The British Ruby Conference has been cancelled

http://2013.britruby.com

by andrewnez • 14 years ago

57 89 14 years ago

2013.britruby.com

matthewrudy2• 14 years ago

Can anyone explain what happened?

andrewnez• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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?

hmc2• 14 years ago

It only seems to be white males that are complaining.

tomstuart3• 14 years ago

A Twitter search for “britruby” should clear it up.

Short version: they’d invited all white male speakers; people complained about it on Twitter; the organisers got disheartened and called the whole thing off.

ETA: https://twitter.com/joshsusser/status/269844125363339264, https://twitter.com/jamesarosen/status/269859024164495360

matthewrudy2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised there was nothing on LRUG. Seems like a rush decision to cancel.

blacktulip4• 14 years ago

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?

riazrizvi• 14 years ago

Awesome example of awful business writing.

typicalrunt2• 14 years ago

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?

thisduck2• 14 years ago

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.

danenania2• 14 years ago

Actually, selecting speakers without regard to gender or race and ending up with 100% white guys (which is easily possible, since they are very overrepresented in the field) isn't racist or sexist, whereas selecting people specifically based on these traits would be racist and sexist, by definition.

I think diversity is a worthwhile goal for a conference, but we shouldn't throw around these labels so freely (and incorrectly).

tinco3• 14 years ago

This is a ridiculous statement. If you want to be non-racist, diversity shouldn't even be a word in your vocabulary. The definition of racist is not 'have at least one of each in your audience'. It is 'do not discriminate based on race'.

I won't accept any accusation of racism or sexism until I see a message from a minority that says, 'I have been disrespected on the count of me being a minority at this conference, and the organisation did nothing to make sure this would not happen again'.

There being 100% white guys is not a problem. It is a problem when a black woman goes there, and she feels disrespected because of her sex or race.

Tell me how a conference that is only attended by white men perpetuates racism? It just doesn't make sense, you should listen to Morgan Freeman more.

markshead3• 14 years ago

If you have a goal of "diversity" that implies that you are going to treat people differently depending on their race and gender. Race and gender becomes part of the selection criteria. Isn't that pretty much the definition of racism and sexism?

A system where the speakers are just randomly chosen from a pool of people who submitted papers would definitely not be racist or sexist, but it probably wouldn't meet your definition of diversity. (Probably wouldn't make for a very good conference either.)

A fair system is one where race and sex do not influence the selection criteria. It cannot have diversity listed as a goal. If it is a goal then you have created a racist, sexist system for selecting who gets to speak.

apawloski2• 14 years ago

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.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

So what you are arguing is essentially 'if you are not with us, you are against the terrorists?'

The only reason that strategy sometimes works (and it does by no means work in all cases, just see what happened to Pompey the Great when he tried it) is that there is some kind of punishment for those who are against you.

If you want to win people over, don't be combative. Stand firm on your belief but hand over olive branch after olive branch -- people that will give people plenty of opertunities to change their minds and will leave a favourable impression, which will be useful later.

What you have just done is the opposite of helping your cause.

evanphx• 14 years ago

The lineup was all invited speakers and there wasn't any diversity among those speakers, that's a bit of a difference between doing a CFP with regard to how people will see diversity at the conference.

revelation• 14 years ago

@johnsusser is exactly right. You can't add diversity at the end.

So if you want to have more diverse people speaking at conferences, make sure you get more diverse people interested in school. Don't give a conference flak because biases in school and society have emptied their prospective diverse speakers to a pool of zero people.

_pius• 14 years ago

If you want to have more diverse people speaking at conferences, make sure you get more diverse people interested in school. Don't give a conference flak because biases in school and society have emptied their prospective diverse speakers to a pool of zero people.

You can't possibly think that there are no non-white or non-male developers qualified to speak at this conference.

countessa• 14 years ago

it's easy to sling mud, and I'm fighting my knee jerk reaction to sling some back but I wonder if Josh was provoked into that comment, otherwise it seems unnecessarily aggressive....especially given that the ruby community is probably poorer for not having the conference at all.....nose, face, spite etc.

hopeless3• 14 years ago

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.

mgkimsal5• 14 years ago

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.

hopeless3• 14 years ago

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

rplnt• 14 years ago

There was a RuPy conference[1] this weekend in Brno. I think it would be more accessible money-wise since accommodation + food in Czech Republic (or Poland last year) + travel (20-50GBP for return ticket from London) would be probably cheaper than accommodation + food in the UK.

Can't really tell if it was world-class though.

1. http://rupy.eu/

hopeless3• 14 years ago

I live in Ireland. Manchester was only a short hop and a single night's stay.

Accessible in my case was not (just) about money but also about time and convenience

petercooper4• 14 years ago

There is one! Scotland Ruby Conference attracts pretty high profile speakers: http://scottishrubyconference.com/

I'd far prefer one in England mostly out of convenience, but Scotland does have a pretty good one, to be fair.

bonzoesc2• 14 years ago

Scottish Ruby Conference is easily my favorite, and it's worth the inconvenience for me to travel there from Miami, USA.

blacktulip4• 14 years ago

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"

micmakarov• 14 years ago

They should have invited Matz

blacktulip4• 14 years ago

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

betageek• 14 years ago

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

instakill• 14 years ago

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.

mgkimsal5• 14 years ago

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...

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

tinco3• 14 years ago

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 :)

petercooper4• 14 years ago

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 :-(

tinco3• 14 years ago

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

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

peteforde2• 14 years ago

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://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.

tomstuart3• 14 years ago

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.

jamesbritt• 14 years ago

What's your criteria for "better"?

Niten• 14 years ago

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.

occam• 14 years ago

"Not all meritocracy is bad."

This is a reasonable thing to say now. We've come a long way.

mjg594• 14 years ago

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.

markshead3• 14 years ago

>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.

mjg594• 14 years ago

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.

juliendorra• 14 years ago

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...

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...

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

nihar• 14 years ago

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

nathan_f77• 14 years ago

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!

JimmyL• 14 years ago

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.

fjfish• 14 years ago

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.

The British Ruby Conference has been cancelled

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