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> 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.

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.

You're presenting a false dilemma. As the linked article makes clear, it's not either/or, it's about avoiding an initial mis-step that poisons the initial pool of speakers.

The crucial part of the linked article is when he talk to Josh Susser, one of the initial tweeters who triggered the issue, and who organizes GoGaRuCo, which receives plaudits for diversity. GoGaRuCo very pointedly reaches out to evangelists in the community who will bring in a diverse selection of speakers, and then do a blind judging of submitted papers. The result is that, by making sure the pool of speakers is diverse to start with, they can pick the best papers blindly to gender and race, and still get diversity.

The result is that, by making sure the pool of speakers is diverse to start with, they can pick the best papers blindly to gender and race, and still get diversity.

By your logic, as a caucasian person I shouldn't submit a presentation to GoGaRuCo because they are determining the pool of speakers based on diversity (read: gender/race/taste), before they determine what I have to say. Since I somehow have a lighter shade of skin and because I have these dangly bits between my legs, I'm no longer eligible for inclusion into the speaker list.

I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.

Edit: Since I can't reply directly to fatbird, I'll reply here. I see we're using "diverse" and "diversity" differently here. Looking at your comment again, I can see how you are thinking. I personally don't know how BritRuby opened their CFP process. I assumed (ass - u - me, I get it) that they would just open up the CFP to the Interwebs and papers would just roll in. Maybe they did something differently, and narrowed their advertising for papers, there's not enough information to know whether they did that.

They're not determining the pool of speakers based on diversity, they're making an extra effort to broaden the pool of potential speakers. They're not excluding white people or in any way causing white people a disadvantage. Unless, that is, you think that white people deserve not to have to compete with non-whites.

I'd call that a clear case of discrimination.

There seems to be some minimum age requirement before the reply link shows up.

The linked article goes into the sausage making that got the BritRuby guys in trouble. I encourage you to read it fully because it's a really good read on how these things happen without malice or conscious racism or sexism on anyone's part. Short version is that they drew up a list of 15 initial invitees who were white males, without ever contacting prominent Rubyists in the area who weren't white or male, who would have been happy to attend and speak, and who were certainly of a stature to deserve to be invited. It's a classic example of systemic bias.

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.

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.

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.

> I'd put forward that it's based on middle-class white peoples collective guilt for pre 21st century racism.

God, you're so spot on. When someone comes along that's supposedly from the same group of people that whites are trying to coddle and foster and tells them to fuck off (kindly), they don't know what to do.

:). Additionally, I find the double standard that I can get away with phrases like "white peoples collective guilt" to be quite abhorrent. A white person saying the same thing with inverse colours would be deemed a racist, and we all have no qualms with discriminating against white racists.

Just one point. You don't need motivation to speak at this particular conference. You, and anyone else who aren't in a small group of white males, were not given the opportunity to speak.

Really? If I had built up my profile in the ruby community, gave regular talks at conferences etc you're saying that I wouldn't have been given the opportunity to talk? That they would specifically turn down proposals for non-white speakers regardless of their standing in the ruby community?

By this argument why isn't anyone arguing the corner of transgenders, Native Americans and people who think that the original Battlestar Galactica was better than the re-imagined series?

As part of the linked article, it was revealed that many people who are not white, or not male, but who were prominent and very qualified to speak, and available to speak, simply weren't invited in the initial list of 15.

In other words, they sat down to draw up a list, and out of a large and diverse community of Rubyists, invited only the white male ones. No one is saying they did it consciously or deliberately, but they did it, and got some push back on it, and /ragequit their own conference. So, no, you wouldn't have been given the opportunity to talk.

(And btw, fuck you for the phrase "white people's collective guilt" ;)

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

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

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?