@BritRuby cancelled over diversity controversy

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Andrew Kuklewicz

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Nov 21, 2012, 2:21:43 PM11/21/12
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I always like to start with facts from an official statement:  http://2013.britruby.com/




thoughts?

On a related note, another common complaint at tech confs is attendee/sponsor behavior, and how the conf handles it.  One approach is to have an anti-harassment policy from the start.

One I am familiar with is Steel City Ruby Conf:

They also blogged about the issue:

From what I can tell, many confs now base their policies off this:

Would it be okay, if I draft a policy based on these for wicked good?
We had in issue like this in our last railsbridge workshop, and I wish we had a policy like this in place from the start.

Happy turkey day folks,

Andrew Kuklewicz

Brian Cardarella

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Nov 21, 2012, 2:30:50 PM11/21/12
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I'm all for making diversity as a goal for Wicked Good Ruby.

Would you mind sharing what issue you had at Railsbridge? I'm curious to know how it came about.

I also want to have a zero-tolerance policy for presentations. It will be a requirement that we have a sense of what the talk will be about, but if presenters think that once they have the floor they can get away with anything they're in for a surprise. I have no issues with turning of a projector and kicking someone off stage if they start up with any bullshit.

Andrew Kuklewicz

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Nov 21, 2012, 2:57:20 PM11/21/12
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Thanks Brian,

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Brian Cardarella <bcard...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm all for making diversity as a goal for Wicked Good Ruby.

Would you mind sharing what issue you had at Railsbridge? I'm curious to know how it came about.

We had a group of students where one woman started making transphobic/homophobic remarks to others at her table, some of whom I believe were members of the LGBT community.

No one at the table put up with it, and everyone at the table told her to stop it, and under such pressure she left of her own accord before I found out this was happening.

I found out after the fact, when I was making my rounds and asking how things were going.  I escalated to the rest of the railsbridge leaders, got the TAs who witnessed it to provide more info to us.  After brief discussion, I then we went back to the folks at the table and apologized that such a thing had happened at our event, as it went completely against what we are about, and explained that the student in question would no longer be welcome to return or attend any further events.

As we talked with the folks at the table about it, they recommended some good policies from other tech events they had attended, and we promised to have a similar official policy in place before the next event.

I also want to have a zero-tolerance policy for presentations. It will be a requirement that we have a sense of what the talk will be about, but if presenters think that once they have the floor they can get away with anything they're in for a surprise. I have no issues with turning of a projector and kicking someone off stage if they start up with any bullshit.


I find it easy to agree with that: we don't want a repeat of GoGaRuCo http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html

Cheers,

 - Andrew

Dan Croak

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Nov 21, 2012, 5:43:16 PM11/21/12
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+1 making diversity a goal.

I'm not well-researched on how to achieve it, so looking to you folks for input. The two options I know of are:

* "blind" proposals
* no proposals, organizers seek all speakers

My only prior experience running a conference was "Boston I/O": http://boston.io/schedule. The year prior, it had a different name, "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers."

Both years, I set the speaking topics I thought would be good, then found speakers for each topic, trying to find faces that would make everyone in the audience feel comfortable. No call for proposals, turned down a number of people who asked to speak, was very heavy-handed and top-down.

I really don't know if that's appropriate or not, but the result seemed to be pretty good (something like 35% female attendance, for instance). Everyone seemed comfortable and felt welcome.

I'm sure there is actual research done on this kind of thing that is more worth following than my anecdote, but wanted to share the "no proposals" / authoritarian style as an option to consider.



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Johnny Boursiquot

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Nov 30, 2012, 6:26:49 PM11/30/12
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Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame suggests a few approaches in this blog post recently:
  1. transparent process
  2. blind selection
  3. proactive outreach
  4. enlisting help
It would be interesting to see how we can incorporate these principles into our selection process.

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