
The British Ruby Conference has been cancelled - andrewnez
http://2013.britruby.com
======
typicalrunt
Reading the twitter stream
(<https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264>), I find it odd
that one person comments that the lineup is "100% white guys", and then all of
a sudden it's a foregone conclusion that the BritRuby organizers are sexist.

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?

~~~
thisduck
If you don't have diversity as one of your goals (either from the start or
tacked on at the end) you are part of the system that perpetuates racism,
whether you like it or not.

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.

~~~
apawloski
I'm sorry for whoever downvoted you for disagreeing with them. Normally we're
better than that.

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.

~~~
mjg59
Year after year, new people start running conferences. And year after year,
people have to point out that running a conference while paying no attention
to diversity will (a) ensure that your conference fails to represent whatever
diversity _already_ exists in your community, and (b) do nothing to encourage
further diversity in your community. It's unsurprising that the people who've
been making these arguments over that time get frustrated - they've had to
keep on making them in the face of wave after wave of naive conference
organiser.

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.

~~~
apawloski
I'm not disagreeing with your first paragraph -- that's what I was trying to
acknowledge in my original post.

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.

~~~
mjg59
Oh, it's definitely a combination of the two that engenders change. If the
calm, reasoned position is the only one expressed, the compromise position
will never reach it. You need an extreme position in order to shift public
perception to the point where the calm, reasoned position _is_ the compromise
position.

------
blacktulip
I am a ticket holder. I can not understand even a little bit the reason why it
get cancelled. If I get it right, the reason is there are not enough female
speakers? Seriously, if that is not gender inequality then what is?

------
mgkimsal
Having just finished a conference yesterday - <http://indieconf.com> \- I feel
like throwing in a few words on speaker selection. OK, maybe a whole bunch, as
I blogged about this a couple weeks ago:

[http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-
speak...](http://indieconf.com/2012/how-does-a-conference-select-speakers/)

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>

------
hopeless
I'm pretty furious about this. I was really forward to having a reasonably-
accessable world-class ruby conference in UK. I'm really only care about
whether the speakers are interesting and that I can learn from their talk.

I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the
quality of speakers.

~~~
mgkimsal
Race and gender can be (generally _are_ ) used by potential attendees to
determine what comfort level they'd have at an event like that. The more
people you can get to your event, generally the better the outcome will be -
increased connections, networking and exchange of ideas from a broader range
of people.

I made an earlier comment about my recent experiences organizing a conference,
and linked to my blog which touched on this very reason.

~~~
hopeless
Thanks, I hadn't considered that, and it's a good point.

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

~~~
mgkimsal
Speakers != audience all the time - the audience won't be an exact match for
the speaker demographics. But having done this for a bit, I've had enough
feedback that indicates that having a more balanced/diverse set of speakers is
a signal to a wider audience that there will more likely be a wider range of
attendees to socialize and network with. Again, yes, not 100% all the time.

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.

------
mjg59
Paying attention to diversity doesn't mean picking worse proposals. It means
ensuring that minority groups in your community submit proposals in the first
place. It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to
sound less confident and may understate the value of their content. It means
ensuring that your conference has a clear statement of supporting members of
minority groups who may feel uncomfortable in a space dominated by white men.

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.

~~~
markshead
>It means being aware that proposals written by minorities are likely to sound
less confident and may understate the value of their content.

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.

~~~
mjg59
Because there's strong social pressure that encourages anyone other than white
men to sound less confident about their ability. Failing to take that into
account means that you're not actually engaging in meritocracy.

~~~
twoodfin
There is? Is that pressure getting stronger or weaker? How will we know when
it no longer exists?

------
instakill
People will whine about anything, unfortunately they'll do so into the
amplifier that is Twitter. On behalf of everyone that was going to go (myself
excluded), thanks for nothing you whinging, impatient keyboard-slacktivists.

------
betageek
This is very disappointing, the community has moved from calling out concrete
examples of sexism to dog piling on anything where a circumstantial case can
be made. Not very MINSWAN*

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

------
blacktulip
<https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/270221926490857474>

"#BritRuby’s decision to cancel was thought-out and based mainly on financial
implications that arose from what happened on Twitter"

------
nathan_f77
It's sad how much damage can be caused by the ripple effect. First the
sexualized presentations and sexist invitations, and now the TSA-style
response to every hint of sexism. Conference organizers shouldn't have to
worry about forcing diversity into their line-up. It starts with schools and
universities, and every child having equal opportunities to tinker with
computers.

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!

------
juliendorra
These two posts from actual successes building more gender balanced tech
conferences will give a better perspective on the core issue (gender and
ethnic diversity):

"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...](http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-
got-25-percent-women-speakers.html)

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...](http://geekfeminism.org/2012/05/21/how-i-got-50-women-speakers-at-
my-tech-conference/)

To summarize, it takes lot of effort and thought. But it's totally doable with
outreach + anonymization.

------
peteforde
I was the curator and co-organizer of RubyFringe and FutureRuby in Toronto.
I'm really sorry to hear that folks organizing BRC felt so beat down by
negativity that cancelation was the best option. Most people simply do not
appreciate the hundreds of unpaid hours of work that are required to pull off
a good event.

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

<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.

~~~
tomstuart
I helped to organise the last Ruby Manor conference
(<http://rubymanor.org/3>). As an experiment, we built a web app
(<http://vestibule.rubymanor.org/>) which allowed anyone to submit, discuss
and vote for proposals. When voting closed, the 8 most popular proposals were
automatically selected.

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.

~~~
Niten
Is it brash to suggest that maybe those "8 white guys" actually did have the
most merit out of all candidate speakers, and that you would have done the
conference a disservice by bumping one of them for someone else, based on sex
or gender alone?

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.

~~~
rhizome
I think a simple estimate of the composition of the "most merit of all
candidate speakers" could be to compile statistics of the contributors to the
1000 most popular gems and rails-core, or something similar. There's more heat
than light in this controversy, and for a discipline that prioritizes CS
techniques as a proxy for skill the flashlight is readily at hand.

~~~
peteforde
While I appreciate that you're looking for solutions instead of trying to
amplify the finger-pointing, the approach you are imagining is not going to
generate a very good speaker line-up.

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/sieger-jazzers-programmers)

<http://www.infoq.com/presentations/hirsh-california-ideology>

~~~
rhizome
It wasn't meant to generate a line up, only to provide some idea of
demographics. You have to start somewhere, even if only to figure out how true
"curating on merit gives you white guys" is.

------
fjfish
I worked with what became the Brit Ruby team on the Magrails conference last
year, which did have a female speaker in the form of the excellent Rachel
Davies, who is a leading Agile coach

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.

------
matthewrudy
Can anyone explain what happened?

~~~
andrewnez
It seemed because of complaints regarding race/gender diversity of speakers on
twitter.

I think it started with this tweet:
<https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264>

~~~
veeti
Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire
conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some
nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup?

He's making this up in his own mind. Who's the real discriminator here?

~~~
masklinn
> Am I just missing something here or did they seriously cancel an entire
> conference just because of some random dude on Twitter imagining some
> nonexistent racism/sexism in the speaker lineup?

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)

------
JimmyL
If you're a conference organizer and struggling to find local women to speak
at your event, it's often worth putting in a call to your local Google office.
If you can show that your event has a decent level of organization & chance of
success, they have a well-established Diversity Grant program where they'll
give conferences funding to fly in and house prominent female speakers which
smaller conferences often wouldn't have the budget to do.

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.

------
riazrizvi
Awesome example of awful business writing.

------
nihar
Here's a thought - why not make the speaker selection process double blind,
like medical trials. Whoever is reviewing submissions, should not have access
to the authors' info. Though this is not perfect, it does provide a way for
conference organizers to silence all criticism about demographics...
#justathought

------
micmakarov
They should have invited Matz

~~~
blacktulip
They did, Matz has not replied yet
<https://twitter.com/BritRuby/status/269853833503588352>

------
tinco
Black people and women are so linguist. Not submitting talk proposals to Ruby
conferences is just disrespectful.

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 :)

~~~
petercooper
It's irrelevant anyway since BritRuby didn't get a chance to pick proposals
and announce speakers.

They were criticized on their invite list rather than their chosen proposals
which were never made public :-(

~~~
tinco
Wow.. that's even more sad than I thought.

btw, thanks for scrolling down to see my comment, it was lonely down here :D

~~~
petercooper
Haha, I did see it at the time, but on a revisit I noticed your update so I
thought it was worth pointing out ;-)

