I don't pretend to know if the conferences mentioned in the story are exclusionary or just choosing the best speakers. The only thing I'll say is that speaking

I don't pretend to know if the conferences mentioned in the story are exclusionary or just choosing the best speakers. The only thing I'll say is that speaking or joining a panel at a small conference often leads to speaking at bigger conferences and keynote appearances. If I was looking for speakers for my conference, I'd check their proposals to see if they had spoken at other conferences. But at this point, whose judgement am I relying on? Not mine, of course. I'm relying on the judgement of other conference organizers who in turn probably relied on the judgement of other conference organizers. This isn't really a system based on merit, though it appears to be. It's more based on who had an initial connection or a good PR guy to get access to that first conference spot. I'm not entirely sure what we do about this problem, just pointing out that there's a problem here.