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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask, what was the ruby conference drama?

I know of at least three incidents. The CouchDB talk at a Ruby conference in 2009 had soft porn pictures [1]. Another Ruby conference in 2008 offered a 'daycare' where attendees could leave their 'spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend' if they weren't interested in the conference itself. They called it a 'girlfriend daycare' which generated some controversy on a mailing list named DevChix. [2] These aren't the most objective and reliable sources, its just to give you an idea of that drama.

Also BritRuby was cancelled because the speaker list consisted entirely of white males, which is somehow a bad thing. [3]

[1] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk

[2] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/RubyFringe_offers_girlfri...

[3] http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/18/britruby-conference-felled...

> Also BritRuby was cancelled because the speaker list consisted entirely of white males, which is somehow a bad thing.

The dismissive tone is unnecessary, the matter was more complex than it seems. See here for a previous discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399848

I just read your link. So the issue is that they advertised themselves as a 'diverse conference' but didn't have a diverse speaker list. I don't typically look at race/gender when I look at speaker lists, so I didn't think it was a bad thing.

There are lots of ways to be diverse, its not just a matter of race/gender. Personally, I think diversity in race is a pretty week indicator of general diversity.

I'm stunned that RubyFringe is on this list. The writeup you linked to is brutally one-sided: the partner track ("girlfriend daycare") was conceived of, named and run by women working in the larger context of supporting a conference run by a woman who happens to be the managing partner of the original Rails dev shop.

The men who had a blast as partner track participants would agree that this controversy was the ultimate tempest in a teapot.

The name change happened because there was a conference to be run and there was no battle to be fought and won.

Luckily it didn't seem to matter as none of the DevChix folks had any intention of coming in the first place. A good time was had regardless:

http://www.rubyinside.com/rubyfringe-success-and-roundup-956...

Psstttt... don't tell anyone... but all of the conference dramas ever have been "tempests in a teapot."

Western people that don't have anything better to do than parade some misguided PC cause.

It's what passes for "action" and "making the world better" in this era.

That, and BS orchestrated rage against foreign issues they are instructed to care about by their government (Tibet, Iranian elections, etc).

Which is sad for people who remember the SDS, the Vietnam protests, and so on.

The biggest problem in many such cases isn't really the name, but the reaction to complaints. Perfectly the name would be fine from the get go, but if it wasn't, people say "hey, that's crap", organizers change it, case closed. Real crap starts when people start freaking out that "OMG feminism has gone insane!", and it's that reaction that is the real symptom of big problems. All because someone deemed the name more important than the likelihood a woman would feel welcome in the conference proper.

Similarly in the case of PyCon: joke was crap, someone called it out. Instead of an apology and admission that it shouldn't have happened, two people lost their jobs, and a lot of whistleblowers will be discouraged from speaking out. All because people think their freedom of joke making is more important than the likelihood a woman would feel welcome.

People do know those aren't complaints about direct harassment – just about a lot of individually tiny things that, once taken together, breed an atmosphere that encourages harassment and discourages participation. And sure, some women can deal with that – but they shouldn't have.

Also, a dong joke wouldn't be an issue in a perfect world, but we're not living in one.

From what I understand in the Pycon incident there was an apology and admission that it shouldn't have happened, and parties were happy with the result. The problem came later because of the tweeted picture.

The PyCon incident blew up because of the tweeted picture, which to many of us was _far_ worse than the stupid joke. Complain to the organizers, sure. Make fun of them at the conference, even.

But the tweeted picture to a large number of followers took it well into harassment, where the joke wasn't.

Hard to imagine anything more horrible or harassing than posting a photo of someone.

Do you seriously not understand that the problem is not that she "posted a photo of someone", but the context?

That photo got two people fired. Seems serious enough to me.

>Also BritRuby was cancelled because the speaker list consisted entirely of white males, which is somehow a bad thing.

The fools! Where did they go without the token woman or black or asian person?

There are many many many suitable black / Asian / woman choices for speaking at your conf. No reason to be a 'token.'

It surprises me that people can't tell the irony.

I used to be too, but doesn't any more. :(

And if you haven't gotten an application from one to do so, no need to go out of your way to have one.

If they had rejected someone for being black/asian/a woman/all the above, I would have understand the outrage. But in a field where 99% of the people active are white males in Britain, it makes less sense.

Should a conference about confucianism in China also find a western person to speak, or be cancelled?

Here's a quick quiz for you: name a woman/asian/black person that is active and does interesting things in the Python community? Here are the people that come to MY mind: 1) Guido, 2) Alex Gaynor, 3) Jacob Kaplan Moss, 4) several more white geeks.

Whereas in, say, web design circles I know far more women that do interesting things.

> Should a conference about confucianism in China also find a western person to speak, or be cancelled?

Actually, that's a pretty good idea. There are some good scholars of Confucianism who aren't Chinese, and it'd be worth getting them in.

>Here's a quick quiz for you: name a woman/asian/black person that is active and does interesting things in the Python community?

Jessica McKellar, Hilary Mason, Wesley Chun... Cancelling a conference b/c all speakers are white male is disturbing, but it's equally disturbing the idea of "token minority" is IMO.

>Here's a quick quiz for you: name a woman/asian/black person that is active and does interesting things in the Python community?

Mahdi Yusuf, Audrey Roy, Bryan Veloso, etc. You see what you have always seen. Open your eyes, there's more in front of you than what you consciously choose to know.

A Ruby conference was cancelled:

https://gist.github.com/seanhandley/4106776

And for more drama:

http://rubydramas.com

EDIT: more facts

> http://rubydramas.com

You just made my day posting this. It's absolutely hilarious!

Awesome. This is getting added to our company chatbot's little morning news report, right next to the "days since last Java exploit" one someone posted here a couple of weeks ago.

dhh really doesn't allow too many other good opinions, eh?

If I was dhh, I'd let the other smart folks have their good says without getting all defensive.

You only have to get defensive if you somehow think you are better than others. I harbor no such illusions.

There was a presentation relating CouchDB and "Performance" in a sexual way some years ago.

Sex! Mentioned in jest! Oh, the humanity!

Aren't those conferences targeted at adults? Is there some assumption in english speaking countries that the average adult is offended when he hears about sex?

Because it sure as hell doesn't hold true in most non-english speaking countries...

I think the assumption generally is that some women will feel uncomfortable with a sex jokes in an audience where they tend to be a small minority. My experience as a man is that women in groups are at least as prone to telling dirty jokes as men, but I can understand that if you're one of a handful of women in a room full of men it might feel quite different.

As the IT guy in a variety of medical offices who's known for being pretty laid back, some of the discussions that have happened when I was in the room are filthy. Also, sometimes folks forget I'm in the room.

The most memorable and amusing was the discussion by several women (some busty) of "[flopping them on the counter]", but there have also been discussions of men or parts thereof.

I live in America. It's still unclear if there's a national consensus on women being mainly sex objects with breeding potential rather than thinking, speaking human beings, and thus every woman with a brain needs to be reminded that they're properly understood to be fuckholes. Maybe in your English-speaking country, things are better?

I live in America and you're completely incorrect.

One of the first RailsConfs (perhaps even the first one) had male/female drama... There was a chatroom somewhere that people were on while the presentations were going on and some folks said some questionable things and a woman blogged about it.

I ended up having to apologize to the woman :O

2009 http://gadgetopia.com/post/6794

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