> If the organizers had said "We contacted groups involved in women / minorities in computing, and they knew of no-one who was of an acceptable quality who could talk about Ruby", then personally I would accept that, and have no problem with an all white-male set of speakers.
I think then that it's fair to say that diversity in and of itself is not the goal here, i.e. you don't have an underlying reason for pursuing diversity for the sake of it.
I would note that I believe that rooting out and debugging your own cognitive biases[1] is a worthy goal, and can only commend efforts like selecting conference talks blind.
My only beef is with the intentions behind it, primarily because we need to debug this whole diversity thing before we can deal with actual racists, rather than you guys who appear to be just trying to rule yourselves out of the witch-hunt.
> I extrapolate (only by my gut instinct I will admit), that there is no reason for the distribution of people in computing to broadly follow the distribution of people in wider society.
Very well then, but this leads to some interesting questions:
* Roughly 90% of the UK population is classed as "White" or "White (Other)". Therefore, 9/10 attendants to a ruby conference in the UK should be white (they won't be). If you're totally focused on making the demographics match the general population, doesn't that mean you should be stopping non-whites at the door to make sure you have a high enough quotient of white people so that they're not just going along with the status quo? Is it conceivable that BritRuby would have been cancelled for not having enough white people?
* The largest age group in the UK is between 40 and 55, therefore the majority of attendees to a ruby conference in the UK should be in this range (they won't be, they're outnumbered by the 20-something year old programmer). Doesn't that mean you should be trying to balance the numbers out by stopping younger programmers from coming to conferences?
(These suggestions are of course absurd).
> If we need to occasionally push people to make sure they aren't just going along on auto-pilot, keeping the status quo, then all well and good.
This is not 'all well and good'. In the UK, where state education is compulsory (and legally enforced for crying out loud!) it's condescending paternalism at best. The results kind of speak for themselves here, us minorities are doing a pretty spectacular job in the UK without your help, in all sorts of fields, way out of proportion of what we should be for our numbers. If you need convincing of this, turn on your TV to any news channel or take a ride on any tube line that runs through the City. Have a walk around the campus at UCL or Imperial College and tell me with a straight face that 9/10 people you see there are "White" or "White (Other)". When the BNP worry that foreigners are taking all the good jobs, they kind of have a point (we are).
Save that paternalism for people in countries like Pakistan where there is no social mobility at all at the lowest rungs of society. Living in the UK is Star Trek levels of utopian in comparison. Some of my relatives who come over for the first time literally cry when they realize (in their own words) that "This is a country where we treat each other like human beings!". When you/we go over there with your big ideas about democracy, equality, freedom of speech etc, you're right, they're wrong, and you/we are totally correct to be paternalistic and condescending about it.
What I think you allude to and what I believe would make a hell of a lot more sense here is to encourage people from difference economic demographics to participate in technology in general, regardless of race or gender. The benefits of this to both individuals and society are easy to intuit. You'd do this through outreach at schools and other community centres etc and I believe there is already a movement underway in the UK promoting programming in schools[2]. Randomly selecting talks at a technical conference in order to account for the cognitive biases of the organisers is a noble goal, but totally inconsequential in comparison.
[1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[2] http://www.codeclub.org.uk/