Technical conferences don't exist to engender your preferred social change, they exist to impart knowledge to attendees, all of whom paid considerable sums to be there.

Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge', so they are a fundamentally social event. The 'hallway track' as it is known. If it weren't for the networking, conferences would be pointless as you could just do a local course or read up on the niche publications.

Open-source is not simply egalitarian. PostgreSQL (for example) doesn't try to apply egalitarian ideals to patch acceptance. Bad code is bad code, no matter who wrote it.

In the ideal, open-source is meritocratic, which also happens to be the ideal criteria applied to selecting conference papers.

> Also, half of the value of tech conferences is networking, not lectures, which is about 'meeting people' rather than 'imparting knowledge' ...

Why do you think these are different things? Some of the best collaborations I've had have resulted from meeting the smart people presenting at conferences, and sharing knowledge.

If conferences break the signal-to-noise ratio by attempting to fill quotas rather than selecting noteworthy papers, then the smart people will stop attending; the social value AND the associated knowledge sharing will be diminished.

I'm pretty sure that pifflesnort got it correct. Egalitarian means that people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. But open source communities do not treat people equally. If you've never learned to write a good bug report, you're marginalized. If you've learned to program and have time to contribute, you're likely to be able to have a significant impact on the project that you're interested in.

It is true that the economic barriers to entry are fairly low. I've personally known multiple homeless people who found open source to be their gateway to learning a useful skill and getting a good job. (Most who know the ones that I am thinking of do not know this detail of their lives...) But there are other types of barriers to entry. Language skills, intelligence, interest, etc.

It is easy to ignore those requirements. But stop and think about the fact that significantly less than half of adults in the USA can read, write, and do math at a grade 8 level. A lot of the reasons why have to do with unequal opportunities (bad schools, families that discount learning, etc). The fact that open source communities ignore those people rather than actively seeking to give them access is a demonstration that open source is a meritocracy, not an egalitarian society.

Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal. A dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian in need of advice on wood will still seek a carpenter over a weaver.

What is a 'starting point'? Open source certainly doesn't provide equal starting points, because each individual is evaluated on merit, the acquisition of which is often tied to social and economic background.

Conferences don't provide equal starting points, for the same reason.

> Egalitarianism and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive nor orthogonal.

They are orthogonal. An egalitarian meritocratic society would give each member equal opportunity to achieve, but would judge the achievements of each member according to their merit.

Open source only concerns itself (like any sane organization whose mission is not social advancement) with merit, not with egalitarian questions of how merit was acquired.

http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/01/quote-metritocracy-unquote....

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/columnists/eli...

That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.

There's not much controversy there, and like it or not, most people feel the same way.

You are not a technical conference. You are a person.

At a technical conference, focused on technical content: if you sacrifice the quality of that technical content for quotas, then you've produced objectively worse conference.

> That's the context of the article - some speakers are exercising their right not to participate on panels or give talks unless the conference makes more than a lip service effort to include people who aren't 30 year old white males.

What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?

Well spotted. The point is that the status quo is a choice, just as being more inclusive is a choice. Which is the better choice?

And your post has a couple of assumptions that I feel compelled to point out:

1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.

2. That conferences include talks based on some absolute value of merit.

3. That conferences are so amazing that everyone wants to go to them.

> What would qualify as "more than a lip service effort", exactly?

Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."

Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.

> 1. That including people from a more diverse background will lead to inferior talks.

No, judging content on the basis of anything other than direct merit will lead to inferior papers and talks.

> Something more than "We didn't get lots of women applicants for talks, so we have 100% white males."

What do you want them to do exactly? They put out a call for papers, they get the papers they get. Of the roughly 200 accepted speakers (authors of papers) presented at Usenix, about 5% were female.

Usenix is well known. It's not new. The call for papers goes out every year. Research arms of corporations and universities send their employees.

So what, in your book, does Usenix do so wrong?

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/tech-schedule/usenix...

Say that you put out a call for conference papers, but due to a bug in your mailing list software, only every other email is sent - 50% of potential participants are excluded. What do you think will happen to the quality of your conference?

Now let's say you find the bug after you've decided on your talk schedule. Should you should fix the bug and include the 50% of papers that you've missed? Isn't that unfair to the people who've already been selected?

So where is the problem, exactly?

That's only partly true, and even that part depends on what you mean by "better technical content"

It also depends on whose perspective you're measuring from.

If a conference is run purely as a business, then the "better choice" for the organiser is the one that has the highest return on investment (presumably "highest net profit"). And there are lots of things, over and above the merits of the content itself, that contribute to that. If your target audience is 30% women, but your speaker line-up is only 5% women, that might be a problem for you. It might cause some percentage of those women to decide not to attend. The alternative - creating an artificial quota of having women make up 30% of speakers, regardless of quality - might cause an even larger drop in attendance. There's a balance that's needed, and it takes work.

But even if we don't worry about that, "technical content" isn't a simple measure. If your conference has even a moderately broad scope, then you need to worry about the breadth of talks. Clearly a Ruby conference where all the talks are on Rails, is not an ideal lineup even if the best submissions (on individual merit) were all for taks on Rails. In terms of content, if nothing else, you need to worry about diversity.

So, if you're planning a Ruby conference, and you know that only 50% of your target audience are Rails users, but 90% of the papers submitted are for Rails talks, then it would appear that something has gone wrong in your process. It look like people have pegged you a a Rails conference, even though that's not your intent.

I'd argue that same applies to speaker demographics as well. If you think that 30% of your target audience are women, but only 5% of your submissions are from women, then there's a reasonable chance that something in the process caused the women not to submit papers. If that's the case, then your conference is going to suffer for it.

There a lots of things that conference organisers can do that either increase or decrease the diversity in their submissions/selection process. E.g.

- Placing too high an emphasis on previous speaking engagements in an industry segment where diversity has been lacking in the past.

- Having a selection panel that is overly skewed towards one group of people (selection bias)

- Putting out your call for papers in the wrong places (one that is skewed)

- Having a call for papers that contains biased language

Even if you are firmly decided on selecting speakers based purely on their content (even though, for some conferences, that might not produce the "best" result), there is work that can be done to make sure you're at least considering the widest selection of papers in the most effective way.

Right, and if their CFP is systematically discouraging some people from applying, or their review process is systematically undervaluing proposals from some people, and those people would give great presentations, then the conference is not going to be as good as it otherwise would be. Conferences that fail to take questions of gender representation seriously are depriving their attendees of great presentations from women. If you care about the quality of technical conferences, you should want to attend those which have a policy that tries to ensure good proposals won't be missed simply because of the gender of the presenter.

At 'serious' technical conferences, presentations are based on papers, papers are based on work already done. The conference itself is an end game of months or years of work that already happened.

At less serious conferences, talks, presentations, and panels are selected to maximize interest by choosing people of significant stature and interest in the community. Again, this is the end game of months or years of work that already happened.

Where is it the conferences responsibility (and to what advantage) to extend themselves to garnering talks and presenters from a minority industry segment (and which minority segments?). Do you actually have demonstrable evidence that presenters and papers of merit are being excluded from conferences? This would serve as evidence that conferences were failing in the missions to provide top tier content.

It seems that your position is focused more on who is presenting content than what the content actually is.

Did this actually improve the technical content of the conference, or did it simply redefine the objective measure by which PyCon determines "success" to include non-technical metrics? The latter seems to be the case, in which case, it's not a particularly valuable stratagem for a merit-focused technical conference.

Also: Why are women more valuable than stutterers at conferences?

The basic answer to that is that they're not - if you know someone who stutters, I would like to think that you'd encourage them to present at a conference if they had something valuable to present.

However, imagine that that conference is a brofest - they're not going to feel very included, are they? Bros are assholes after all, and they probably won't want to participate if they feel that they're going to be mocked or not listened to.

Being on stage in front of an audience who are tweeting about your physical attributes, not what you are saying; who are snarkily commenting about you being the token blonde; who are assuming you got there because of your birth, not your brains -- that's not a hindrance to speaking?

Even if none of those things are true, they can be running through the speaker's head, just as a stutterer is incredibly self-aware of their impediment. We create our own barriers.

The definition of stuttering involves having problems with physical speech. The definition of woman doesn't involve having problems with physical speech.

Stutterers are underrepresented in most conferences; even if you could get them up on stage, it would be a difficult presentation to listen give eloquently (and probably hard to listen to). Women are underrepresented at conferences, but it's not because they would have a problem presenting. Some people might have a problem listening to it, but that'd be largely because of their own issues.

Comparing stutterering - a physical (or perhaps mental) impediment - to females is insulting.

I've seen few female presenters bomb, and the ones that did - there were much easier explanations - no or little experience public speaker, didn't understand the topic, etc. The ones I've seen who know the topic and the audience and have spoken before in public are fine - no better than men. I do have occasion to listen to male speakers who stutter, and while I know they're smart people - they know their subject well - they can not present.