KatieConf

https://katieconf.xyz/

by JoshTriplett • 10 years ago

74 63 10 years ago

katieconf.xyz

djadmin• 10 years ago

June 31, 2016 ?

KatieConf is a parody

qntmfred• 10 years ago

KatieConf is a parody.

shizcakes• 10 years ago

KatieConf is a parody. Have you checked a calendar lately? There is no June 31st. Sorry. The town of Katherine does exist, though.

strictnein3• 10 years ago

It's a parody. About the lack of female speakers at tech conferences or something.

The bit: Here's all these female tech people with the name "Katie", thus you shouldn't have problems filling your tech conference with female speakers.

rwmj5• 10 years ago

Assuming there was a speaker expert in the subject of the tech conference, who was as qualified as any non-Katie speaker.

cm33• 10 years ago

What's the joke?

geofft6• 10 years ago

If there are enough women named Katie to fill a compelling conference schedule, anyone running a conference who can't find women named anything at all is clearly not even trying.

cm33• 10 years ago

Oh, I see. Is it really true that organizers filter out some part of the demographic, or are women due to bad experience not trying to present? I didn't organize a conference, so this is a serious question.

I mean, encouraging everyone to attend, submit talks, and ensure they all feel welcome and safe is more useful than making it seem like women (or some_x) are only at a conference due to maybe a diversity quota.

imglorp• 10 years ago

Maybe it's not the organizers, but the attendees are exhibiting self selection bias? Maybe males have a stronger urge to seek reputation/fame, so are more likely apply to conferences?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias

untog5• 10 years ago

In case anyone was wondering as to the point of the parody:

If you are looking for speakers for your conference, why not ask one of the wonderful people featured here? They are all listed with their Twitter accounts, and a link to some of their prior talks.
Do you really need another conference lineup of all men? Or as many female speakers as speakers called Steve?

I suspect it is a direct rebuttal to the argument that it's difficult to find female speakers for conferences, which is one I've heard a few times before.

kozhevnikov• 10 years ago

http://lanyrd.com/2012/benconf/

iamben• 10 years ago

Having attended Benconf (which was really, really great), and only having skim read this page (I'm not called Katie, it's not in the UK), I didn't realise this was a parody...

mikeash6• 10 years ago

Wow, that really says it all, doesn't it?

Set up "BenConf" with an all-male lineup clearly not chosen purely based on their qualifications, and dozens of people will pay money to attend.

Set up "KatieConf" and you get people coming out of the woodwork complaining about faux diversity, saying that gender doesn't matter and you should only choose speakers based on qualifications, saying that conferences shouldn't have to care about combating sexism, complaining that it's patronizing, etc.

rwmj5• 10 years ago

It's incredibly patronising.

Edit: Controversial comment, so let's say something positive here. I found this site to be unfunny and unclear about its message. However it's easy to improve it.

The first thing I would add to the site at the bottom would be a list of recommendations for avoiding bias in selection of candidates. These would include things like always doing blind evaluation of speaker candidates.

Secondly it would be good to talk about how to get more people involved in projects, so that in future you have a more diverse range of speakers. How to broaden access, easier onboarding, removing toxic people.

Thirdly, talk about why it's good to have more diverse opinions. Give some motivation for doing this apart from some hazy feelgood factor. (See references here: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...)

Number four, the site could link to projects like Outreachy which are already doing the above.

untog5• 10 years ago

Not for nothing, but "being patronised" is usually right up there on the list of common female developer complaints.

lsiebert• 10 years ago

I'd just note that blind evaluation could be hard because of systematic discrimination biasing how you evaluate a candidate. For example, if you look at who has spoken at conferences before in your blind evaluation, it's blind, but biased by previous discrimination. it's the same sort of issue that crops up regularly in machine learning, where people assume that the data isn't the result of bias.

I'd say the correct way to avoid bias is to set a blind baseline of expectations (Like 3+ years in industry working with the topic) and then reach out to minorities. That said, even someone who doesn't have experience can be a good presenter if given the right support, I've seen great conference talk made by total newbies to a technology who were encouraged to write code making use of a new feature. They presented what they learned, problem spots that they found that might trip up someone new to the technology, and open sourced their app as a learning tool.

strictnein3• 10 years ago

"Do you really need another conference lineup of all men?"

If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.

When the subject is one's technical knowledge, the actual genetic makeup of the person making the presentation doesn't matter. It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.

untog5• 10 years ago

It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.

What you are saying is not controversial, but nor does it reflect reality. Conference speakers are not solely selected on the basis of being the best at what they talk on.

This is not a call to add people who are inexpert, it is a call to find experts where you don't usually look.

zck• 10 years ago

If they are the subject matter experts, then yes, I would prefer they are all present, and none of them be excluded because we are searching for faux diversity.

My understanding is that the complaint is not "these men are not qualified", but "there are women who are qualified who are systematically being ignored".

There isn't an objective ranking of subject matter experts, from which conferences simply invite the top N people. Nor, as far as I know, is anyone in favor of inviting non-qualified minorities to speak. The question is "why are qualified [women, people of color, trans people, etc.] not being invited?".

mikeash6• 10 years ago

Implying there are no female subject matter experts.

The problem isn't that people choose expertise and skill over gender. The problem is that men greatly outnumber women for no discernible good reason, despite the availability of qualified women speakers.

It's not faux diversity. The fact that you just assume any change from the all-male status quo must be a step down is amazingly sexist and insulting.

ubernostrum• 10 years ago

It's strange that, to some, this is somehow a controversial statement.

For a conference to say "we couldn't find enough subject-matter-qualified women", one of the following must be true:

* The least qualified speaker on their roster is still more qualified than literally every woman currently living, or

* Something about their conference failed to attract (or worse, repelled) half the population of the planet.

The first is statistically extremely unlikely. The second is more likely, and represents a problem with the conference rather than the pool of potential speakers.

Unfortunately, telling people "the problem is with your conference and not with the pool of speakers" is a controversial statement despite being painfully obvious.

This is without getting into the "faux diversity" insult which implies that there is something about women as a class which naturally makes them less qualified (since, obviously, conferences select purely on qualifications and just coincidentally end up heavily or often entirely male) -- if you didn't believe women are inherently less qualified, you wouldn't think that having women speak was necessarily a relaxing of qualifications or only done for "diversity".

Here's another true-but-sadly-controversial statement: if you believe what you're saying, then the kind of tech conferences you'd likely run are actually affirmative action for people who look and think like you. And I bet you wouldn't want anyone saying you only got in because they give preferential treatment to people like you, right?

pornel• 10 years ago

Lots of genuinely interesting speakers. Full of puns. I wish it was real.

Ianvdl2• 10 years ago

People here are saying that this page is trying to create awareness that there are enough females in technology to ensure greater numbers of female speakers at conferences, and that conferences should try harder to achieve that.

Why is that the responsibility of the conference? As far as I'm aware most conferences call for proposals to be submitted. Whether or not anyone of a particular group applies to speak at that conference is not necessarily a fault of the conference organisers? Are there conferences that actively seek out the majority of their speakers?

I am in favour of a wide variety of speakers at a conference (the more viewpoints the better), but this seems unnecessary. I would have liked for this to be a real conference though, the topics are great.

DanBC• 10 years ago

Everytime we try blind auditions we see more women being picked. It's the responsibility of the conference to guard against bias.

Ianvdl2• 10 years ago

Don't conferences already use a blind process to determine speakers?

Torgo2• 10 years ago

Sometimes you get Curtis Yarvin.

incongruity2• 10 years ago

While I think your point is superficially valid, I'd ask you this – what if you had the power to change something that you admit is less than ideal (i.e.: the lack of a wide variety of speakers, or even the exclusion of a group) – if you had that power and didn't use it, wouldn't you be part of the problem?

All of this is a vicious circle – women don't apply to be speakers at many tech conferences in equal numbers as men, possibly in large part because they don't attend in equal numbers as men and that happens in large part because it's clear they're not amongst peers – i.e.: there aren't women who are speaking in equal numbers as men and they're not seeing women in attendance in equal numbers as men, so they're less inclined to feel like it's a place for them.

Where does that system of subtle/unintentional exclusion end? Why shouldn't it be the role of the conference to encourage a breaking of that cycle?

PyCon US is a good example of a conference that did just that...

stevetrewick2• 10 years ago

Aren't amongst peers? I mean I get the concern about gender imbalance, really I do, but to feel that someone is a 'peer' in a professional context really shouldn't require identical genital configurations, surely?

geofft6• 10 years ago

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat reviewing talk proposals for PDP-6-Con.

"What are you doing?" asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to review talk submissions," Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?" asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of who should present," Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

snassar• 10 years ago

While I wouldn't have traveled to Australia for this, I find the concept of an idiosyncratic conference like this very cool conceptually in addition to supporting the political statement.

EDIT: I initially wrote Canada instead of Australia. Not that this changes the sentiment. Thanks for catching the error tedmiston.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

Katherine is a town in Northern Territory, Australia.

reustle• 10 years ago

The WHOIS points to the 2nd Katie down on the left speakers column. I was half expecting it to be a guy.

mattdotc• 10 years ago

You didn't need to do a WHOIS to figure that out. The information you 'found' is right there on the page. Just scroll...

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

The .xyz TLD was a red flag, if for no other reason than Namecheap is practically giving them away.

Torgo2• 10 years ago

Limiting this conference to the name Kate is extremely Eurocentric. and I don't see a single black attendee.

HelloNurse• 10 years ago

What sort of black people do you expect to find in Australia in significant numbers?

eivarv• 10 years ago

Not OP, but what about Aboriginal Australians?

3pt14159• 10 years ago

Can't we just have fun some of the time?

neutronicus• 10 years ago

Katie Conforti

Straight-up super-setting the conference name.

stevetrewick2• 10 years ago

Or as many female speakers as speakers called Steve?

Three is enough for a coven. After that, things get hairy very quickly. Disappointed this turned out to be a parody, it would be a marvellous and amusing thing to do.

jacknews• 10 years ago

Malkovich.

Malkovich, Malkovich.

KatieConf

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