a_dent 14y ago

"Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look beneath the surface before you retweet." This is the problem I have with "free" speech. Yes you can say anything you want, but the problem is that those with the audience take no responsibility or apply any judgement to the effect. Someone yelling racist epithets on their doorstep to an audience of no one is free speech. Bill O'Reilly calling for vigilante justice on Dr. George Tiller and taking zero responsibility for it is not the intent of "free speech." "And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech." - Bill O'Reilly (2006) In a similar way, this John Susser takes no responsibility for stirring up this particular storm but the effects are real. No one got killed over it but its huge disservice to an already very contentious issue. With ignorant comments like those of John Susser we won't be able to make much forward progress.

oellegaard 14y ago

Dear God! As if it wasn't hard enough to arrange a conference, apparently you have to make sure to invite every minority as a speaker at that conference too. I'm not even in the ruby community, but judging from the python/django community, assembling a team of good speakers is hard enough already.

anonymous3821 14y ago

These HN comments are some of the most disconcerting that I've seen in a long time. The amount of ignorance displayed in some of them makes me--a white male--question this community. I could only imagine what message they would send to a minority. Here's my take on a few comments in this thread. (I don't mean to single anyone out.) >>Imagine if people were criticizing a lineup because there were too many women. If our society treated males and females equally, then this hypothetical would make sense. But in a society where females face discrimination their entire lives and barriers can often prevent from reaching their potential, I think such a hypothetical is silly to bring up. It is everyone's responsibility to try to adjust for this inequality in society. That might include going out of your way as a conference organizer to encourage more qualified minorities to apply as speakers. As some HN'ers have brought up, quality will not be jeopardized in the process. >>To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is textbook selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination at all. If you notice, no one (as far as I can tell) explicitly called this discrimination. There will always be people who question the validity of things like these, and why shouldn't there be? Conferences, if they did their share of work, should be able to hold up against arguments like these (if they're invalid). Yes, statistically some conferences might have gone out of their way to find minorities and failed to do so. Looking at any single case, though, such a scenario is unlikely. One should not just say, "Oh, statistics show that this might happen by chance, and therefore no one should question the validity of the selection process." >>The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable - simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are no women in the lineup. Like before, the problem cannot be blamed on statistics. I don't believe that there will be a lot of conferences where no qualified women could present at. If they couldn't be found, I'm guessing that--most of the times--the organizers didn't look hard enough. This is just a guess, but I'm not going to assume the utopian society that others on this page have and say that everyone tries their hardest to attain diversity. >> Dear God! As if it wasn't hard enough to arrange a conference, apparently you have to make sure to invite every minority as a speaker at that conference too. Misunderstanding the issue at hand and making outrageous claims like these does not improve my opinion of HN. >> I really hope the responsible trolls... [emphasis added] Enough said. Calling people who raise valid concerns trolls (or muppets, like someone else did) is not respectful. The fact that such an ad-hominem attack on HN got upvoted to the top is shocking. >>Why should that have been their goal? This isn't a conference about racial issues or gender issues. Taken from the BritRuby's website: Our mission statement was to encourage Ruby developers to unite and create a community, which would allow such to network, exchange ideas and provoke innovation for the future of Ruby. Britain has 51% women. Women are underrepresented in the Ruby community, but there is no reason why it should stay like that. Is not anyone's job to increase the percentage of female coders. It is everyone's. HN user luigi says it better than I ever could: The act of organizing a conference makes one a leader for their technical community. We all know we have a diversity problem. And conference organizers are responsible for helping address that problem. Leaders should lead. =========== If I were pg, I would close this thread before we make a fool of ourselves even further. People are seriously questioning this community and its views on gender imbalance in technology, minorities, etc. This is not an isolated case.

javert 14y ago

What this tells me is that a significant part of the Ruby community is racist and sexist. The proper approach is to utterly ignore the race and sex of people. Anything else is racist and/or sexist.

eropple 14y ago
There's a ton of literature on the topic if you care to look, but in short: this simply does not work due to societal assumptions and levels of privilege. It's a non-starter to "not care", because privileged groups automatically get their foot in the door.
- javert 14y ago
  That's just utter nonsense. (You haven't even defined what you mean by "working" and "not working." But let's assume you mean that certain groups have an advantage in society.) I'm a white male. I'm not particularly attractive. I am not able to exhibit certain class indicators. I am not very sociable or "cool." And I don't agree with mainstream ideology. Also, I don't have many social connections. All of these are a pretty big disadvantage compared to, say, a black person with relevant social connections, or a handsome and suave white male, or an attractive female. But at the end of the day, meritocracy still rules, and if you're good enough, you can get by just fine on merit. That's just reality, and it "works" just fine. And if there is any correction I want to advocate for publicly, it's certainly towards merit and away from any other factor. Any other factor ought to be irrelevant and is just going to change the balance of unfairness rather than improve the situation. And, fortunately, in a free country (and even a semi-free country like the USA), merit is an absolutey overwhelming advantage. That doesn't mean reality is fair. It's not. It will never be. Forget "fair." What we want is for things to be just. And when you start discriminating based on race or gender, for any reason, you stop being just.
  - Total_Meltdown 14y ago
    Can we all please get over this ridiculous idea that we are perfectly rational agents in some free-market meritocratic utopia? People are irrational, biased, accident-prone, living things. That alone precludes unbiased judgements of another person's "merit". I mean, come on. We're programmers. We have jobs because of how much people screw up.

PedroBatista 14y ago

And the Al Sharptons of the web are nowhere to be seen now...

danilocampos 14y ago

Hey white dudes. I see you're pretty worked up. Non-white dude here to explain. When you're white, and you're male, technology (as a career field) is pretty accessible. And here's why. You can open up a newspaper or a tech blog or whatever, and many of the major important people in the photos staring back at you basically look like you. And that's nice, because you can be reassured that someone with your background and origins has a place in technology. If you're not male, or not white, you have to look a bit harder. Sometimes a lot harder, indeed, to find people who both look like you and are doing what you want to be doing professionally. Now, you'll give me an argument that looks just shouldn't matter. That we should look at people's minds and ideas, not their skin color, in evaluating their contributions. And while I'm sure such an ideal feels reassuring – it's bunk in this context. Diversity of "race" is really a proxy for diversity of background, experience and origins. For maximizing the varieties of life story represented. It's useful to do this because diversity of experience leads to diversity of solutions. Diversity also breeds further diversity, as people with wildly different backgrounds feel more welcome into the fold. So when we see people helping to lead a community, and some of those people aren't like the majority, that's encouraging. It says that even though a given person is "different" from the norm, they are welcome, they may be successful. Star Trek is lauded for this reason. Actor Nichelle Nichols was thinking of leaving the show. None other than Dr. Martin Luther King implored her to remain – he believed a black professional woman on television would be a crucial role model for young people. (In her childhood, Whoopi Goldberg is said to have screamed, "Hey Mom! Look! There's a black woman on the TV and she ain't no maid!") And you may argue, well, why should diversity matter? Let some people do some stuff and other people do others. And I'll tell you that position, on top of being lazy, opens us up to many missed opportunities. In technology, we want as many different sorts of humans as possible all working on our hard problems. If STEM is a country club for white guys, that leaves out a huge chunk of the population who might otherwise make great contributions. One last thing. When you say stuff like "Wull, shucks, what were they supposed to do? Find a token [non-white-male] to fill the spot?" you make it sound like you don't believe there are any people but white guys with useful things to say on the subject of the conference. Careful with that.

Camillo 14y ago
The barrier to entry to becoming a Ruby programmer is as low as can be: all you need is a laptop and internet access. You can become a celebrity without people even knowing your name, let alone your face: why_ (or _why or whatever) was at one point the biggest name in Ruby (AFAICT from outside), and he might have been a cat with a keyboard for all anyone knew. On top of that, there's plenty of famous and powerful non-white engineers. And if you don't want to look at the top, look at your peers: in my university in America, whites are the minority in most gradute CS classes. By all objective measures, this is the last industry where people should be subject to a witch-hunt and have their conference cancelled because of their speaker lineup.

lwat 14y ago

Here's my question: How many of the top 10 Ruby speakers in the UK are white males? What about the top 20? Top 50?

danso 14y ago

Sorry to make a different thread than the two others I've made, but FYI, here's was the proposed Brit Ruby 2013 lineup: http://lanyrd.com/2013/britruby/speakers/ http://lanyrd.com/2013/britruby/speakers/ It was important to see this list, for those of us who have never been, to understand if Brit Ruby includes only British speakers or Rubyists from all over. (it at least includes a few Americans) FWIW, here are a few other speaker lists for comparison: Ruby Conf 2012: http://lanyrd.com/2012/rubyconf/speakers/ http://lanyrd.com/2012/rubyconf/speakers/ Ruby Midwest: http://lanyrd.com/2011/ruby-midwest/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/ruby-midwest/ Ruby Madison (Wisc.) http://lanyrd.com/2011/madison-ruby/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/madison-ruby/ It should be noted that all of these conferences feature at least more than one non-"white guy"...but all have more speakers than did the announced lineup for Brit Ruby 2013.

jufo 14y ago
As a 60-year-old, I'm glad to see Jim Weirich in the Brit Ruby lineup :-)

willvarfar 14y ago

The big question is, who should they have invited to speak?

jballanc 14y ago

Racism and Sexism are not bad because they involve race and/or sex. They are bad because they imply that you are judging a person before first knowing that person well enough to pass sound judgment. The real lesson here is that the internet is an echo chamber for context free judgments.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

There is an old Russian joke about this: Professors of a music school gather and try to figure out who to enroll ethnicity-wise. One of them says they should accept jews for every opening because they make perfect violinists. Another one tells they should accept russians only because it's a russian state after all. Then someone offers to to accept them evenly: five jews, five russians. But then there is an argument that jews only make up ten percent of citisens and therefore for nine russians they should accept one jew. Finally, some rogue professor blames them all for being racists. What would you do!? They ask. Who to accept? "We should accept those who are the best at playing violin!" The same thing applies here, plus innocence until proven guilty. As long there are no facts that those speakers were selected by foul play, they should not cancel the conference. Anything else is racist. Regarding sponsors who pulled support: who do you think gave them this idea? I have an answer you won't like.

fatbird 14y ago
I don't know, who did give them this idea? I'm brave enough to hear an answer I might not like.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  People who occassionally consider race and sex of a person over everything else this person does.

adrianhoward 14y ago

There's some text up on the main http://2013.britruby.com/ http://2013.britruby.com/ - among other things it says: "We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue. This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of such awful things? " I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a tad... sub-optimal? In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their sex. Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota. I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049). Plenty of female speakers on the other stages too. At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year (http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013-survey/ http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-uk-2013...) and the survey has already produced some great possible speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women. Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major conference. I'd be reaching out to folk like http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/ http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/, or http://www.womenwhotech.com/ http://www.womenwhotech.com/. I'd be looking to how other folk got more great women speakers at their conferences like 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.... Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding good speakers is not as effective as it should be.

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mjg59 14y ago

https://gist.github.com/4106776#gistcomment-602103 https://gist.github.com/4106776#gistcomment-602103 is relevant, and everyone involved in this discussion should read it. The argument so far has been presented as a false dichotomy - either take the best speakers (who all happen to be white men) or accept lower quality proposals in order to ensure some token degree of representation. Those aren't the only options. It's entirely possible to obtain a larger number of speakers from minority groups in your community without compromising your conference's quality. You just need to care about things like outreach, the way you write your CFP and the presence of policies to reassure people that harassment won't be tolerated. Do that, and you'll suddenly find that you have a high quality conference with a more diverse panel of speakers.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
This is a nice example but I doubt this skill is transferrable, and anyway I don't think ruining a conference will make anybody happier. Barring a few trolls who didn't care much about Ruby in the first place.
- mjg59 14y ago
  The person who originally complained about the speaker lineup on Twitter is an organiser of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. That conference successfully attracted a far more mixed speaker demographic. Are you implying that he was attempting to ruin the conference?
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    Well, that's what he did cause. So now he is an organiser of one conference and the ruiner (not sure English has this word) of another one. Maybe he didn't mean to. But maybe guys at the British conference didn't mean anything either.
  - youngtaff 14y ago
    To me much of this whole thing boils down to differences between the UK and the US and there respective approaches to equal opportunities and affirmative action. Similar factors were are play in the reaction to Faruk's .net article and Laura Sanders response. The US approach to diversity and equal opportunities isn't right for everyone and some people perhaps need to remember that.

danw 14y ago

What were the original tweets that caused so much trouble? I've tried to gather what I can but I don't see much 'trolling', just criticism, some polite and constructive, some less. And there's a few tweets by @britruby that have been deleted. http://www.exquisitetweets.com/collection/iamdanw/1898 http://www.exquisitetweets.com/collection/iamdanw/1898

antihero 14y ago

Greetings. As an active feminist and a Python programmer who may organise this sort of thing in the future, this is a fascinating discussion. On one hand, diversity is exceptionally important for a multitude of reasons, and there must be an effort made to make people of other ethnicities and genders feel welcome and represented. On the other hand, personally I know that "white dudes" significantly outnumber everyone else in the tech scene here in the UK. There definitely are, for instance, women who are fantastic programmers and would give amazing talks, but they may not be able to make the conference. It is also, I think, a difficult line to walk between encouraging diversity and tokenism. I think what I'll do is bring this up as a point of discussion at our next meeting (interestingly, our feminist group meets at the tech community "hub" in Brighton) and see how our members feel the best way to approach an issue such as this in a constructive and positive manner.

danw 14y ago

You are running an event. Running events is hard. You do not have money to cover upfront costs. Seek sponsorship to cover upfront costs. Sponsor is possibly concerned over conference diversity. Solutions: 1) Address sponsors concerns 2) Seek alternate sponsor without the concerns 3) Seek non-sponsorship funding (bank loan, kickstarter) 4) Cancel conference, transfer blame onto those who stated event diversity.

shawn-butler 14y ago

I guess I don't see why a conference like this even exists in 2013 anyway. If you're not trying to educate someone about some product, all these events do is serve to stroke the egos of everyone involved (see SXSWi). You don't really learn much, you pretty much network with people you already know. Just ditch this ridiculous format and the pretensions to academia or "professional" events altogether. Have a star keynote for each day, a planned, fun social "mixer", a hackathon, and space for organic groups to get together and for attendees to find them without much friction. All of this nonsense about planning for diversity is irrelevant when the activity is driven by the community and not community "leaders" (unless of course the community is actually racist which I seriously doubt in this case and which in any case disappears in the sunlight of a public event anyway).

MrKurtHaeusler 14y ago

As a white guy, I think any conference struggling to attract female speakers, probably should be canceled. It doesn't mean the conference itself or its organisers are explicitly racist or sexist, but there has to be some reason why either the topic, or the community or whatever seems so hostile to women wanting to participate. Essentially it is a symptom of a deeper issue. The fact that no women wanted to speak at the conference is a fairly clear indicator that something is sick in the community. It is just not normal. In Saudi Arabia maybe, but these days any healthy community in a modern western country should be able to attract a couple of female speakers. We have known for a while now that parts of the programming community have issues with sexism, especially the ruby community, and if it takes a few conference cancellations to get the issue discussed than that is all good. Here is an idea: The organisers should organise a Ruby Girls event or something. Main thing is, lets not pretend there is not a serious problem here, and lets do something to address it!

PaulRobinson 14y ago

Disclaimer: I know some of the BritRuby organisers personally. I haven't spoken to them in months though, so I think I can say all this without fear of being branded either an "insider" or too biased. I have been one of the most vocal critics of gender and racial bias in the programming community in the UK in the last few years. I have wrung my hands at the misogyny, the "jokes", the lack of diversity and I have spoken to as many people as I could about "what we can do to fix this". BritRuby did not - and would not - fall into this category had it proceeded with its planned line-up. There was no evidence of racial or gender bias in the line-up, because the line-up reflected the community. Are there too many fat white guys in the community? Speaking as one, yes. But conferences aren't how we fix that. To explain why that's a legitimate call, we need to look at a bit of history. First, let's go back to one of the most vocal pieces of hand-wringing - almost a milepost for critics of gender and racial diversity in conference line-ups - Chris Messina's arguments about the 2006 FOWA line-up: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-boy-clubs/ http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-bo... This piece was so controversial and so widely read at the time, that when I talked about "the fat white boy club problem" for several years later, many knew what I was talking about. As a fat white boy myself, I realised there was a germ of truth in this, but I felt Messina had tackled the problem in the wrong way. The issue of gender and racial diversity is not one that is fixable in conference line-ups. Conferences do have problems (I'll come back to that), but speaker selection at conferences is the wrong point to deal with the lack of diversity. By then - by the time somebody is qualified to talk at a conference - it's clearly too late. By definition, speakers at conferences have to be domain experts. To be domain experts they have to have worked in the domain for many years. To work in the domain for many years, they must first enter a career in that domain. To enter the domain they must be attracted to the work. In other words, if you want to increase racial and gender diversity in conference line-ups, you must first go down the stack and increase it at the entry point in the programming/tech careers. We are crap at attracting women and non-caucasians to the geek industries. So that's the problem I set out to solve (in my own small way), some years ago. I joined the Royal Society's STEMNET Ambassador programme and I went into schools around Greater Manchester (the 30-mile radius around where BritRuby was to be hosted), cheering on kids from all sorts of backgrounds to learn some coding, play with some tech under the hood, and get them to imagine what they could do. The stereotypes I had to fight were varied, and it's there the fight must take place. For example, I did a Summer school type away day programme with about 40 girls from a range of Greater Manchester schools at Salford University. Myself and the 4-5 colleagues I was working with from other companies asked them as they came into our part of the away day what careers they thought we did. One girl thought I was a crane driver (I'm a biggish bloke). When I laughed a little and explained no, I ran my own tech consultancy and helped SMEs develop ideas to go into the app store, on the web, Facebook apps, etc., etc. her jaw dropped. Later when I pointed out to another girl that she could develop her mild interest in space with perhaps a degree and career in aviation engineering and that we were about to see a boom time for people building small scale commercial space craft, I could see hope dawn on her face. Nobody had ever told her she could do that. Why was all this so odd to them? Because as a society we didn't bother telling them that these careers were for them as well. They assumed that they were out of reach for them. The news that they're for anybody came as almost a cultural shock. Another time, I did a presentation at Manchester's Muslim High School for Girls. I went in as a 30-something white fat boy agnostic with virtually nothing in common with a single person in that room. I talked about Babbage and Lovelace. I talked about Turing and the work he did a few miles up the road at Manchester University. I talked about Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates (because they're people the audience knew slightly, and knew the products they had created) and their teenage exploits. I pointed out that with a laptop or the kit in the school's computer lab and a bit a of knowledge they too could create something that could spread out over the World and change it forever. All they needed was their intelligence, their creativity and a little bit of relatively-easy-to-acquire knowledge. They ranged in age from 11-14, and I don't think a middle class white guy had ever talked to them quite like that before. The feedback after the talk I got was that they were amazed this was a possibility open to them. Imagine how my heart sank when the talk after mine that I stayed for was from British Gas telling them they could become boiler service engineers: "You get company-supplied overalls and use of a company van!" But slowly, surely, I hope through STEMNET and other programmes we'll see the number of women and non-caucasians involved in the industry increase. If every person who is reading this went and signed up for such a programme, or just phoned a school and talked about going and doing a talk, if every person who reads HN went and did this, then in 10 years time the industry would be transformed. And 10 years after that, the speaker line-ups at conferences will be transformed. And this kind of situation will never happen again. The BritRuby organisers aren't the problem. The problem is with people who aren't actively recruiting diversity into the industry. The problem is with people who think the current diversity situation is acceptable. Earlier I said there was a problem at conferences that needed addressing though. It's the content. I know the Wiki I'm about to link to gets some heat from many on HN (that heat is part of the problem, not part of the solution), but let me remind you of some of the talks that have caused us issues in the past: * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Flashbelt_slide_show http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Flashbelt_slide_show * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk * http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexist_jokes_at_JSConf http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexist_jokes_at_JSConf Fuck it, just go through these that are conf-related (there are plenty): http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents That's just the documented cases at that wiki about misogyny - race related ones aren't there (perhaps because thankfully it's less prevalent, but I'm not sure if the KKK have a programming conference arm). The number of gender and racial discriminatory incidents I've seen with my own eyes (mostly sexism rather than racism) at conferences number more than that. It's absolutely disgusting that when it's pointed out many will explain it away with the argument it's "all in the eye of the beholder" and that the critics should learn to "relax". Not cool people. Not cool. Etiquette in the Victorian sense was created as a concept that was designed to avoid embarrassing or upsetting others around you. You would eat soup a certain way so you don't make a disgusting noise everybody else had to put up with. You would bow and curtsy in different ways for different ranks of Lords, Earls and Barons to show you knew their title and their contribution to the nation. In other words, etiquette was forgetting yourself and saying to somebody else - somebody you might not even like - you matter, let's make this work, here's a little piece of theatre that shows how deep down I think you and your feelings are important to me and to everybody else. And those who were the best at etiquette became the most revered, the most liked, the most socially connected people of their era. And the society became so efficient it ended up conquering half the planet. That bit, not so good, but you get the idea. We need a little etiquette here, hackers. We need to step back and realise that whilst we might think a joke is funny, for many it is not and if we want them to feel welcome in the room, the joke should be unwelcome. You don't get to decide if the black lesbian in a wheelchair should or should not be offended by the content of a talk, you only get to decide if you care about them being offended, and so when putting together a talk, think about that. BritRuby didn't get a chance to do that. I am 100% certain any content that was discriminatory would have been canned. I am astonished they weren't given that chance, and instead were judged on an incomplete line-up. I'm hoping that in a year or two they'll try again. I'm hoping they'll get the support of the community, and if need be I'll go around the UK tech scene knocking on doors getting them some under-writing in lieu of sponsorship so they won't feel the sponsor pressure quite so much again. It's a simple pitch: "write a cheque now. It'll be returned when the conference goes ahead with full sponsor support, but your cheque under-writes them so if another Twitter furore blows up, they can ride it out". And in the meantime, let's all make sure our content isn't offensive, our doors are open, and please, please, please go out and talk to kids from a range of backgrounds about how they can get into coding: we can start today on making sure this kind of scenario is impossible to recreate in a decade.

keymone 14y ago

this is hilarious (read ridiculous) would all the pro-equality people tell me how you suggest to fix the inequality of XY chromosomes between males and females? or inequality of melanin in people's skins? or inequality of hair on our heads? demanding to have 50% male/female or black/white speakers reminds me of a joke: "- what is the chance that dinosaur will cross this road this very moment? - 50%. it will either cross or will not." rather than whine and cry about not having enough women in tech go and tell your employer to hire your female friend because she's good.