The British Ruby Conference has been cancelled
2013.britruby.com
2013.britruby.com
Even @johnsusser is a bit much with his comment: @BritRuby I don't think adding diversity at the end works. You have to start with it as one of your goals. Who wants to be the token female?
IMHO, I find that sentence insinuating that, unless you start with diversity as your goal, you are just racist/sexist/-ist. This is the wrong approach from the start; just perform a call for papers process and take the best ones.
If one looks at the speaker list, they seem to be from non-3rd world countries. Where are the dirt poor people speaking at this conference? I'm going onto Twitter to state that BritRuby is class-ist.
And while we're at it, I'm pretty sure (but I'm guessing here) that all of the speakers can speak. That's quite discriminatory to those people who cannot speak, but can code in Ruby.
Should I continue or can we just get on with the conference and be inclusive, instead of this faux discrimination bullshit?
2010: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist."
2011: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist."
2012: "We're not racist, but oh look, we organized yet another conference with 100% white guys, wonder why that happened. But really, we're not racist."
Yeah, okay.
I think diversity is a worthwhile goal for a conference, but we shouldn't throw around these labels so freely (and incorrectly).
So yeah, you do end up with a problem if somehow, conference after conference, we only field white guys.
Got any sources for your <60-70% in the Ruby community?
I would link to wikipedia for some verification of that feeling but all I could fine were biased feminist articles on that topic.
Half of all people are women. !caucasians and !males are probably at least 30% of the industry, especially when you consider how minorities are overrepresented.
This is the problem with the programming community we need to fix.
GB is only about 10% non-white and last statistic I saw on gender was that only 1.5% of people participating on open source projects (world wide) were female.
"So yeah, you do end up with a problem if somehow, conference after conference, we only field white guys."
I agree with you. But in this case, racist and sexist are not appropriate terms unless you believe that speakers were actually excluded based on race or gender.
Also, when you begin a post that is meant to argue against discrimination and prejudice with "Listen, white guy", it might be time to step away from the keyboard for awhile...
It is racist, and/or sexist. It's just a kind of wholesale discrimination, visavis the retail, personalized kind of racism/sexism we're more accustomed to.
It's not intentionally evil, there may not be any malice behind it, but it's still… discriminatory.
As white dudes, it's especially hard to see as we're largely unaffected by it, blah blah privilege, etc.
If you artificially make minorities (based on the community's demographics) a majority on the selection committee, in the hope they will select speakers that more closely mirror the larger community, and if they pick more speakers who are members of minority groups, how do you know they aren't being subconsciously racist/reverse-racist in exactly the same way you're complaining about whites/males being racist?
How do you objectively evaluate the race-blind quality of a set of potential speakers if your claim is that everyone on any possible selection committee is potentially subconsciously biased?
What if you make an effort to select speakers that mirror the demographics of the larger community, and conference attendees rate this new anti-racist conference lower than they rated the last ("racist") one? Is this demographics equality campaign to be pursued at the expense of attendees' perceived value of the conference?
Make sure you pick two or three females for at least every eight to seven males. Aim for as high a mix as you can.
>how do you know they aren't being subconsciously racist/reverse-racist in exactly the same way you're complaining about whites/males being racist?
That's easy; there's no such thing as 'reverse racism'. There's discrimination, and anyone can be discriminated against. Furthermore, few if any conferences are organized in the matter you described. There's no selection committee. Only 1-to-3 people are involved picking speakers.
>How do you objectively evaluate the race-blind quality of a set of potential speakers if your claim is that everyone on any possible selection committee is potentially subconsciously biased?
You misunderstand my claim. My claim isn't that people are subconsciously biased, my claim is conference after conference filled with white dudes is a sign the conference speakers aren't doing their jobs of presenting their audiences with the widest range of interesting ideas.
>Is this demographics equality campaign to be pursued at the expense of attendees' perceived value of the conference?
This assumes that your pool of potential speakers is only slightly larger than the number of speaker slots. There are fewer potential female speakers, but this does not automatically mean that you can't provide a full slate of A+ speakers - only that you have to work a little harder at it.
See: http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got... and http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got...
That's tragic, and in that case I agree that underrepresentation is a problem, but I don't agree that organizers are discriminating if they don't make that extra personal effort to reach out to potential presenters from underrepresented groups.
I agree there should ideally be more encouragement, but I don't think it should be required for conference organizers to do that, to avoid allegations of discrimination.
So, it gets more complicated than that.
Most conferences can't fill their rosters via just calls for proposals. Instead, it is the director of speakers that has to individually invite speakers to attend. As a result, they tend to be dominated by people they know, which tend to be white men.
The only way to escape being dominated by your social network is to invest the extra energy.
Here are a few shows that were also not diverse enough for my liking: London Boat show - too many white males http://www.londonboatshow.com/2013/whats_on/attractions__eve...
British Educational Training and Technology Show - not a single person with a double barrel name :( http://www.bettshow.com/Conferences-Features
The baby show - only females speaking. This is COMPLETELY unacceptable. This show should NOT go ahead. Refunds all around http://www.thebabyshow.co.uk/excel/new-parent/for-baby
Professional Beauty- not enough males http://www.professionalbeauty.co.uk/page.cfm/Link=149/nocach...
/sarcasm
Selecting qualified underrepresented people would not be racist or sexist. Ending up with white men all the time would be. And we should throw these labels around, this is something that should be discussed and addressed in variety of ways.
I won't accept any accusation of racism or sexism until I see a message from a minority that says, 'I have been disrespected on the count of me being a minority at this conference, and the organisation did nothing to make sure this would not happen again'.
There being 100% white guys is not a problem. It is a problem when a black woman goes there, and she feels disrespected because of her sex or race.
Tell me how a conference that is only attended by white men perpetuates racism? It just doesn't make sense, you should listen to Morgan Freeman more.
A system where the speakers are just randomly chosen from a pool of people who submitted papers would definitely not be racist or sexist, but it probably wouldn't meet your definition of diversity. (Probably wouldn't make for a very good conference either.)
A fair system is one where race and sex do not influence the selection criteria. It cannot have diversity listed as a goal. If it is a goal then you have created a racist, sexist system for selecting who gets to speak.
I'm on the fence for the kind of thinking you suggest.
On one hand, the phenomenon you describe does happen -- it's what MLK referred to as "the mythical concept of time." That if an un(der)represented group just waits patiently, they'll be alright. The idea that they'll get rights when the courts decide so, or that they'll get a decent education when they test well enough, or that they'll get reasonable jobs when they can afford to commute there.
I think people get upset about these observations because they think the observer is attributing malice. "Racist" is a strong term that elicits an emotional response -- people thinking of the Deep South in the 50s. I don't think that the British Ruby Conference planned on an all-white all-male conference, and I don't think any reasonable person believes that they explicitly denied presenters because they were black, or hispanic, or gay, etc.
But it's also true that year after year we see this. To be transparent, as a white male, I sympathize with meritocratic thinking ("the best person should get the job"). And I understand why people get upset over affirmative action-like policies. But what we're doing now isn't working, and I don't know the answer.
What I do know is that both sides need to be able to acknowledge that there are reasonable views and goals across the board in this debate. The emotional language that comes with this is polarizing, and people are defensive, and people are indignant, etc. We need to discuss this reasonably, and this is a forum that should be able to, but frequently doesn't.
Sometimes an emotional response is justified. Sometimes rational discussion gets you nowhere. Sometimes it really is just time for people to say that they are sick of this bullshit and they aren't going to take it any more. In this case, the conference organisers clearly weren't acting in bad faith - but nor had they put even the most cursory effort into making themselves aware of the issue. That shouldn't be considered acceptable behaviour these days, and if rational discourse hasn't led to it being considered unacceptable then maybe emotional responses will do.
And I think there are many people who share the viewpoint of your second paragraph. Personally I don't think I do -- compromise is rarely made in the name of strong emotion. But I understand where these feelings come from. After all, for every MLK there is a Malcolm X. Maybe it's a combination of these forces that facilitates change. I have no idea, and can't speak about much else other than the fact that there are reasonable goals on both sides of this debate. We should be working towards them.
In addition you are arguing in front of a forum where people value rational speech and good arguments. Throwing a tantrum is not the way to get anything done here.
Finally you seem to assume that there is some way to convince your opponents. I agree that it seems likely, but how is it certain? And what gives you the right to go of the rails and decide what should be considered acceptable behaviour? That seems strongly opposed to the culture of freedom that has permated the hacker culture since it first escaped the wrath of the operators back in the early sixties.
Correlation is not causation. It is perfectly possible that the best papers (by whatever metric) were submitted by white guys. So if that was the case, and they selected the best papers then they would end up with 100% white guys.
If you make diversity a goal, then you potentially reduce the resulting quality. A technological conference should care about the papers' quality and nothing else. I would not mind if it would be 40% transsexuals, 30% furries in pony dresses and 30% carribean housewifes because to me, that is completely irrelevant and not something I care about.
I have no idea about this conference, ruby or anything else.
On the other hand, I upvoted your comment because it is a more reasoned argument. There's no right or wrong answer when someone charges another person with racism, unless it is overwhelmingly obvious (re: your 1950s example).
Charging the BritRuby organizers with racism is a harsh indictment, and I would feel profoundly hurt if that charge was levelled against me. Now that the charge is out there against BritRuby, what are they to do about it? They can't "show their work" in choosing the speakers, because it acknowledges that they might have been racist to begin with, and nobody will do that. If they stay quiet, they have to contend with people like 'thisduck'.
@apawloski you make the right call that one needs to step back and reassess the situation from an objective standpoint before using the word 'racism'. Sometimes admitting that you don't know the answer is the first step to actually getting the conversation started.
Lastly there's a voice in the back of my head saying that, based on the way people are saying that having x% white people at a conference is sign of racism[1], I'm not sure if I should ever submit an application to speak. I'm "white", but I don't want to be charged with being racist or taking a 'non-white's' speaker slot because I happened to want to speak at a conference. Now, what do I do?
It's now my turn to be naive: I honestly didn't think my skin colour and willingness to share information with others would be seen as a sign of racism.
[1] where x >= .... what's the right number? is it 50%, 80%, 1%?
The only reason that strategy sometimes works (and it does by no means work in all cases, just see what happened to Pompey the Great when he tried it) is that there is some kind of punishment for those who are against you.
If you want to win people over, don't be combative. Stand firm on your belief but hand over olive branch after olive branch -- people that will give people plenty of opertunities to change their minds and will leave a favourable impression, which will be useful later.
What you have just done is the opposite of helping your cause.
So if you want to have more diverse people speaking at conferences, make sure you get more diverse people interested in school. Don't give a conference flak because biases in school and society have emptied their prospective diverse speakers to a pool of zero people.
You can't possibly think that there are no non-white or non-male developers qualified to speak at this conference.
http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-speak...
For my perspective, the idea of only opening up a call for speakers and just 'picking the right ones' doesn't work very well. Or at least, I don't think it works very well for conferences just starting off which don't have a lot of reputation to fall back on. Borrowing some of this reputation by getting some 'superstar' speakers might help a bit, but if you do that before a CFS, you've already done some preselection.
From year one, I had a call for speakers process open, but I also had some particular speakers I wanted to talk on specific topics. I had probably half the speakers/topics nominally on board (not officially at that point) during the first year CFS, and fleshed out the rest of the slots with submissions - some of which were really good angles I hadn't thought of.
However, imo, the role of a conference organizer is largely curation of an experience, and you have to have an idea of what you want that experience to look like early on. And for me, gender is a factor - it's not a major one, but I made sure to encourage some females in my network to submit. At the same time, there were some submissions and applications from females that I didn't bring on board the conference this year, because they didn't quite fit the vibe I was shooting for.
Anyhow, sorry to see they've cancelled this. I know all too well how hard it is to organize something, and to be discouraged enough to pull the plug like this was certainly not fun or easy for the organizers. I wish them luck in future projects like this.
EDIT: Couple more thoughts - how you run the event the first year has an impact on how people view your event in subsequent years. I get props every year on the food, but mostly because I take the extra 10 minutes to organize vegan and gluten-free options, and I get people coming back partially based on the fact that I've done that (had people buy tickets and tell me that). Example: https://twitter.com/alanstevens/status/269856351214268416
I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the quality of speakers.
I made an earlier comment about my recent experiences organizing a conference, and linked to my blog which touched on this very reason.
Although perhaps I'm an oddity: I rarely see myself as among the speakers so I don't look at them as a guide. Also, I've been to "gender-equal" conferences where almost the only women there were speakers. So speakers != audience
FWIW, at indieconf we had about 30% of the speakers were female. About half of the attendees were female as well. Interestingly 30% answered the 'gender' question as female - 30% answered 'male', 30% left blank - I'm assuming based on names given about half of the remaning were also female - that's where I'm getting the ~50% were female.
Can't really tell if it was world-class though.
Accessible in my case was not (just) about money but also about time and convenience
I'd far prefer one in England mostly out of convenience, but Scotland does have a pretty good one, to be fair.
If your defence against claims of your conference lacking diversity is "Well, all our proposals came from white men", that's your fault. Countless other technical conferences around the world can attract proposals from community minorities. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.
Why do you assume that the color of someone's skin will make them less capable of writing a good, confident proposal for a conference. You are suggesting that you weight the value of the proposal based on the race of the person who submitted it.
The only solution I can see is to make the process 100% transparent and show all invitations and refusals online - maybe even move to a voting system a la SXSW.
*Matz (the inventor of Ruby) is nice so we are nice
"#BritRuby’s decision to cancel was thought-out and based mainly on financial implications that arose from what happened on Twitter"
Does anyone have evidence that the @BritRuby organizers intentionally excluded anyone? Has anyone ever said 'I am an experienced Ruby developer and speaker, but I feel that I was excluded based on my race or gender"?
If you really care about the issue, then there are far more productive ways to shift the balance than posting comments on twitter. I think the cancellation is a ridiculous over-reaction, and I still don't understand why 100% white males is a big deal. My Ruby meetup group is diverse, but noone is there because they feel the need to represent their race or gender. We're just all interested in Ruby!
"Beating the Odds — How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012" http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got...
They were themselves inspired by:
"How I Got 50% Women Speakers at My Tech Conference" http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speake...
To summarize, it takes lot of effort and thought. But it's totally doable with outreach + anonymization.
Several aspects of this controversy don't sit well with me, however. First off, since when does the curation of a conference have to follow someone else's value system? It's very simple: the people that organize an event should work hard to put together the most interesting line-up they can. It's then up to the potential attendees to decide if the event is worth their time to attend. That's it; there are no more rules!
If you want to solicit proposals for talks, go ahead. If you like some of them, give them a shot at speaking. If you decide that none of them match your curatorial agenda, then thank them warmly for their submission and move on. You aren't obligated to take proposals at all, and you're certainly not obligated to make your decision process transparent or part of some laborious community democracy. In fact, I would guess that one strongly opinionated curator will put together a far more coherent line-up than any popularity contest ever could. If you're looking for inspiration, consider asking attendees from previous years if they'd like to consider "leveling-up" to speaker.
When I put together our speaker lists, it wasn't arbitrary and much like test driven development we didn't just start emailing random smart people. We started with strong themes for the entire event, ideals that could pull together folks and be both entertaining and challenging. Those themes directed our branding, our choice of talks and the after-hours entertainment, which in our world is just as vital to the conference experience as anything else.
Not all meritocracy is bad. Conference curation is one such domain where winning has far more to do with subject diversity, pacing and the element of surprise than arbitrary quotas for gender, race, age or class ever could.
I'd say that the best metaphor for future curators to use is building a deck of Magic the Gathering cards. You need the right balance of mana, summon and sorcery cards. There are five colors but to be effective you choose 1 or perhaps 2 at most. And most importantly, you design your deck around a theme which is based on a hypothesis for winning which you think brings something new to the table. Most of the strategy for winning at MtG happens before game play starts, and if everyone had a say in how you built your deck, it wouldn't be very fun to play with such an unnecessarily shitty deck. You could call it the "Stop Hitting Yourself!" deck.
There's a difference between fighting for a developer community free of sexist bullshit, and pretending that a conference built on arbitrary values for diversity is automatically better than one where you nail a theme and everyone leaves happy. Those who disagree are likely to simply skip my conferences, and that's perfectly fine.
Finally, we did both of those events with no sponsorships. We cost less than an O'Reilly-backed RailsConf event and we provided logo-free swag, great wifi, amazing food, three nights of entertainment with an open bar and we helped speakers with travel and lodging while still managing to break even. It's simply not true that you can't do a successful conference without sponsors. You just have to charge money to attend, and be prepared to help those who are having financial issues find ways to volunteer.
http://www.rubyinside.com/rubyfringe-success-and-roundup-956...
http://unspace.ca/blog/rubyfringe-what-now
http://railspikes.com/2008/7/27/rubyfringe-recap-and-slides
RubyFringe and FutureRuby are two of the things in my life that I am most proud of. My heart goes out to the organizers of BRC, and I encourage you all to try again next year but ignore the noise and focus on building the best deck ever seen.
The result? 8 white guys giving talks (http://rubymanor.org/3/videos).
We’re going to try something different next time, but who knows if that’ll work any better.
Whatever racial or gender or economic biases might exist that influence the shape of the global developer community, these need to be addressed at the source: in kids' youth when many programmers take on computers as their lifelong obsession, or in high school curricula and college programs.
The conference organizer's job, as it pertains to race and gender bias, is to provide a neutral selection process that chooses the best speakers on their own merits. Their job is not to diminish the quality of the conference by imposing their own, nobly intended but horribly misguided, form of bias on the candidates. More than hurting just the conference or the candidates, I fear that this can have serious unintended consequences relating to public perception of the quality of e.g. female programmers, in the same way that "affirmative action" does on college campuses.
There are a huge number of variables to consider when planning a speaker line-up. As I said before, the best conferences are carefully crafted around a theme or issue. Even in the case of a regional conference, it doesn't require that the speakers live nearby. Just selecting popular, smart or friendly devs is not a theme unless your theme is "Random". :)
Sometimes there's a milestone library or development approach that you want to shine a light on. Perhaps 5 of the top 10 gems are template engines or test frameworks, and in 2012 that's a dull theme. Factually, some developers are great speakers, but many are not able or willing to give a good talk. Some speakers are amazing but have nothing interesting to show off or discuss.
Some speakers live far away or have special needs. You might be able to afford and accomodate one or three, but a roster of expensive tickets would make the event lose money.
However, the biggest reason that the algorithmic curation approach is not going to work is that curation is less like selling seats on a plane and more like making a mix tape for a fickle lover. You need to delight, surprise and enrapture people. A month after the event, they remember not what was said but how they came away feeling. It's hard but worth it to find ways to inject ideas that people are not expecting.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/glouberman-noises
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/sieger-jazzers-programmer...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/hirsh-california-ideology
This is a reasonable thing to say now. We've come a long way.
I know the guys had the (perhaps unstated) ambition to get as many of the Ruby Rogues in a room and create the largest conference in Europe. The Rogues are all men, but if you listen to the podcast you will know that they all care deeply about these issues and have taken steps themselves in events they organise to make sure that there is no bias.
I was the old guy in the corner with Magrails and it was me who originally mooted the idea. I do remember we had some pressure from sponsors to do things like drive traffic to their websites, I was all for returning the cash and doing without their support because it was so annoying, we were creating a space for the community to gather and talk about Agile development using Rails and if we weren't driving traffic maybe they needed to make their product more compelling instead of blaming us. ;)
If I had still been on the team I would have been arguing strongly to tell the nay sayers to get their own ass in gear and submit proposals, or shut up, assuming they weren't themselves the white guys they seem to see everywhere.
The reason for sponsorship was to keep the ticket cost somewhere affordable by the jobbing developer, while still being able to pay for accommodation for the speakers. I know that a lot of people will come and talk anyway, self funding, but it's a big ask if you want some of the leaders from the US to come. Plus the cost of decent sized venues in Manchester is not cheap. Putting on Magrails cost a lot, let me tell you, and we have less than £100 left in the bank account.
I think it started with this tweet: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264
He's making this up in his own mind. Who's the real discriminator here?
According to https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912 sponsors pulled out. It's not mentioned at all in TFAA though, so I'd don't know if the explanation's legit (and why they went with a non-explanation instead if it is)
Sane people of different hues are probably doing something more interesting - reading Ruby books, writing Ruby code, or just having a life.
Short version: they’d invited all white male speakers; people complained about it on Twitter; the organisers got disheartened and called the whole thing off.
ETA: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264, https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360
ETA: “@Rebeccask Due to sexist & racist remarks made on twitter last night got way out of hand. Sponsors pull out. No money no conf” (https://twitter.com/Rebeccask/status/270220165344550912)
Interestingly, it's run totally separate from their normal event sponsorship program. A friend was organizing a local Ruby conference and couldn't get any monetary sponsorship from Google (they said they needed six to eights months lead time to budget for it), but in a month or so turned around a diversity grant package to bring in female speakers and attendees that was worth several times the financial sponsorship that was initially asked for.
edit: Just found out raganwald submitted a talk proposal to BritRuby. Turns out my racist general remark was entirely misguided and black people might actually not be linguist at all. A shame his talk wasn't accepted. I'd like to hear more about method combinators :)
They were criticized on their invite list rather than their chosen proposals which were never made public :-(
btw, thanks for scrolling down to see my comment, it was lonely down here :D