The Go team had nothing to do with the organization of the conference. The gophercon organizers decided who got the keynotes. From an external viewpoint, Googl

The Go team had nothing to do with the organization of the conference. The gophercon organizers decided who got the keynotes. From an external viewpoint, Google the corporation has two influences. Firstly, it employs the language leaders (i.e. Russ). Secondly, Google frequently hires/gives to the Go team experts in some particular field in order to improve the implementation. For example transforming GC for the 1.5 release or moving to SSA for 1.6. As a result, Google probably has a big influence on what the important tasks are to work on. That said, it is still open source, and so outside contributors can still work on what they consider important. For example, the shared library development was all external.