On BritRuby

http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/11/19/on-britruby/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

by knowtheory • 14 years ago

52 48 14 years ago

devblog.avdi.org

Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male. This ignores cultural diversity that is not related to skin colour, but place of birth and nationality, and other forms of identity.

Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference, I can make the assumption that a line up of Spanish, South African, German, Icelandic and Russian speakers - who are all white - isn't diverse.

I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.

knowtheory2• 14 years ago

> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.

That is not what is being assumed, and that is also not what this discussion is about.

You can disagree as to whether diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is), or we can have a discussion about whether BritRuby was organized in a coherent manner (I would argue that there isn't really enough evidence to assess), or we could look at how other conferences have been organized (which is what Avdi does in this post).

What we should not do is take offense just to take offense, and take this away from a discussion of what it is that we can and should do, into an argument about who's more offended.

> Because I don't know the exact line up for that conference

Just sayin', but it might be helpful to find out what the lineup was before taking offense.

alinajaf9• 14 years ago

> diversity is a laudable goal or not (I and others will vigorously defend that it is)

Can you point me to some literature about this please? I'd be interested in finding out how you, and the voting majority in the UK, have convinced themselves that diversity is so laudable a goal in and itself. I understand it on an evolutionary biology level, but not in terms of the make-up of a technical community[1].

As a bonus I'd also like to know why so many people think that it should be artificially manufactured when it doesn't occur organically. These ideas are not self-evident to me, but seem to be for a large number of people.

[1] Unless of course, your ulterior motive is to reproduce with members of the opposite gender of a variety of nationalities.

ceol3• 14 years ago

> I find it quite offensive to base arguments on the assumption that the sum of any person is nothing but their gender and the colour of their skin.

Good thing the OP didn't do anything of the sort, or else you would be quite offended.

lomegor2• 14 years ago

> Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male.

That's another issue, but not the one we are talking about. There was a lack of diversity in some important areas. Maybe there was a lot of diversity in other areas, but that doesn't contradict the first assessment.

smacktoward2• 14 years ago

Everyone keeps talking about the 'white guy' as if there's only one type of person who is white and male.

This argument reminds me of the classic scene from The Blues Brothers: "We got both kinds of music here: country AND western!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSZfUnCK5qk

jordan0day• 14 years ago

That's a funny anecdote, but I fear since it seems so apt, it's might just overshadow what I think is a perfectly valid point being made by FuzzyDunlop.

I mean, it's a tech conference. Diversity should equal a wide range of views on technology-related things, right? I find it absolutely believable that the magnitude in the difference of opinions between two (members of gender A & race X) is no different than two people of differing genders and nationalities.

danso• 14 years ago

I completely agree with you. I think the most well-intentioned of the detractors are using race/gender as a proxy: it's one of the faster ways to initially judge the makeup of a group, and it's becoming less and less accurate as globalization increases.

For example, "Matz" could've been a "white guy" working out of Japan at the time of creating Ruby. Including this hypothetical white-Matz in a Ruby panel is totally justifiable, even if the rest of the panel is white.

But in reality, Matz is ethnically Japanese, as are at least several of the core committers. So it's especially awkward in yesterday's Brit Ruby post on HN for the organizer to say that if they had brought in a minority, it would've been seen as tokenism. In Ruby's case, it would not at all seem strange to have a few ethnic-Japanese at the conference, given the language's origins.

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

i too find it funny. in the states i'm just a white guy(a good thing tbh), but where i grew, i'm everything but a white guy.

I think Americans are taking this white/minority thing a bit too far. Granted other countries do it too little, but you can exaggerate.

I know first hand that people get funding for inviting minorities to speak in the united states. If that ain't messed up I don't know what is.

ceol3• 14 years ago

Fantastic post. It's infuriating to read all the comments by programmers, both on github and reddit, who seem to think there was a tumblr-esque witch hunt by the evil PC brigade against the poor BritRuby organizers, when that just wasn't the case— and hardly ever is.

If anything, the responses by the community only prove there's still a problem with diversity.

nailer• 14 years ago

One of @joshsusser's comments:

"@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?"

This seems to contradict itself - if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people. Which is wrong for both the token speakers and those who missed out.

JSConf EU handled this very well and managed to get 25% female speakers - pick the best talk, but pick them blind. This stops both implicit bias towards 'people like me' AND token selections of 'people not like me'.

ceol3• 14 years ago

You're conflating the need for diversity with throwing a few token minority people at the end of a lineup. This was addressed in the post:

> But note that Josh didn’t say “I contacted all the female developers I knew”. Instead, Josh reached out to the existing community networks that RailsBridge and DevChix had created. You don’t have to have a complete mental Rolodex of the Ruby community to make diversity happen. You just have to get the ball rolling, and lean on the community.

Obviously BritRuby didn't reach out to these types of groups, because as the OP found out, most of them didn't even know it existed.

adrianhoward2• 14 years ago

The intent is to take diversity into account - which involves effort and having it as a goal.

Yes - select your speakers on merit.

But unless you had diversity as one of your goals in where you put your CFPs and how you reach out to possible speakers, etc. then you won't have a diverse pool of great speakers to pick the best sessions from.

Wearing my conference organising hat. If all the sessions I have available to pick my programme from are are white guys in their 20s then I've failed already.

smacktoward2• 14 years ago

if you're explicitly aiming to have a certain representation of all people, unless there's some bizarre statistical anomaly, there will be token people.

But women should not be among them, surely? According to the Office for National Statistics (see http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estima...), in 2011 the population of England and Wales was 50.8% female and only 49.2% male. So the bizarre statistical anomaly would be a BritRuby panel of fifteen speakers with no women, or even one woman.

mjhoy• 14 years ago

Seems that there was, at most, a (somewhat snarky) suggestion that the diversity of the conference could be improved.

You can agree with that or not. The fact that someone voicing concerns caused the whole thing to be called off indicates this is still an issue people are mostly not equipped to discuss.

alinajaf9• 14 years ago

> If anything, the responses by the community only prove there's still a problem with diversity.

I agree that there's a problem with diversity but believe that it's a white persons problem. Once they're done convincing themselves that they're not racist, the rest of us can carry on talking about ruby.

williamdix• 14 years ago

I agree with the OP, not because I am trying to prove to others/convince myself that I am not racist. I agree with them precisely because I recognize that I benefit from privilege as a white male, and that I suffer from biases towards those that are different from me. I believe that I need to think critically and deeply about the privilege I enjoy and the bias that I possess, and I encourage others to do so.

Dirlewanger2• 14 years ago

I share the sentiments of one of the commenters, iain barnett, which is probably going to be at odds with most people reading this (and as such, I'll get pointlessly downvoted). An excellent quote from him that I think sums up this entire mess:

> If you choose not to do something because the group you'd be joining are different to you, then I'd say you're the one with the problem regarding race or gender or whatever.

That tweet about one of the women not wanting to be the token one or whatever...what a load of crap. That's her personal problem if she THINKS she's going to be perceived that way, not the organization's. Has it ever crossed anyone's mind that perhaps those original 15 speakers had the best and most fitting presentations...and maybe that is why it was coincidentally all white males? It really is quite pathetic that all it takes is one wannabe righteous whistle-blower to say something about race and an event can be derailed...in this case, completely.

knowtheory2• 14 years ago

> It really is quite pathetic that all it takes is one wannabe righteous whistle-blower to say something about race and an event can be derailed...in this case, completely.

Are you really focusing in on a single tweet as the cause of a conference being canceled? You think that they decided to fold up months of work and organizing just because Sarah expressed her disappointment and dissatisfaction?

Blaming her for the organizers' decision seems super weird to me.

Also... Iain's quote there misunderstands what it's like to be a minority. The problem is not being different (we're all different in various ways), it's being singled out for being different. That's also why BritRuby couldn't fix the problem by tacking on diversity speakers at the end, the damage was already done by then.

My humble opinion is that they should have tried to weather the storm, issue a mea culpa and endeavored to do better next time. Instead we have flame wars.

yummyfajitas• 14 years ago

it's being singled out for being different. That's also why BritRuby couldn't fix the problem by tacking on diversity speakers at the end

So it would have been better if they singled people out for being different and tacked on diversity speakers from the beginning?

You either single people out for being different or you pick the best speakers and let the racial/sexual chips fall where they may. There really isn't a middle ground.

lomegor2• 14 years ago

So you are only taking into account the comments from a white guy while totally ignoring the feelings expressed by the minorities saying that that's their problem?

untog• 14 years ago

This is all going to be somewhat redundant, because my reply to your comment will mirror the replies to Iain's comment.

May I make a conservative bet and say that you are a white man, much like Iain is? I am too. And on an instinctive level, I agree with what Iain said, and you echo. But that's because I haven't had to deal with systemic discrimination in my life- neither I, nor you, nor Iain know what life is like when, at all stages and in all environments, you are part of a minority. This is not the same as Iain's laughable example of having made multiple visits to nightclubs that contain black people.

Given that we have never experienced that life, we probably shouldn't tell minorities how they should feel, and what they should be afraid of, or if we're not careful we're going to get a reputation for being oppressive.

alinajaf9• 14 years ago

As a brown man who has had to deal with racism at various times in my life, I find this whole affair terribly condescending.

If I want to speak at a ruby conference, I don't need to see other brown people there to 'motivate' me to do so. I especially don't need to see white people flagellate themselves publicly in my defence either. If the goal is to have a mixed colour-palette at the conference, change the fucking wallpaper.

> Given that we have never experienced that life, we probably shouldn't tell minorities how they should feel, and what they should be afraid of

And yet, here we are. This whole issue is telling me that I should feel discriminated against and underrepresented in the UK ruby community[1]. I didn't feel any of these things before, but a bunch of white people on the internet are pretty sure I should be feeling this way.

Manufactured diversity of the sort people are advocating here is unnecessary at best. I don't know where the desire for it comes from, but if I had to guess, I'd put forward that it's based on middle-class white peoples collective guilt for pre 21st century racism. The reducto-ad-absurdum against manufactured diversity is that I don't see anyone arguing that transgenders, veterans, BNP members or left-handed people are underrepresented in the UK ruby community.

[1] Go to an LRUG meetup and I'll think you'll find that WASPs are the only group that are underrepresented in terms of the UK population as a whole.

alex-g• 14 years ago

It has apparently crossed several minds, because you're certainly not the first one to suggest it. But as someone who's organized more than one conference, I can say that "the best" is not nearly as easy to define as many people think. Of course there are various kinds of technical quality that we can estimate, and trade off against one another, but one also has to consider the overall balance of the event - for example, we don't want too many talks on the same topics, which may result in otherwise-worthy proposals getting bumped.

Moreover, there is a hugely important signalling role in the selection: it is advertising, "here is our community, here's who we are, here are the problems we work on and the cool techniques we use". So the selection also takes into account things like: "people doing X should get to meet people doing Y", "we think more people should work on Z", and so on. Diversity among the speakers is part of this! Just as surely as you wouldn't want a program of people all from the same company - like it or not, the makeup of the speakers does send a message, and part of the responsibility of organizing an event is deciding what that message will be. It's also communicated by all sorts of other things, including the process for soliciting and choosing submissions, details of language and graphic design, etc. All of these things contribute to a general impression of what the community is like.

The claim of "coincidence" in this instance would be a lot more convincing if the procedures and language were there to back it up. I'm not even talking about affirmative action. I only mean that if you want to claim to be meritocratic, you have to do the work, not just cross your fingers.

fatbird5• 14 years ago

(and as such, I'll get pointlessly downvoted)

That's some quality pre-martyring there, that is.

adrianhoward2• 14 years ago

Agree 100% with that post... and I'd urge folk to follow the links and read some of the underlying tweets that started this whole thing off.

I'm gonna take the liberty of copy and pasting something I wrote on the other thread about this since I think it's relevant to what Avdi said:

----

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...) 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...

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.

----

As another data point - I notice that the London Perl Workshop - a one day event next weekend - has two women speakers running three sessions. Surely the Ruby folk have as many smart women speakers as the Perl folk ;-)

RivieraKid• 14 years ago

And what about diversity of species? Personally, I find the prevalance of homo sapiens in the list of speakers absolutely alarming and unacceptable. Where are the dolphins?

alinajaf9• 14 years ago

I find this comment offensive in that it doesn't even consider the possibility of talks from non-sentient objects. I take personal offence on behalf of rocks, gym balls, mass-spectrometers, pastries, table-lamps and all under-represented objects in the ruby community.

Kaworu• 14 years ago

I know you're making a joke, but can we please avoid demeaning references to animals like this? I understand everyone isn't bothered by the fact they there aren't "people like them" as positive role models in the community, but it sure is something that makes me uncomfortable.

And to see my distress about it casually written off makes me feel like shit.

trustfundbaby• 14 years ago

While I ultimately side with Avdi and co, I think the whole thing wound up coming across as a bit self-righteous ... unfortunately.

Dealing with something like this requires a lot more tact than it seems was brought to bear, exactly because it is such an explosive issue. Its very difficult to be on the receiving end of something like that and not feel very personally attacked, no matter how logical the arguments ... the air of negativity surrounding something they worked so hard to bring to fruition would be too much to take. So I do empathize with BritRuby on some level.

I think in the future, it might not be a bad idea to try to try to handle something like that a little more privately and only move to twitter when it is clear there is a concerted effort to exclude people.

This 'public shaming' ideal that the rise twitter seems to have encouraged, just seems to be a little lazy (it doesn't require a lot of thought to be snarky) and counter productive in most situations, as it automatically puts the target on the defensive.

dradtke• 14 years ago

Given how much of the programming community is made up of white men (especially in Britain), I don't see a 100% white male speaker lineup as being too far-fetched, barring some form of affirmative action. Given the situation, the selection process should have undergone some level of scrutiny to make sure there's no discrimination, but I don't think it's worth cancelling the whole conference over.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

I didn't realize we had to engage in nose-counting when evaluating the value of a conference on a technical topic.

On BritRuby

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