
Why Brit Ruby 2013 was cancelled and why this is not ok - seanhandley
https://gist.github.com/4106776
======
influx
Why is the Ruby community addicted to drama?

<http://rubydramas.com/>

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html)

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/ruby_ruby_on_rails_and__why_the_disappearance_of_one_of_the_world_s_most_beloved_computer_programmers_.html)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963>

<http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/127984254/>

It feels like an abusive relationship.

~~~
knowtheory
Hey Influx.

Every community has its dramas. Ruby just likes to make ours really really
public :P

Ruby folks like to talk about passion for coding, so unsurprisingly
controversies in Ruby are equally passionate.

One thing that is very much worth noting about the Ruby community is that when
controversies happen, things change. Sometimes they're things like Zed Shaw
flaming out of the community (which i'm still kinda bummed about), sometimes
it means organizations like Railsbridge (<http://workshops.railsbridge.org/> )
are formed.

But these are not needless controversies with no results. This stuff matters.

~~~
influx
Passion is great, but why couldn't this have happened in e-mail instead of
Twitter, perhaps the OP could have e-mailed the conference organizers with
some names of some great Rubyists that had been overlooked, but would give a
great speech. Win-win. Instead, the conference is canceled, and no one wins.
:(

------
rlpb
Even if we had perfect gender and ethnicity equality, probability tells us
that we would still expect there to be some proportion of conferences where
the best available speakers are all white and male.

In this case, there is self selection too. Britain is still predominantly
white. And even as I accept that there must still be factors which make women
feel less welcome, I remain convinced that even if no factors of unfair
discrimination existed, more men than women would self-select technology
careers.

These factors mean that we would expect even more conferences with all white
and male speakers, still without unfair discrimination.

To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is textbook
selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination at all.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias>

------
guard-of-terra
There is an old Russian joke about this:

Professors of a music school gather and try to figure out who to enroll
ethnicity-wise. One of them says they should accept jews for every opening
because they make perfect violinists. Another one tells they should accept
russians only because it's a russian state after all. Then someone offers to
to accept them evenly: five jews, five russians. But then there is an argument
that jews only make up ten percent of citisens and therefore for nine russians
they should accept one jew.

Finally, some rogue professor blames them all for being racists. What would
you do!? They ask. Who to accept?

"We should accept those who are the best at playing violin!"

The same thing applies here, plus innocence until proven guilty. As long there
are no facts that those speakers were selected by foul play, they should not
cancel the conference. Anything else is racist.

Regarding sponsors who pulled support: who do you think gave them this idea? I
have an answer you won't like.

~~~
fatbird
I don't know, who did give them this idea? I'm brave enough to hear an answer
I might not like.

~~~
guard-of-terra
People who occassionally consider race and sex of a person over everything
else this person does.

------
danilocampos
Hey white dudes. I see you're pretty worked up. Non-white dude here to
explain.

When you're white, and you're male, technology (as a career field) is pretty
accessible. And here's why. You can open up a newspaper or a tech blog or
whatever, and many of the major important people in the photos staring back at
you _basically_ look like you. And that's nice, because you can be reassured
that someone with your background and origins _has a place in technology_.

If you're not male, or not white, you have to look a bit harder. Sometimes a
lot harder, indeed, to find people who both look like you and are doing what
you want to be doing professionally.

Now, you'll give me an argument that looks just shouldn't matter. That we
should look at people's minds and ideas, not their skin color, in evaluating
their contributions.

And while I'm sure such an ideal feels reassuring – it's bunk in this context.

Diversity of "race" is really a proxy for diversity of background, experience
and origins. For maximizing the varieties of life story represented.

It's useful to do this because diversity of experience leads to diversity of
solutions. Diversity also breeds further diversity, as people with wildly
different backgrounds feel more welcome into the fold.

So when we see people helping to lead a community, and some of those people
aren't like the majority, that's encouraging. It says that even though a given
person is "different" from the norm, they are welcome, they may be successful.

Star Trek is lauded for this reason. Actor Nichelle Nichols was thinking of
leaving the show. None other than Dr. Martin Luther King implored her to
remain – he believed a black professional woman on television would be a
crucial role model for young people. (In her childhood, Whoopi Goldberg is
said to have screamed, "Hey Mom! Look! There's a black woman on the TV and she
ain't no maid!")

And you may argue, well, why should diversity matter? Let some people do some
stuff and other people do others. And I'll tell you that position, on top of
being lazy, opens us up to many missed opportunities. In technology, we want
as many different sorts of humans as possible all working on our hard
problems. If STEM is a country club for white guys, that leaves out a huge
chunk of the population who might otherwise make great contributions.

One last thing. When you say stuff like "Wull, shucks, what were they supposed
to do? Find a token [non-white-male] to fill the spot?" you make it sound like
you don't believe there are any people _but_ white guys with useful things to
say on the subject of the conference. Careful with that.

~~~
Camillo
The barrier to entry to becoming a Ruby programmer is as low as can be: all
you need is a laptop and internet access. You can become a celebrity without
people even knowing your name, let alone your face: why_ (or _why or whatever)
was at one point the biggest name in Ruby (AFAICT from outside), and he might
have been a cat with a keyboard for all anyone knew.

On top of that, there's plenty of famous and powerful non-white engineers. And
if you don't want to look at the top, look at your peers: in my university in
America, whites are the minority in most gradute CS classes.

By all objective measures, this is the _last_ industry where people should be
subject to a witch-hunt and have their conference cancelled because of their
speaker lineup.

~~~
danso
They didn't "have their conference cancelled". They cancelled it because they
felt pressure from their sponsors. Without more example or explanation, we
have to take them at their word that the pressure was on level with a witch-
hunt. If that's the case, that is indeed a poor state of affairs in terms of
open debate and civility.

~~~
MrKurtHaeusler
If I organised a conference, and failed to attract a single female speaker,
especially in a community where sexism is a sensitive issue, I would
immediately decide to cancel it of my own volition. I don't want to contribute
to the type of things that make women feel excluded.

~~~
Evbn
So if women choose not to be included on your activity, you would cancel it,
because women would feel excluded? OK....

If I never took part in anything that didn't attract females (that were not
family), I would have never learned anything, or seen any movies, or eaten any
food...

~~~
Kaworu
That's a bit of a disingenuous comparison. Organizing a conference that should
be representative of a very large, diverse community is not quite the same as
organizing personal activities.

------
sgt
Well put!

I really hope the responsible trolls (e.g. John Susser, James A Rosen) on
Twitter reflect on what they have done with their careless and frankly
ignorant comments, and also that Brit Ruby 2013 finds new sponsors as soon as
possible.

I still believe there _must_ be a chance Brit Ruby 2013 is going to be
reality. Don't give up, guys.

~~~
m0nastic
I can't fathom any definition of trolling that would include any of the
comments that John Susser made about this issue (there's a grand total of 6 of
them).

I have no doubts that once the ball got rolling, people were quick to throw
around all kinds of accusations of sexism and racism (which to be fair, I
don't think characterizes the Brit Ruby organizers at all.)

Pointing out that an otherwise interesting conference is less interesting
because of a lack of diversity of the speakers isn't trolling.

~~~
ricardobeat
Why is it less interesting, why does skin color matter? Would be it be less
interesting if all speakers wore plain white t-shirts too? Why do you care at
all about anything other than the content/experience?

~~~
m0nastic
Your comment implies that you think that content/experience is orthogonal to a
diverse speaker group.

I strongly disagree. I think a diverse speaker group leads to overwhelmingly
better content and experience.

I think this extends much further than gender or race, however. I think this
extends to the totality of human experience. I have a great interest in seeing
the technical community encompass as wide a range of people as possible.

I want this partly for reasons of equality and fairness, and partly for purely
selfish motivations (plainly that I want to work in an industry made up of
people with a wider range of experiences, it makes me happier).

I think conflating a desire to see a diverse population of speakers to
people's t-shirts probably means that you and I aren't going to see eye to eye
on this subject. Which is fine, as I don't think you're a racist, or sexist,
or a terrible person.

I do feel pretty confident betting that in 200 years, we'll see a much more
heterogeneous makeup of both speakers and conference attendees, regardless of
whether an active effort is made to make that so (it'll happen eventually).

Some might say if that's the case eventually, than shouldn't people just
pretend that it's the case now (in which case drawing attention to gender and
race is actually doing more harm than good).

I'd argue that if people agree that that's what the future is going to look
like, and by most accounts, that seems like a better future, than why the hell
aren't we doing more to turn the present into that future.

~~~
ricardobeat
A diverse population doesn't necessary mean different skin colors. In this
case diversity, to me, would mean people that work on different technologies,
proprietary vs open-source, web/mobile/enterprise etc, small studios vs big co
vs freelancers; it's a software conference. I don't give a damn what a speaker
looks like, and also don't have any reason to assume they share anything
besides being british and liking Ruby. And what about women, why did nobody
complain?

I do support pro-activity measures in education/work, but I don't think being
conscious (or "pro-active") about inequality all the time does much good for
equality either.

~~~
m0nastic
A diverse population absolutely means different skin colors. And different
genders; and different income brackets; and different religions (including
lack thereof).

The world is an incredibly diverse place. Full of people, all with different
experiences. I argue that the more all of those people get exposure to one
another, the more we can all learn from one another.

And I don't mean in a "everyone has an interesting life story to tell" way. I
mean that our experiences absolutely inform our thoughts and decisions. This
is as true for thoughts on technology as it is for any others.

Everything that you (and by you, I mean all of us) have to say, everything
that has shaped your outlook on the world (including but not limited to
technology) is inexorably linked to the sum total of things which have
happened to you.

And if I grew up somewhere else, or am of a different gender, or have a
different religion, than that's less total perspective that I have to inform
my decisions.

So I don't care what specifically a speaker looks like; but I do care that
huge sections of the population are way less likely to be sharing their
experiences.

And if you read the tweets which seemed to cause all of this, the overwhelming
majority are people complaining about a lack of women, including numerous ones
listing groups and people the con organizers could reach out to if they wanted
help in trying to make the speakers more diverse (advice the organizers
seemingly took to suggest that they should select some woman speakers to
"balance out the male-heavy selection"; which isn't what was offered).

I can appreciate that you don't think every situation should be an excuse to
rail against inequality, but I think it's important to be conscious of these
things.

~~~
ricardobeat
Well, we don't seem to be talking about the same thing; I was talking of a
diverse population in the context of a technology conference. Despite personal
contact being a huge part of it, the focus for presentations is on technology,
not people. Selecting for cultural diversity is not a goal - it could be, but
it shouldn't be a crime if it isn't.

------
__abc
So, from the outside looking in knowing this is a tough subject to "sum up" in
a few paragraphs ...

What's the end goal? I find it incredibly _more_ insulting, demeaning, and
counter productive to include someone _JUST_ because they are white, black,
female, asian, etc. It's just as discriminatory as excluding them.

In fact, in my opinion, it's far worse. It's discrimination masquerading as
equality.

You want everyone treated equal? Awesome. The best speakers get in, period.
You vary from that in either direction, and you are embracing inequality.

------
FuzzyDunlop
I don't know what to make of this. I tend to feel that if you want to accuse
someone of racism or sexism then you have to be sure it was deliberate. The
accusations can be so damaging that it's irresponsible to sling them about
freely without due care or thought.

I don't think that playing the discrimination card before getting your facts
straight is the best way to encourage improvement. In the case of the
accusations made, the people making them have contributed _nothing_. What they
have done is deny the minorities they were supposedly defending an opportunity
to speak at a large conference, because the whole damn thing has been
_cancelled_ as a result.

------
danso
A commenter on the OP said:

> _This is awful. The accusations are a disgrace. Have considered suing for
> libel?_

This may be actionable on Brit soil where libel laws are tougher, but not as
likely in the U.S., which is a good thing. As far as I can tell from the OP,
the circumstances were:

1\. The lineup was indeed all white and male 2\. People alleged that the
organizers of being racist and sexist.

The OP used the word "allegations"...and if every allegation based on the
reading of the facts were grounds for libel, then most of HN discussion would
be shut down.

(Think about every time Zynga, Groupon, or even Apple, is discussed.)

It's disconcerting to see the hacker community so blithely call for the courts
to step in when freedom of expression infringes upon their viewpoint.

~~~
ceol
Github comments are getting closer to YouTube in terms of quality— especially
when an issue or gist is linked on reddit. You'll see a flood of image macros
and memespeak derailing any meaningful conversation.

It doesn't surprise me to read such comments. It just saddens me.

------
oellegaard
Dear God! As if it wasn't hard enough to arrange a conference, apparently you
have to make sure to invite every minority as a speaker at that conference
too. I'm not even in the ruby community, but judging from the python/django
community, assembling a team of good speakers is hard enough already.

------
thedufer
Having only white male speakers is a sign that something _might_ be wrong, but
it seems that a number of people took it as a sign that something _is_ wrong.
If there was evidence that action was taken to avoid having minority speakers,
then sure, throw a tantrum. But saying there might have been bias, so it needs
to get shut down - that's not fair to anyone.

------
SagelyGuru
It is not ´careless words´ that caused this. After all, everyone is entitled
to express their opinion.

What really caused this is the climate where it is ok for women to meet
without the least danger of being accused of sexism. It is the climate where
it is ok for blacks to meet without any danger of being accused of racism. It
is the climate where it is VERBOTEN for white guys to meet, even if the topic
is something totally neutral like Ruby and the attendance is self-selected.

~~~
luigi
Please tell me more about how awful it is to be a white guy in Western
society.

~~~
SagelyGuru
To all of you trying to justify this, I only have this to say. I am sorry to
have to repeat the obvious but it is true and it needs to be said.

The best test for injustice in all these situations, if you are unable to see
it staring in your face, is just to turn it round. Imagine the best rubyists
just happened to be all black and their conference was cancelled because they
were all black. If you still think it was justified, I have nothing more to
say except: `Please, beam me up, Scotty!'

------
antihero
Greetings. As an active feminist and a Python programmer who may organise this
sort of thing in the future, this is a fascinating discussion. On one hand,
diversity is exceptionally important for a multitude of reasons, and there
must be an effort made to make people of other ethnicities and genders feel
welcome and represented. On the other hand, personally I know that "white
dudes" significantly outnumber everyone else in the tech scene here in the UK.
There definitely are, for instance, women who are fantastic programmers and
would give amazing talks, but they may not be able to make the conference. It
is also, I think, a difficult line to walk between encouraging diversity and
tokenism.

I think what I'll do is bring this up as a point of discussion at our next
meeting (interestingly, our feminist group meets at the tech community "hub"
in Brighton) and see how our members feel the best way to approach an issue
such as this in a constructive and positive manner.

------
jlouis
I don't get this. What should be in focus is not your gender, nor your race.
It is the talk you are going to give which should be the focus. I don't care
if you are a man a woman, an indian, a japanese and so on. But I deeply care
about the talk being interesting.

That said, I would much prefer having diversity in the speaker lineup - it
makes for more interesting talks in general. I am also for biasing toward the
minority: If you have, say, only one woman who applied there should be a good
reason to reject her.

The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable -
simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then
there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are
no women in the lineup. That is, you have to weigh the chance of an all-white-
male lineup to occur at random toward the fact that people where _chosen_ to
be all-white-male.

------
javert
What this tells me is that a significant part of the Ruby community is racist
and sexist.

The proper approach is to utterly ignore the race and sex of people. Anything
else is racist and/or sexist.

~~~
eropple
There's a ton of literature on the topic if you care to look, but in short:
this simply does not work due to societal assumptions and levels of privilege.

It's a non-starter to "not care", because privileged groups automatically get
their foot in the door.

~~~
javert
That's just utter nonsense.

(You haven't even defined what you mean by "working" and "not working." But
let's assume you mean that certain groups have an advantage in society.)

I'm a white male. I'm not particularly attractive. I am not able to exhibit
certain class indicators. I am not very sociable or "cool." And I don't agree
with mainstream ideology. Also, I don't have many social connections.

All of these are a pretty big disadvantage compared to, say, a black person
with relevant social connections, or a handsome and suave white male, or an
attractive female.

But at the end of the day, meritocracy still rules, and if you're good enough,
you can get by just fine on merit.

That's just reality, and it "works" just fine.

And if there is any correction I want to advocate for publicly, it's certainly
towards merit and away from any other factor. Any other factor ought to be
irrelevant and is just going to change the balance of unfairness rather than
improve the situation.

And, fortunately, in a free country (and even a semi-free country like the
USA), merit is an absolutey overwhelming advantage.

That doesn't mean reality is fair. It's not. It will never be. Forget "fair."
What we want is for things to be just.

And when you start discriminating based on race or gender, _for any reason,_
you stop being just.

~~~
Total_Meltdown
Can we all please get over this ridiculous idea that we are perfectly rational
agents in some free-market meritocratic utopia? People are irrational, biased,
accident-prone, living things. That alone precludes unbiased judgements of
another person's "merit".

I mean, come on. We're programmers. We have jobs because of how much people
screw up.

~~~
javert
I don't disagree with anything you're saying.

------
jballanc
Racism and Sexism are not bad because they involve race and/or sex. They are
bad because they imply that you are judging a person before first knowing that
person well enough to pass sound judgment.

The real lesson here is that the internet is an echo chamber for context free
judgments.

------
luigi
It's rather clear through their actions and words that the organizers didn't
have the goal of diversity when choosing the speakers. That was their mistake.

No, that doesn't make them sexist pigs. But that's a pretty serious oversight
to make for the people who are curating a Ruby conference for England in the
year 2012. Their sponsors are right to pull out for such an error.

~~~
angersock
To play devil's advocate for a moment--would you rather go to a conference
with diversity as its goal, or one with quality speaking?

(And I'm not suggesting either is the worse choice, or that they are mutually
exclusive!)

~~~
knowtheory
Then why are we speculating about counter-factuals?

There are women in the Ruby community, and they are interesting speakers who
have done interesting work. There's no need to ask folks to prevaricate about
whether diversity or quality are at odds.

~~~
oh_sigh
Yes, there are women in the Ruby community who fit that criteria. But the
question isn't whether there are women, it's how many of them are there vs how
many men are there with similar qualifications? If there are 100 men for every
10 women (which doesn't seem too far off based on my experience), then it
isn't unrealistic to have a panel of 6 composed entirely of men with no gender
discrimination taking place.

------
__alexs
Were they using a speaker selection system designed to try and increase
equality in the line up like for example JSConf EU have in the past?

[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)

------
betageek
TL;DR "kicking up a shitstorm on Twitter these days is easy"

------
a_dent
"Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look
beneath the surface before you retweet."

This is the problem I have with "free" speech. Yes you can say anything you
want, but the problem is that those with the audience take no responsibility
or apply any judgement to the effect. Someone yelling racist epithets on their
doorstep to an audience of no one is free speech. Bill O'Reilly calling for
vigilante justice on Dr. George Tiller and taking zero responsibility for it
is not the intent of "free speech."

"And if I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes.
Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech." - Bill O'Reilly (2006)

In a similar way, this John Susser takes no responsibility for stirring up
this particular storm but the effects are real. No one got killed over it but
its huge disservice to an already very contentious issue. With ignorant
comments like those of John Susser we won't be able to make much forward
progress.

------
keeran
I wish you could sue the muppets slinging mud around on Twitter etc.

~~~
petercooper
It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may be
surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not
brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types.

There have been a lot of crossed wires, misinterpretations, and faux pas here
which probably wouldn't have occurred in real life (or even video). Online
communications, especially on Twitter, is so woefully inadequate when dealing
with social issues :-(

~~~
keithpeter
" _It's tricky. I know most of the people involved on both sides and you may
be surprised to learn almost all of them are decent, every day people, and not
brogrammers, militant feminists, or typical 'argument on Twitter' types._ "

But the net result is loss of coding/development related activity in
Manchester, sponsor getting wet feet, loss of credibility for future events &c
Seems a shame.

Note for US readers: UK is small island(s) and most of the fun stuff happens
in London (my perception).

~~~
petercooper
Oh, totally. But I think those are separate issues.

The curious thing is it was the first serious attempt to have what I'd call a
'full scale' Ruby conference in England (other events like Ruby Manor do a
great job but are unique experiences or unconference type events). Scotland
Ruby Conference has done pretty well, but it's very odd that England (and
London, in particularly) hasn't had any success with a large Ruby event given
the huge market.

~~~
lazyatom
This is orthogonal to the main point of this thread, but since Ruby Manor has
been mentioned, and Peter doesn't read my blog (which is fair enough):
<http://interblah.net/ruby-manor-is-not-an-unconference>

Just for completeness sake, there was also a successful RailsConf Europe in
London, and a well-received Rails Underground too. I therefore assume that
'full scale' must mean something quite specific. Anyway, as I said,
orthogonal.

I'm aware of and not fan of the gravitational well that London influences, and
definitely agree that it would be great to have events all over the UK. It's a
shame that BritRuby isn't going ahead, whatever the reasons.

~~~
petercooper
I subscribe to almost no Ruby blogs anymore! :-) But I _had_ seen your post
once before. In my defence I said "or" and Ruby Manor has seemed to me,
wrongly or rightly, to be in the "unique experience" group (where I'd also
include JSConf and RubyFringe).

By 'full scale' I did mean something reasonably specific, yes: a typically
annual multi-day event with at least a few hundred attendees, a large numbers
of sessions (or a very strong single track) focused on the topic at hand, a
commercial presence or influence, and a sizeable number of well known speakers
or attendees.

RubyConf, Scotland Ruby Conference and RubyKaigi would be examples of events
like that.

I don't have anything against smaller or more creative conferences (and
frequently support them!) but they _tend_ to emphasize socializing rather than
business. With a family and a business to run, by necessity I go to
conferences 50% for business and 40% for networking, and 10% for socializing.
So if I can't do business there, it's a really hard sell in terms of time and
leaving my wife stranded with the kids.

This might be unfair to Ruby Manor, and sorry if it is, but I got the
impression Ruby Manor would be more like a fun day out for my personal
enjoyment than one I can justify to my wife, daughter, business and the tax
man. That's really the line I'm drawing.

(I had forgotten Rails Underground so thanks for bringing it up. It did tick a
lot of boxes - just a shame it didn't run again(!))

------
shawn-butler
I guess I don't see why a conference like this even exists in 2013 anyway. If
you're not trying to educate someone about some product, all these events do
is serve to stroke the egos of everyone involved (see SXSWi). You don't really
learn much, you pretty much network with people you already know.

Just ditch this ridiculous format and the pretensions to academia or
"professional" events altogether. Have a star keynote for each day, a planned,
fun social "mixer", a hackathon, and space for organic groups to get together
and for attendees to find them without much friction.

All of this nonsense about planning for diversity is irrelevant when the
activity is driven by the community and not community "leaders" (unless of
course the community is actually racist which I seriously doubt in this case
and which in any case disappears in the sunlight of a public event anyway).

------
mgkimsal
"Yes, gender equality and racial equality are important. But the team's
motives were to get the best speakers who were able to make it to Manchester.
Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who
said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys.

... It doesn't matter who speaks at a conference, as long as they're capable,
interesting and relevant. That's what matters: content, not style."

Why do the speakers have to be famous? Frankly, probably a lot of what they've
said and think on subjects is already known - they're _famous_ already. Why
not have that be less of a factor? It would probably have reduced costs some,
assuming there was financial travel costs covered, and perhaps been able to
focus on 'content', without respect to the fame of the speaker.

~~~
mythz
"Why do the speakers have to be famous?"

To get people to go.

~~~
mgkimsal
Well, then they should be able to sell enough tickets to cover costs. You
can't have it both ways - we want "famous" people to attract crowds (who
generally pay for a ticket) but also want sponsors to cover the costs.

EDIT: can't

------
matthewowen
Do people realise how offensive it is when they say things of the form "we
shouldn't include a speaker who isn't a white male because that would just be
tokenism, and tokenism is bad"?

~~~
GuiA
That's not what they're saying.

What they're saying is: "We reached out to the best, and it turns out that the
ones who accepted our offer were white males. People complained about that;
but we don't want to go out of our way to find a non white male just to tick a
box".

~~~
juridatenshi
I'm kind of skeptical that they even tried to reach out to diverse people. For
example, Keavy McMinn indicated on twitter they never asked her. She's a very
well known and liked speaker in the Ruby community and lives relatively close
by. If you largely reach out to white guys, of course that's who you'll end up
with.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
I'm not sure I like this argument. Because one woman (who from your comment I
presume everyone should know about - I don't know her) said they were never
approached, this means the organisers intentionally selected (using your
words) 'non-diverse' people?

~~~
juridatenshi
Their argument was that there were only white guys available from the list of
popular ruby presenters. I'm saying they may not have tried very hard to reach
out if they didn't even ask a closeby popular presenter (yet they asked a ton
of white guys from the US). There were others that also weren't approached - I
mentioned Keavy specifically because she spoke about it publicly.

------
MrKurtHaeusler
As a white guy, I think any conference struggling to attract female speakers,
probably should be canceled.

It doesn't mean the conference itself or its organisers are explicitly racist
or sexist, but there has to be some reason why either the topic, or the
community or whatever seems so hostile to women wanting to participate.
Essentially it is a symptom of a deeper issue.

The fact that no women wanted to speak at the conference is a fairly clear
indicator that something is sick in the community. It is just not normal. In
Saudi Arabia maybe, but these days any healthy community in a modern western
country should be able to attract a couple of female speakers.

We have known for a while now that parts of the programming community have
issues with sexism, especially the ruby community, and if it takes a few
conference cancellations to get the issue discussed than that is all good.

Here is an idea: The organisers should organise a Ruby Girls event or
something.

Main thing is, lets not pretend there is not a serious problem here, and lets
do something to address it!

------
danso
OK I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

The OP says:

> _...Turns out, a lot of the famous Rubyists are white guys and all of the
> ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys._

And:

> _Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided. Adding a token minority
> speaker is offensive to that speaker, it says "You're here because you tick
> a box - not because you're skilled." It doesn't matter who speaks at a
> conference, as long as they're capable, interesting and relevant. That's
> what matters: content, not style._

The second point is a strawman argument (and doesn't reflect well on the OP,
unfortunately). Unless the detractors were complete reprobates, I doubt their
reasoning was "You guys should include a non-white female for balance's sake!"
I would hope that the line of allegation (and maybe it got muddled up in
tweets, as oft is the case) was: you guys did not look hard enough to find
alternative viewpoints, or: you guys have a narrow viewpoint on what makes for
an interesting Rubyist.

Which brings me to point 1: Ruby was invented by a Japanese national. And last
time the the Ruby 2.0 announcements were posted on HN, it was in Japanese. So
in terms of pure white vs. non-whites, you most definitely can't say that all
of the pioneers in Ruby are white, as you might be able to with other
languages.

That said, I don't think (again I was only playing devil's advocate) that the
organizers' intentions were bad. It's within the realm of possibility that
every "minority" candidate they wanted could not make the conference. Yet it's
also possible the organizers have a mostly-white circle, and without prodding,
are prone to select from that group...not because they're racist, but because
they happen to follow these people more and thus are more aware of their
achievements. That most of these people are white males is a _symptom_ of this
natural tendency to look within your clique, without racism playing any
influence at all.

Case in point: if you asked me to assemble a panel of top Rubyists and if I
were unaware of the language's origins...I would most likely pick mostly white
males and no Japanese at all. Not because I'm racist against Japanese (FWIW,
I'm Asian), but because I don't speak/read Japanese, have never been to Japan,
have never met other Japanese rubyists...and thus their accomplishments don't
even enter my head when brainstorming top rubyists because I'm just unaware of
their existence.

In that case, I'd welcome people to call me out for not ever looking up who
this "Matz" character is. But I'd still probably be insulted if someone just
called me a racist. So maybe in the OP's case, it's true that their circle is
not large enough...and yet it's not right at all to just call them
racist/sexist. The end result, I'm afraid, is that despite the well-meaning
parties in this fight, the problem and problematic judgment of "tokenism" will
just increase.

* One more point: The OP says:

> _Please: think before you speak. Investigate before you judge. And look
> beneath the surface before you retweet._

I'm not going to argue whether it's fair or not to expect this: but if an
organizer is facing these kinds of allegations, then they can help alleviate
the issue by writing a substantial post on their criteria for selecting the
speakers and some examples of people they asked but who could not make it. If
all outsiders see is the list of speakers as it stands, then they have to give
the organizers the benefit of the doubt...which is not always going to
happen...

~~~
tyre
That isn't a strawman argument: the point that the detractors were making was
"This is not the correct assortment of speakers because there aren't enough of
X race or Y sex."

They are arguing against speakers only because of their race and gender. Would
more diversity be welcome in the Ruby community? Absolutely, but judging a
speaker based on their race and gender is idiotic - it says nothing about what
they'll bring to the table.

Imagine if people were criticizing a lineup because there were too many women?
We would flip a shit - and rightly so! Pointing out verbally militant
discrimination that causes a conference to be cancelled isn't a strawman, it
is a reality.

~~~
danso
> _That isn't a strawman argument: the point that the detractors were making
> was "This is not the correct assortment of speakers because there aren't
> enough of X race or Y sex."_

Was that the detractors' point? I can't tell because the OP doesn't link to
any. But just to be clear, I think there is a difference between:

1) Why is this panel completely made up of white males? 2) There aren't enough
of people of x/y category

Argument #2 is, I think everyone here agrees, is not a strong one, since this
wasn't a conference to discuss diversity issues.

Argument #1, however, could be countered with examples of people they asked
but who could not make it. And I for one would completely understand if they
wanted to invite Japanese Rubyists, but could not because of schedule
conflicts or costs. I don't know enough about Brit Ruby to see if it's meant
to be just a local gathering of all-Brits...and even if that were the case,
the U.K. strikes me as a very diverse place where it would be odd to see any
group that was just all of one demographic.

i don't think the OP's intentions are bad and I don't think it's right to
fault someone for being a poor debater when their heart is in the right place.
But Argument #1 does not equal #2 (though obviously, the two are somewhat
correlated)

To your point: > _Imagine if people were criticizing a lineup because there
were too many women? We would flip a shit - and rightly so! Pointing out
verbally militant discrimination that causes a conference to be cancelled
isn't a strawman, it is a reality._

Well, unless the conference were depicted as "The Women of Ruby", I most
definitely would question a general Ruby conference in which all the top
panelists were females (or Japanese. Or Japanese females), especially given
the demographic of computer science. This same demographic makes it more
likely that an all-male Ruby panel could be selected, but doesn't
automatically invalidate questions about its makeup.

------
danso
Sorry to make a different thread than the two others I've made, but FYI,
here's was the proposed Brit Ruby 2013 lineup:

<http://lanyrd.com/2013/britruby/speakers/>

It was important to see this list, for those of us who have never been, to
understand if Brit Ruby includes only British speakers or Rubyists from all
over. (it at least includes a few Americans)

FWIW, here are a few other speaker lists for comparison:

Ruby Conf 2012: <http://lanyrd.com/2012/rubyconf/speakers/>

Ruby Midwest: <http://lanyrd.com/2011/ruby-midwest/>

Ruby Madison (Wisc.) <http://lanyrd.com/2011/madison-ruby/>

It should be noted that all of these conferences feature at least more than
one non-"white guy"...but all have more speakers than did the announced lineup
for Brit Ruby 2013.

~~~
jufo
As a 60-year-old, I'm glad to see Jim Weirich in the Brit Ruby lineup :-)

------
mjg59
<https://gist.github.com/4106776#gistcomment-602103> is relevant, and everyone
involved in this discussion should read it. The argument so far has been
presented as a false dichotomy - either take the best speakers (who all happen
to be white men) or accept lower quality proposals in order to ensure some
token degree of representation. Those aren't the only options. It's entirely
possible to obtain a larger number of speakers from minority groups in your
community without compromising your conference's quality. You just need to
care about things like outreach, the way you write your CFP and the presence
of policies to reassure people that harassment won't be tolerated. Do that,
and you'll suddenly find that you have a high quality conference with a more
diverse panel of speakers.

~~~
guard-of-terra
This is a nice example but I doubt this skill is transferrable, and anyway I
don't think ruining a conference will make anybody happier. Barring a few
trolls who didn't care much about Ruby in the first place.

~~~
mjg59
The person who originally complained about the speaker lineup on Twitter is an
organiser of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. That conference successfully
attracted a far more mixed speaker demographic. Are you implying that he was
attempting to ruin the conference?

~~~
youngtaff
To me much of this whole thing boils down to differences between the UK and
the US and there respective approaches to equal opportunities and affirmative
action.

Similar factors were are play in the reaction to Faruk's .net article and
Laura Sanders response.

The US approach to diversity and equal opportunities isn't right for everyone
and some people perhaps need to remember that.

------
anonymous3821
These HN comments are some of the most disconcerting that I've seen in a long
time. The amount of ignorance displayed in some of them makes me--a white male
--question this community. I could only imagine what message they would send
to a minority.

Here's my take on a few comments in this thread. (I don't mean to single
anyone out.)

>>Imagine if people were criticizing a lineup because there were too many
women.

If our society treated males and females equally, then this hypothetical would
make sense. But in a society where females face discrimination their entire
lives and barriers can often prevent from reaching their potential, I think
such a hypothetical is silly to bring up.

 _It is everyone's responsibility to try to adjust for this inequality in
society._ That might include going out of your way as a conference organizer
to encourage more qualified minorities to apply as speakers. As some HN'ers
have brought up, quality will not be jeopardized in the process.

>>To pick out a single conference in our industry with this property is
textbook selection bias [1] and doesn't demonstrate any kind of discrimination
at all.

If you notice, no one (as far as I can tell) explicitly called this
discrimination. There will always be people who question the validity of
things like these, and why shouldn't there be? Conferences, if they did their
share of work, should be able to hold up against arguments like these (if
they're invalid).

Yes, statistically some conferences might have gone out of their way to find
minorities and failed to do so. Looking at any single case, though, such a
scenario is unlikely. One should not just say, "Oh, statistics show that this
might happen by chance, and therefore _no one_ should question the validity of
the selection process."

>>The problem is statistics. If there are only a few women who are applicable
- simply due to the sad fact that there are so few women in the field - then
there will be a lot of conference where random selection will mean there are
no women in the lineup.

Like before, _the problem cannot be blamed on statistics._ I don't believe
that there will be a _lot of_ conferences where no qualified women could
present at. If they couldn't be found, I'm guessing that--most of the times--
the organizers didn't look hard enough. This is just a guess, but I'm not
going to assume the utopian society that others on this page have and say that
everyone tries their hardest to attain diversity.

>> Dear God! As if it wasn't hard enough to arrange a conference, apparently
you have to make sure to invite every minority as a speaker at that conference
too.

Misunderstanding the issue at hand and making outrageous claims like these
_does not_ improve my opinion of HN.

>> I really hope the responsible _trolls_... [emphasis added]

Enough said. Calling people who raise valid concerns _trolls_ (or _muppets_ ,
like someone else did) is not respectful. The fact that such an ad-hominem
attack on HN got upvoted to the top is shocking.

>>Why should that have been their goal? This isn't a conference about racial
issues or gender issues.

Taken from the BritRuby's website:

    
    
      Our mission statement was to encourage Ruby developers to unite and
      create a community, which would allow such to network, exchange ideas
      and provoke innovation for the future of Ruby.
    

Britain has 51% women. Women are underrepresented in the Ruby community, but
there is no reason why it should stay like that. Is not anyone's job to
increase the percentage of female coders. It is _everyone's_.

HN user _luigi_ says it better than I ever could:

    
    
      The act of organizing a conference makes one a leader for their
      technical community. We all know we have a diversity problem.
      And conference organizers are responsible for helping address
      that problem. Leaders should lead.
    

===========

If I were _pg_ , I would close this thread before we make a fool of ourselves
even further. People are seriously questioning this community and its views on
gender imbalance in technology, minorities, etc. This is not an isolated case.

~~~
MrScruff
_Britain has 51% women. Women are underrepresented in the Ruby community, but
there is no reason why it should stay like that. Is not anyone's job to
increase the percentage of female coders. It is everyone's._

To my knowledge, it has never been established that women and men share
identical dispositions towards all things. In fact, to me it seems unlikely
that it should be so.

Given this, I'm not sure how you can claim that it's everybody's
responsibility to push for more female coders. How would we know what the
'natural' split should be?

~~~
anonymous3821
Correct me if I'm wrong, but men and women are not that far apart. We are all
humans who love solving problems.

The ratio of men graduating with CS degrees to women is around 8:1 or 9:1. Do
you honestly believe that our genetics are that different?

>> Given this, I'm not sure how you can claim that it's everybody's
responsibility to push for more female coders.

Ok, since we can't prove _identical dispositions_ and--who knows? maybe women
are 8 times more unlikely to want to solve computer science problems--let's
just disregard the imbalance and do nothing. Is that your philosophy?

[1]
[http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_De...](http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree_and_Enrollment_Trends_2010-11.pdf)

~~~
MrScruff
My position is that I don't know how the percentage of men who are interested
in coding and the percentage of women who are interested in coding compare. I
have no way of knowing.

In fact, the reasons people pursue a particular career are undoubtedly more
complex than you or I realise. For example in vetinary science, a field once
dominated by men, women are now the majority. No quotas were required to
achieve this reversal.

So I am naturally cautious about the idea of enforcing quotas when we have no
way of knowing what the natural balance should be.

------
galapago
Maybe they should use double blind revision to select their talks..

------
adrianhoward
There's some text up on the main <http://2013.britruby.com/> \- among other
things it says:

" _We at Brit Ruby were well aware of this fundamental and important issue.
This was one of the reasons why we encouraged everyone to submit a speaker
proposal. Sadly, BritRuby was used as the arena to air these issues on Twitter
and this has fundamentally destroyed any chance we had of addressing these
issues. Instead the community should have worked together and allowed us to
bring these issues to light at the conference. How can the community address
these issues if every time someone tries they are shot down and accused of
such awful things?_ "

I really feel for the organisers. Organising conferences is a bloody hard and
often thankless task. But when you're aware of the problems with sex and
technology conferences - and when their are numerous examples of previous
similar shit storms - doesn't putting out a male-only speaker list just seem a
tad... sub-optimal?

In the last year or so I've been to about a dozen technical conferences and
events in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. The only ones that didn't have
female speakers were the ones with only 1-3 speakers. I can tell by the
quality of the female speakers I did see that they were not chosen for their
sex.

Great female speakers are out there. You don't have to pick by gender quota.

I helped organise the UX stage of Agile 2012. We had a 50/50 male/female
speaker split on that stage with zero effort on my part - apart from rabidly
pursuing good speakers - some of which were female (the selection process was
briefly discussed in another thread for those who might be interested
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993049>). Plenty of female speakers on
the other stages too.

At the moment I'm organising a UK conference for early next year
([http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-
uk-2013...](http://www.balancedteam.org/2012/11/12/balanced-team-
uk-2013-survey/)) and the survey has already produced some great possible
speakers of both sexes, and a volunteer team of one man and four women.

Wearing my conference organiser hat: If my CFPs and my personal network had
only produced a list of male speakers I'd be going "Fuck. I've messed up
somewhere." because I see great female speakers every time I go to any major
conference.

I'd be reaching out to folk like <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/>, or
<http://www.womenwhotech.com/>. I'd be looking to how other folk got more
great women speakers at their conferences like
[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/).

Because if I didn't have some really excellent female speakers in my bucket
list of possible speakers I'd take it as evidence that my network for finding
good speakers is not as effective as it should be.

------
danw
What were the original tweets that caused so much trouble? I've tried to
gather what I can but I don't see much 'trolling', just criticism, some polite
and constructive, some less.

And there's a few tweets by @britruby that have been deleted.

<http://www.exquisitetweets.com/collection/iamdanw/1898>

------
danw
You are running an event. Running events is hard. You do not have money to
cover upfront costs. Seek sponsorship to cover upfront costs.

Sponsor is possibly concerned over conference diversity. Solutions:

1) Address sponsors concerns

2) Seek alternate sponsor without the concerns

3) Seek non-sponsorship funding (bank loan, kickstarter)

4) Cancel conference, transfer blame onto those who stated event diversity.

------
subsystem
More than anything it seems to be a failure to communicate their intentions
and/or write contracts with their sponsors.

------
keymone
this is hilarious (read ridiculous)

would all the pro-equality people tell me how you suggest to fix the
inequality of XY chromosomes between males and females? or inequality of
melanin in people's skins? or inequality of hair on our heads?

demanding to have 50% male/female or black/white speakers reminds me of a
joke: "- what is the chance that dinosaur will cross this road this very
moment? - 50%. it will either cross or will not."

rather than whine and cry about not having enough women in tech go and tell
your employer to hire your female friend because she's good.

------
willvarfar
The big question is, who _should_ they have invited to speak?

------
PaulRobinson
Disclaimer: I know some of the BritRuby organisers personally. I haven't
spoken to them in months though, so I think I can say all this without fear of
being branded either an "insider" or too biased.

I have been one of the most vocal critics of gender and racial bias in the
programming community in the UK in the last few years. I have wrung my hands
at the misogyny, the "jokes", the lack of diversity and I have spoken to as
many people as I could about "what we can do to fix this".

BritRuby did not - and would not - fall into this category had it proceeded
with its planned line-up. There was no evidence of racial or gender bias in
the line-up, because the line-up reflected the community.

Are there too many fat white guys in the community? Speaking as one, yes. But
conferences aren't how we fix that.

To explain why that's a legitimate call, we need to look at a bit of history.
First, let's go back to one of the most vocal pieces of hand-wringing - almost
a milepost for critics of gender and racial diversity in conference line-ups -
Chris Messina's arguments about the 2006 FOWA line-up:
[http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-
bo...](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/09/15/the-future-of-white-boy-clubs/)

This piece was so controversial and so widely read at the time, that when I
talked about "the fat white boy club problem" for several years later, many
knew what I was talking about. As a fat white boy myself, I realised there was
a germ of truth in this, but I felt Messina had tackled the problem in the
wrong way.

The issue of gender and racial diversity is not one that is fixable in
conference line-ups. Conferences _do_ have problems (I'll come back to that),
but speaker selection at conferences is the wrong point to deal with the lack
of diversity. By then - by the time somebody is qualified to talk at a
conference - it's clearly too late.

By definition, speakers at conferences have to be domain experts. To be domain
experts they have to have worked in the domain for many years. To work in the
domain for many years, they must first enter a career in that domain. To enter
the domain they must be attracted to the work.

In other words, if you want to increase racial and gender diversity in
conference line-ups, you must first go down the stack and increase it at the
entry point in the programming/tech careers.

We are crap at attracting women and non-caucasians to the geek industries.

So that's the problem I set out to solve (in my own small way), some years
ago. I joined the Royal Society's STEMNET Ambassador programme and I went into
schools around Greater Manchester (the 30-mile radius around where BritRuby
was to be hosted), cheering on kids from all sorts of backgrounds to learn
some coding, play with some tech under the hood, and get them to imagine what
they could do.

The stereotypes I had to fight were varied, and it's _there_ the fight must
take place.

For example, I did a Summer school type away day programme with about 40 girls
from a range of Greater Manchester schools at Salford University. Myself and
the 4-5 colleagues I was working with from other companies asked them as they
came into our part of the away day what careers they thought we did.

One girl thought I was a crane driver (I'm a biggish bloke). When I laughed a
little and explained no, I ran my own tech consultancy and helped SMEs develop
ideas to go into the app store, on the web, Facebook apps, etc., etc. her jaw
dropped.

Later when I pointed out to another girl that she could develop her mild
interest in space with perhaps a degree and career in aviation engineering and
that we were about to see a boom time for people building small scale
commercial space craft, I could see hope dawn on her face. Nobody had ever
told her she could do that.

Why was all this so odd to them? Because as a society we didn't bother telling
them that these careers were for them as well. They assumed that they were out
of reach for them. The news that they're for anybody came as almost a cultural
shock.

Another time, I did a presentation at Manchester's Muslim High School for
Girls. I went in as a 30-something white fat boy agnostic with virtually
nothing in common with a single person in that room. I talked about Babbage
and Lovelace. I talked about Turing and the work he did a few miles up the
road at Manchester University. I talked about Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates (because
they're people the audience knew slightly, and knew the products they had
created) and their teenage exploits.

I pointed out that with a laptop or the kit in the school's computer lab and a
bit a of knowledge they too could create something that could spread out over
the World and change it forever. All they needed was their intelligence, their
creativity and a little bit of relatively-easy-to-acquire knowledge. They
ranged in age from 11-14, and I don't think a middle class white guy had ever
talked to them quite like that before. The feedback after the talk I got was
that they were amazed this was a possibility open to _them_.

Imagine how my heart sank when the talk after mine that I stayed for was from
British Gas telling them they could become boiler service engineers: "You get
company-supplied overalls and use of a company van!"

But slowly, surely, I hope through STEMNET and other programmes we'll see the
number of women and non-caucasians involved in the industry increase. If every
person who is reading this went and signed up for such a programme, or just
phoned a school and talked about going and doing a talk, if every person who
reads HN went and did this, then in 10 years time the industry would be
transformed.

And 10 years after that, the speaker line-ups at conferences will be
transformed. And this kind of situation will never happen again.

The BritRuby organisers aren't the problem. The problem is with people who
aren't actively recruiting diversity into the industry. The problem is with
people who think the current diversity situation is acceptable.

Earlier I said there _was_ a problem at conferences that needed addressing
though. It's the content.

I know the Wiki I'm about to link to gets some heat from many on HN (that heat
is part of the problem, not part of the solution), but let me remind you of
some of the talks that have caused us issues in the past:

* <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Flashbelt_slide_show> * <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk> * <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexist_jokes_at_JSConf>

Fuck it, just go through these that are conf-related (there are plenty):
<http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents>

That's just the documented cases at that wiki about misogyny - race related
ones aren't there (perhaps because thankfully it's less prevalent, but I'm not
sure if the KKK have a programming conference arm).

The number of gender and racial discriminatory incidents I've seen with my own
eyes (mostly sexism rather than racism) at conferences number more than that.
It's absolutely disgusting that when it's pointed out many will explain it
away with the argument it's "all in the eye of the beholder" and that the
critics should learn to "relax".

Not cool people. Not cool.

Etiquette in the Victorian sense was created as a concept that was designed to
avoid embarrassing or upsetting others around you. You would eat soup a
certain way so you don't make a disgusting noise everybody else had to put up
with. You would bow and curtsy in different ways for different ranks of Lords,
Earls and Barons to show you knew their title and their contribution to the
nation. In other words, etiquette was forgetting yourself and saying to
somebody else - somebody you might not even like - you matter, let's make this
work, here's a little piece of theatre that shows how deep down I think you
and your feelings are important to me and to everybody else. And those who
were the best at etiquette became the most revered, the most liked, the most
socially connected people of their era. And the society became so efficient it
ended up conquering half the planet. That bit, not so good, but you get the
idea.

We need a little etiquette here, hackers. We need to step back and realise
that whilst we might think a joke is funny, for many it is not and if we want
them to feel welcome in the room, the joke should be unwelcome. You don't get
to decide if the black lesbian in a wheelchair should or should not be
offended by the content of a talk, you only get to decide _if you care about
them being offended_ , and so when putting together a talk, think about that.

BritRuby didn't get a chance to do that.

I am 100% certain any content that was discriminatory would have been canned.
I am astonished they weren't given that chance, and instead were judged on an
incomplete line-up.

I'm hoping that in a year or two they'll try again. I'm hoping they'll get the
support of the community, and if need be I'll go around the UK tech scene
knocking on doors getting them some under-writing in lieu of sponsorship so
they won't feel the sponsor pressure quite so much again. It's a simple pitch:
"write a cheque now. It'll be returned when the conference goes ahead with
full sponsor support, but your cheque under-writes them so if another Twitter
furore blows up, they can ride it out".

And in the meantime, let's all make sure our content isn't offensive, our
doors are open, and please, please, please go out and talk to kids from a
range of backgrounds about how they can get into coding: we can start today on
making sure this kind of scenario is impossible to recreate in a decade.

~~~
seanhandley
Thanks for this, Paul. I'm actually really encouraged by how supportive the
community has been about this.

And I'm pleased at how many other people have stood up in the last 24 hours
and announced their plans to start organising Ruby conferences in Manchester.
This community is wonderful and, where Brit Ruby stumbled, I don't doubt
someone else will succeed.

See you in the front row :-)

------
PedroBatista
And the Al Sharptons of the web are nowhere to be seen now...

------
lwat
Here's my question: How many of the top 10 Ruby speakers in the UK are white
males? What about the top 20? Top 50?

