This isn't a conversation about being a programmer, however. This is a conversation about being part of a programming community. Successful assimilation into a community has numerous benefits for one's career prospects, social life and overall success. Exclusion can be correspondingly damaging.
As a result, programming communities all over the place are having a tough conversation: is this community sufficiently inclusive? Some are indifferent to the cause of inclusiveness. What's unfortunate is that those most indifferent seem so consistently to be those most already included.
So in this case, some people decided they were uncomfortable with the level of inclusion. That's a fair conversation to have.
(As it happens, while _why's true identity may have been a secret, his membership in the racial and gender majority group for his field is not:
Certainly. But when the conversation turns into accusations of racism and a boycott (or feared boycott?) that ends with the sponsors running away and the conference being cancelled, it's a sign that the conversation has gone astray.
In fact, it's hard to even have a rational conversation on inclusivity in CS if we're already at the point where such things happen. We really need cooler heads to have a rational debate.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-...
The author fails to grasp that a kid from Oakland, Cleveland, or South LA, has never heard of TED, or Academic Earth, or Khan Academy. He has no idea that there are free resources available online, and no reason to expect such.
But what can you expect? The Forbes article is written by a very wealthy, middle-aged, white man who had both parents and lived in a wealthy neighborhood.
I'm skeptical about this. The company I work for were the only sponsor formally announced on their site. We were behind them 100% and didn't have a clue about the controversy or the cancellation until we found out after they made their decision. It doesn't add up. If financial strain was a reason, why not contact us to see if we could help?
If I never took part in anything that didn't attract females (that were not family), I would have never learned anything, or seen any movies, or eaten any food...
1) It's a process. We already have non-white people in top positions (both in the industry and in academia), so there's no lack of inspiration, but it takes time for those who have inspired to make their way through school and immigration. Right now there are multitudes of Indian and Chinese students in American universities: in a few years you'll see them at conferences. And that is already going to happen: they're certainly not going to drop out of their degrees and go home because some Brits were not diverse enough with their conference in Manchester.
2) From what I've seen, many of those students are more interested in enterprise or research applications than in doing web development with Ruby, so you might see them at slightly different conferences.
3) This particular conference was in the UK, not in America or in India or in China or in France. Let's be careful not to call the entire country racist just because it's mostly populated by whites.
I agree with #2, but Ruby is a fairly special case, in that its creator, and still one of its main contributors, is Japanese. So you can't make the argument "if only non-whites stepped it up in Ruby dev"...(but the argument that none of the Japanese speakers could make it/were affordable/wanted to come is still legit).
It's true that Ruby is a Japanese invention (I wonder if all these racists are aware of what they're bringing into their good ol' boys' club ;)), but as you note, Japan is so far away that there are still difficulties in participating in a little new conference in Manchester. Also, Ruby got its big break with Rails, which was developed in Chicago, I think, so the Japanese community might not have gotten as much of a headstart as one would expect. Or maybe they are using Ruby for far more interesting things than web development. I don't know.
And I think that's the heart of the matter...The Japanese (or any number of non-European/American Ruby communities) could be doing something amazing...and we would have a hard time knowing, because of the inherent geographical and language barriers. That's why it's not just the "moral" thing to make an effort toward diversity, but it is a potential creative and intellectual boon.
In any case, the OP should've just included a statement saying, "we asked speakers x,y,z, for example, but each had a previous commitment, etc. etc. etc.". In fact, that's a point they should've made more prominently in the debate before canceling the conference.
"so there's no lack of inspiration" --> Really, can you point to the numbers?
It's cool. Everything is totally cool.
I haven't had a boss who wasn't a white male in nearly a decade, women are still harassed at conferences, and we can only find white guys to talk at a conference about a language invented by a Japanese guy.
But Camillo's class has foreigners in it, so everything is completely okay now.
There's a big difference between the composition of your university class and the social makeup of a professional community. Let's talk when you're out in your career.
But I am not sure what you mean by the last line. Do you mean: 1: "This is the last industry where it should be necessary to criticise or cancel a conference with an all-male lineup [so the fact that this conference does in fact have an all-male lineup, in the context of this particular community having problems with sexism in the past, raises a huge red flag, and probably should be canceled]".
or do you mean: 2. "This is the last industry to have issues with sexism because we are so diverse, so when one conference comes along where this diversity is not represented, it shouldn't be an issue".
I find both reasonable I guess. Although considering the fact that this topic is already a sensitive issue, I lead more towards opinion 1.
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.