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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Hey white dudes. I see you're pretty worked up. Non-white dude here to explain."
I'm a white dude whose biological parent is non-white dude who grew up in a disadvantaged socio-economic background, and I got to tell you that is probably one of the more offensive lines I have read recently. I am white and male and technology was not pretty accessible.
The only part I got lucky with was that the late 80's and early 90's had a class of entry computers that were wiped out by video game consoles and Windows. They were available and my Dad made one hell of a good decision. Schools who cannot afford vocational programs were not going to afford computer programming. If I had been born 10 years earlier or later then I would not be in a technology field.
I have seen too many people make assumptions based on race that should have been made on wealth and location. Using race as a proxy is wrong.
What opportunities does a young boy or girl from a disadvantaged background have to get into programming? Libraries and schools are not the answer. They have locked computers to keep people from being problems. There are programs to buy kids musical instruments but not computers. OLPC is basically a foreign aid program as you cannot go an buy a kid one.
You want some diversity, skip looking at what-is and look at the next generation. The C64 died in 1994, what was the replacement on ramp to programming. It sure as heck isn't the web browser. Our field is not diverse because of socio-economics. It costs almost like a young hockey player to be a good programmer.
// someone going to make that stupid inflation argument again and I would point to how the under $200 price point is still important (look at tablets)
I think this argument falls flat on the face when people just do things they enjoy, like they might just enjoy programming. Do you really need permission to get into programming? I don't think so. On the internet, nobody even knows your skin color. If you like programming, just do it. When most of us started, it wasn't a trendy thing to do, we just did it because we enjoyed it.
What I find particularly vexing here: just a couple of years ago everybody was deriding the geeks hacking away on their computer, and didn't want to have anything to do with them. Now that they officially seem to have some fun, suddenly everybody wants in and the same people who made the nerds life hell 20 years ago by bashing them for their nerdiness now start bashing them for their alleged sexism and racism? What is wrong with people simply doing their thing? Why not leave such people alone, or join them if you enjoy the same things?
Edit: another thing, it seems this conference was simply organized by some Ruby developers who decided to give it a go. If people have a problem with it's structure, why don't they simply start their own conference?
I know of a handful of non white male programmers who are vocal and prominent members of the community, they exist, but they are hugely in the minority. That is the problem, what you see at conferences is a manifestation of THAT problem.
I do not know the organizers at this conference, but I know people who have been put in a similar situation, even when as organizers they are non white males. For example, Rebecca Murphy getting accused of sexism when she organizes a conference. Even when she has done way more for the cause then the people calling for her head.
As a conference organizer, you ARE put in the position of either finding token minorities, or facing a backlash. Who talks at a conf is based on who submits talks. If you end up with a situation where you have no submissions from minorities, or going on merit, the few minority submissions don't really make the cut, what do you do? It sucks for the organizers, and it sucks for the people who are asked to speak, since they never know if it is based on merit, or based on the fact that they aren't white men.
I agree that it is easier to envision yourself in a role if you have role models to look up to, but I don't agree that its mandatory. The counter example is sports, it stayed white until the strictures were removed and then became talent driven. The goal of a sports team is to win games which is a wonderfully crisp way of prioritizing recruiting.
The goal of startups (and a lot of companies) is to ship code and so talented people get hired regardless of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. In fact tech has something of a reputation for hiring "weirdos" as really talented technical folks are valued even if society at large discriminates against them. Just as true for the LGBT folks as it is for the non-white folks.
So the barrier to entry for becoming a Ruby star is essentially zero, laptop and a free AWS instance. And the market is demonstrably talent driven not 'class' driven.
You will have a hard time trying to convince me that the lack of non-white guy talent/leadership in the Ruby community has anything to do with race.
There aren't that many Ruby (or Python) programmers compared to say Java, PHP, or C++. There are even less Ruby programmers who want to make a 30-60 minute presentation on Ruby, let alone have the time to travel to some city in the UK. When you add a requirement for race in addition to skill, experience, and motivation; at this time you're probably not going to get anyone.
The main reason people go to programming conferences is mainly all about what's being specifically presented. Most people in tech don't care about ethnic group; they care about results. As someone else already posted, even when programmers go to see someone; it's really really rare that they even know what they look like unless their last name gives it away.
Star Trek references and all I have a feeling you will like this keynote from YAPC::NA 2012, "Perl: The Next Generation". Like he says, demographic diversity is the canary in the coal mine.
You couldn't be more right but I still don't see how it makes shutting down Brit Ruby okay. White guys like me have white privilege and though white dudes like me sometimes know this intellectually it's easy to forget because no one is reminding us of it. So yeah, you're right about every last thing you said but you didn't really address this particular conference.
There are ways to go about this sort of thing and while the issue deserves attention and the situation needs to be addressed, shutting down a conference over it doesn't do anyone any good. I don't think its really an issue of minorities being excluded so much as is it an issue of minorities not being included. There's a subtle difference.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Why is diversity a noble goal in choosing speakers? Like he said, would it have been better to choose 90% of their desired lineup and then seek to fill the remaining 10% with minority speakers just for the sake of diversity?
Nice blaming of the victim, buddy. It seems that you are coming from a very loaded position here.
It's one thing to say "you must not discriminate because of race or sex". That's racism and sexism and we all find it abhorrent (or at least, I would hope so from HN's readership).
But is the fact that they had a non-diverse lineup of speakers proof that they explicitly excluded non-whites and non-males from participating? From what we know, that's not really the case. Ending up with a lineup of white male speakers, at a Ruby conference in England in the year 2012, is not at all an unlikely outcome for a selection process that ignores race and gender. I think you understand this.
But you're saying something else. You're saying that they should have made it a goal to have a diverse panel, by specifically taking into account race and gender to override other factors and get the diversity makeup you want. Don't immediately think of merit, either: it could have taken something such as offering a larger subsidy to get that one female speaker they wanted who had initially declined, or to fly in someone from Japan. Whatever it took, they should have done it, because the race and gender makeup has to be what you decide.
That's not being non-racist and non-sexist. That's positive discrimination, or affirmative action. It's a somewhat controversial policy that might have its place to rectify situations of long-ingrained oppression and prejudice, but it's certainly not the required standard for being non-racist and non-sexist in all situations. Certainly not at a conference for Ruby programmers in England in 2012!
Mind you, explicitly aiming for a diverse panel is still a fine goal for a conference organizer. But that's not to say that it should be the primary goal of all tech conferences in the world, and that any organizers who fail to put it at the top of their agenda should be publicly tarred and feathered as racists and have their conference boycotted and cancelled.
As well-meaning as I'm sure all people involved are, some parts of the tech community have reached a level of paroxistic politicization that will be detrimental to the community itself. We're going to lose conferences, and we're going to lose people who feel uncomfortable with this forceful imposition of ideological attitudes.
Why should that have been their goal? This isn't a conference about racial issues or gender issues.
Should they have also made it a goal to include a token gay speaker? But then they're discriminating against people who don't fit into the standard classification of gay and straight!
There's no reason it should be a goal of a conference organizer to have a diverse collection of speakers, just to put on display how not-racist and how not-sexist they are. They should of course not discriminate against a speaker for those things, but to make it a goal to seek out diversity is perverse.
Why can't the goal just be to get the best speakers available? They know what their local community is most interested in and I assume would be inviting speakers based on that, not any type of racist or sexist agenda.
Diversity is a problem in all of computing; to make it out that it is solely the problem of conference organizers is to miss the point and to over-concentrate the blame.
It's not clear at all that diversity wasn't one of their goals when choosing speakers. It is clear that diversity wasn't their primary goal, and considering that this is a conference about technology, and not a conference about diversity; I'm not sure, as are many others, why anyone would consider it relevant.
Don't people "organize" tech conferences? Or "put them together", or "run" them, or something? Since when have they been "curated"? Since it was a buzzword?
I agree that they are not sexist. However I don't think diversity needs to be an explicit goal of choosing a speaker lineup.
Having said that, being aware of the diversity in software development, if I were to organise a conference, and only managed to attract male speakers, I would think "oh shit, something has gone very wrong here", and I would not hesitate to cancel it and try and address the serious issue.
"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.
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 :-(
I wish you couldn't sue anyone for anything they say or any information they distribute. May it be a bullshit opinion or nuclear launch codes.
Free speech is under attack enough. We don't need to start suing people because they voice their potentially oversensitive concerns about equality. If that happens, we soon won't be able to say anything without fear of being suit!
[+] [-] influx|13 years ago|reply
http://rubydramas.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20080102040259/http://www.zedshaw...
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rlpb|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anonymous3821|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danilocampos|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] protomyth|13 years ago|reply
I'm a white dude whose biological parent is non-white dude who grew up in a disadvantaged socio-economic background, and I got to tell you that is probably one of the more offensive lines I have read recently. I am white and male and technology was not pretty accessible.
The only part I got lucky with was that the late 80's and early 90's had a class of entry computers that were wiped out by video game consoles and Windows. They were available and my Dad made one hell of a good decision. Schools who cannot afford vocational programs were not going to afford computer programming. If I had been born 10 years earlier or later then I would not be in a technology field.
I have seen too many people make assumptions based on race that should have been made on wealth and location. Using race as a proxy is wrong.
What opportunities does a young boy or girl from a disadvantaged background have to get into programming? Libraries and schools are not the answer. They have locked computers to keep people from being problems. There are programs to buy kids musical instruments but not computers. OLPC is basically a foreign aid program as you cannot go an buy a kid one.
You want some diversity, skip looking at what-is and look at the next generation. The C64 died in 1994, what was the replacement on ramp to programming. It sure as heck isn't the web browser. Our field is not diverse because of socio-economics. It costs almost like a young hockey player to be a good programmer.
// someone going to make that stupid inflation argument again and I would point to how the under $200 price point is still important (look at tablets)
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
What I find particularly vexing here: just a couple of years ago everybody was deriding the geeks hacking away on their computer, and didn't want to have anything to do with them. Now that they officially seem to have some fun, suddenly everybody wants in and the same people who made the nerds life hell 20 years ago by bashing them for their nerdiness now start bashing them for their alleged sexism and racism? What is wrong with people simply doing their thing? Why not leave such people alone, or join them if you enjoy the same things?
Edit: another thing, it seems this conference was simply organized by some Ruby developers who decided to give it a go. If people have a problem with it's structure, why don't they simply start their own conference?
[+] [-] mattbriggs|13 years ago|reply
I do not know the organizers at this conference, but I know people who have been put in a similar situation, even when as organizers they are non white males. For example, Rebecca Murphy getting accused of sexism when she organizes a conference. Even when she has done way more for the cause then the people calling for her head.
As a conference organizer, you ARE put in the position of either finding token minorities, or facing a backlash. Who talks at a conf is based on who submits talks. If you end up with a situation where you have no submissions from minorities, or going on merit, the few minority submissions don't really make the cut, what do you do? It sucks for the organizers, and it sucks for the people who are asked to speak, since they never know if it is based on merit, or based on the fact that they aren't white men.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
The goal of startups (and a lot of companies) is to ship code and so talented people get hired regardless of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. In fact tech has something of a reputation for hiring "weirdos" as really talented technical folks are valued even if society at large discriminates against them. Just as true for the LGBT folks as it is for the non-white folks.
So the barrier to entry for becoming a Ruby star is essentially zero, laptop and a free AWS instance. And the market is demonstrably talent driven not 'class' driven.
You will have a hard time trying to convince me that the lack of non-white guy talent/leadership in the Ruby community has anything to do with race.
[+] [-] chaostheory|13 years ago|reply
There aren't that many Ruby (or Python) programmers compared to say Java, PHP, or C++. There are even less Ruby programmers who want to make a 30-60 minute presentation on Ruby, let alone have the time to travel to some city in the UK. When you add a requirement for race in addition to skill, experience, and motivation; at this time you're probably not going to get anyone.
The main reason people go to programming conferences is mainly all about what's being specifically presented. Most people in tech don't care about ethnic group; they care about results. As someone else already posted, even when programmers go to see someone; it's really really rare that they even know what they look like unless their last name gives it away.
[+] [-] subsystem|13 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOxGjNbp_Y
[+] [-] bpatrianakos|13 years ago|reply
There are ways to go about this sort of thing and while the issue deserves attention and the situation needs to be addressed, shutting down a conference over it doesn't do anyone any good. I don't think its really an issue of minorities being excluded so much as is it an issue of minorities not being included. There's a subtle difference.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anu_gupta|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] __abc|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] FuzzyDunlop|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
> 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|13 years ago|reply
It doesn't surprise me to read such comments. It just saddens me.
[+] [-] oellegaard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedufer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SagelyGuru|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antihero|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
The proper approach is to utterly ignore the race and sex of people. Anything else is racist and/or sexist.
[+] [-] eropple|13 years ago|reply
It's a non-starter to "not care", because privileged groups automatically get their foot in the door.
[+] [-] jballanc|13 years ago|reply
The real lesson here is that the internet is an echo chamber for context free judgments.
[+] [-] luigi|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Permit|13 years ago|reply
Why is diversity a noble goal in choosing speakers? Like he said, would it have been better to choose 90% of their desired lineup and then seek to fill the remaining 10% with minority speakers just for the sake of diversity?
[+] [-] Camillo|13 years ago|reply
It's one thing to say "you must not discriminate because of race or sex". That's racism and sexism and we all find it abhorrent (or at least, I would hope so from HN's readership). But is the fact that they had a non-diverse lineup of speakers proof that they explicitly excluded non-whites and non-males from participating? From what we know, that's not really the case. Ending up with a lineup of white male speakers, at a Ruby conference in England in the year 2012, is not at all an unlikely outcome for a selection process that ignores race and gender. I think you understand this.
But you're saying something else. You're saying that they should have made it a goal to have a diverse panel, by specifically taking into account race and gender to override other factors and get the diversity makeup you want. Don't immediately think of merit, either: it could have taken something such as offering a larger subsidy to get that one female speaker they wanted who had initially declined, or to fly in someone from Japan. Whatever it took, they should have done it, because the race and gender makeup has to be what you decide.
That's not being non-racist and non-sexist. That's positive discrimination, or affirmative action. It's a somewhat controversial policy that might have its place to rectify situations of long-ingrained oppression and prejudice, but it's certainly not the required standard for being non-racist and non-sexist in all situations. Certainly not at a conference for Ruby programmers in England in 2012!
Mind you, explicitly aiming for a diverse panel is still a fine goal for a conference organizer. But that's not to say that it should be the primary goal of all tech conferences in the world, and that any organizers who fail to put it at the top of their agenda should be publicly tarred and feathered as racists and have their conference boycotted and cancelled.
As well-meaning as I'm sure all people involved are, some parts of the tech community have reached a level of paroxistic politicization that will be detrimental to the community itself. We're going to lose conferences, and we're going to lose people who feel uncomfortable with this forceful imposition of ideological attitudes.
[+] [-] monochromatic|13 years ago|reply
Should they have also made it a goal to include a token gay speaker? But then they're discriminating against people who don't fit into the standard classification of gay and straight!
There's no reason it should be a goal of a conference organizer to have a diverse collection of speakers, just to put on display how not-racist and how not-sexist they are. They should of course not discriminate against a speaker for those things, but to make it a goal to seek out diversity is perverse.
[+] [-] angersock|13 years ago|reply
(And I'm not suggesting either is the worse choice, or that they are mutually exclusive!)
[+] [-] robryan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaonashi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rizzom5000|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrKurtHaeusler|13 years ago|reply
Having said that, being aware of the diversity in software development, if I were to organise a conference, and only managed to attract male speakers, I would think "oh shit, something has gone very wrong here", and I would not hesitate to cancel it and try and address the serious issue.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] __alexs|13 years ago|reply
http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got...
[+] [-] betageek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_dent|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
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 :-(
[+] [-] amurmann|13 years ago|reply