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The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

2019.phpce.eu

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Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#81

Post by adonnjohn »

sp332 wrote: post #65
adonnjohn wrote: post #55

What a weird and frustrating circumstance to be in. It's definitely disappointing that the organizers could not work through this. I understand that women candidates may be disproportionately hard to line up, but is there any evidence that the promoters put in the extra effort to find them? More importantly, should they be obligated to do so in the first place when the aim of the conference is quality in technology:…

the conference is quality in technology: nothing more, nothing less There are things in life more important than tech conferences. Quality in tech should not override human rights, civil rights, people's health and relationships, etc. This could be a long list, tech isn't even close to the top. The only number I've seen for this conference is one woman submitter out of 250, which isn't even close to matching the prop…

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I believe that the ratios should align for sure, and I believe that if they don't, that due diligence wasn't done, potentially with some direct or indirect form of prejudice (which cannot be discerned without knowing the details of how recruitment efforts took place). I also don't mean to derail the importance of human rights or equality on any particular playing field, I literally just meant that tech is what people are going there to discuss and learn about. While human rights and reflecting community proportions is certainly a part of it, I highly doubt that the intent of any tech conference is to primarily give keynotes on human rights.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#82

Post by adonnjohn »

gshdg wrote: post #60
adonnjohn wrote: post #55

What a weird and frustrating circumstance to be in. It's definitely disappointing that the organizers could not work through this. I understand that women candidates may be disproportionately hard to line up, but is there any evidence that the promoters put in the extra effort to find them? More importantly, should they be obligated to do so in the first place when the aim of the conference is quality in technology:…

Except those proportions don’t hold true.

Agreed. And as a result, more information is needed on why that turned out to be the case.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#83

Post by larkeith »

Yver wrote: post #44
larkeith wrote: post #7

That's a shame, but I can't say I disagree with the two blog posts linked in the page. Such speaker lineups only exacerbate the lack of diversity in tech, and, given the prior year's lineup, the organizers had the opportunity to work on outreach this year. Hopefully a new conference will supersede this one (if there's not already alternatives, I'm unfamiliar with the PHP community). Props to the speakers who stood up…

Wouldn't it be better to leave outreach programs to outreach groups? This is a conference about programming and "single responsibility principle" is a fairly popular concept there.

I would suggest that the SRP applied here would be organizers calling outreach groups to assist with application diversity. Real-life activities have side-effects which should be mitigated, such as nonrepresentational conferences reinforcing gender disparities in tech.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#84

Post by neilv »

ngngngng wrote: post #25
abeisgreat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read through the second link he mentions how he tried to work with the organizers to improve their submission process and reach more diverse speakers and they opted not to.

That's not what I read, I read in the second link that he wanted to cancel a bunch of the male speakers, and then have everyone work like mad to reach out to women to come speak. That's not a submission process at all. That's outreach.

> That's not a submission process at all. That's outreach.

A lot of conferences seem to have a sort of selective outreach component to their call for papers.

Conference organizers will go and post the CFP in various forums from which they'd like to get papers -- particular programming language forums, particular theory or practice forums, particular universities, etc. Some of this seems creative, like "we'd like to get more foo-lang people involved with bar-con this year." All that sounds like selective outreach.

If the conference values, say, diversity of background brought to the table, then those conference organizers could seek out and post the CFP in places that diversity might be found.

One of the difficulties is that it's hard to know what all diversity you're missing out on (much of it isn't visible, and much of it doesn't have familiar labels), but other of the diversity omissions are glaringly obvious.

Including the glaringly obvious omissions in one's outreach seems a good start.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#85

Post by tzs »

sp332 wrote: post #41
mpweiher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How “broken”?

After a couple minutes of research, the lowest number I could find for women in CS was from https://web.archive.org/web/20141221112502/http://floss2013.... Without getting into how accurate it is, I'm just taking it as a very conservative estimate that 10% of OSS software programmers are women. So out of 250 submissions, we'd expect about 25 of them to be from women if the sample is unbiased. And the odds of having o…

The survey you cite that found 10.4% included software and non-software contributions (such as translators, documenters, community managers, etc.), and found that women contributors were much more likely to be the later. Other surveys, such as a 2017 survey of 5500 contributors to GitHub projects, put it at 3% women [1].

None of that is really relevant, though, because we aren't talking about a generic OSS conference. We are talking about a PHP conference. What is the percent of women who are PHP programmers?

Actually, that number would not be all the useful, either. Such surveys are going to find out what percent of various groups use PHP. That would be somewhat useful for estimating what the conference attendees should look like. Conference speakers, on the other hand, should be people are are doing new things with or to PHP. That's going to be a much smaller group than the people who use PHP, and so is likely to have much more skewed demographics compared to the larger PHP user population.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#86

Post by bonoboTP »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #63
esotericn wrote: post #26

Tangent that may be relevant here. I used to be involved in access work for those from underprivileged backgrounds. It's very difficult to get poor kids to apply to University even if they have the grades, for reasons I expect are pretty similar (social environment, not 'fitting in', having few role models, etc). Going back further - tons of them simply don't have the grades or skills, because they weren't interested…

to follow up on that: at the high end universities do make an effort to recruit clever kids from underprivileged backgrounds, and they implement programs to bring them up to speed; there are pre-freshmen programs, summer classes, supplement lectures, peer mentorship, &c pp. It actually works. That said, what is the focus on individual diversity good for? It's the system that holds people back, and as the parent poste…

> recruit clever kids from underprivileged backgrounds,

A very serious question I've been thinking about lately, and may sound absurd at first: what about non-clever people? It seems that discrimination of less intelligent people is the last standing type of discrimination that is widely socially acceptable to the point of calling someone "stupid" being a very normal thing where nobody bats an eye. This is not intended as a troll post.

Of course in the end society needs smart people in important decision-making roles, but does this mean that stupid and poor people don't deserve better?

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#87

Post by sp332 »

curiousgal wrote: post #35
abeisgreat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one way to think about it is to view the current structure (one of male dominated events) is already enforcing a system that isn't just about PHP. It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently sit in the back. The attempts by speakers and organisers to level this field is trying to get the events to just be about PHP. However they realize that things are very off balance already…

Do all men feel accepted, respected, and praised just because they are men? No, the ones that do have earned it. Like so, I personally would like to get invited to give a talk only because I am the best person out there who can do so on the topic at hand, not because some organizers feel like they have some sort of obligation to be politically correct.

Men are encouraged to go into CS just because they are men. https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-...

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#88

Post by DannyBee »

nikofeyn wrote: post #53
esotericn wrote: post #26

Tangent that may be relevant here. I used to be involved in access work for those from underprivileged backgrounds. It's very difficult to get poor kids to apply to University even if they have the grades, for reasons I expect are pretty similar (social environment, not 'fitting in', having few role models, etc). Going back further - tons of them simply don't have the grades or skills, because they weren't interested…

> This stuff is difficult. i don’t think it’s that difficult. the government finds a way to spends billions and trillions of dollars on tons of stuff that has no meaningful impact. if the government cared, they would increase the budgets of schools to fund good teachers’ salaries. if i could pull a six figure salary teaching, i would do it in a heartbeat. but there’s no way i would teach in this current educational e…

These are very complex systems with lots of variables and interdependencies/connections between the variables.

Suggesting that simple, direct, change of the variable that has direct linkage to pretty much all other parts of the system, will achieve some specific result, is almost certainly wrong.

In fact, pretty much every mechanism taught of how to effect change in large scale systems says not to do that.

In this case, this is pretty easy to see - As an example - If you could pull six figures teaching, everyone would want to teach, regardless of whether they should or not.

Solutions to this have obvious affects on other things

(IE increasing credential requirements, or performance reviews ...).

These in turn have effects on other parts of the system, ...

If you really think this is just simple, i'd suggest looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#Complexity_mana... and going from there.

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#89

Post by sp332 »

adonnjohn wrote: post #81
sp332 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the conference is quality in technology: nothing more, nothing less There are things in life more important than tech conferences. Quality in tech should not override human rights, civil rights, people's health and relationships, etc. This could be a long list, tech isn't even close to the top. The only number I've seen for this conference is one woman submitter out of 250, which isn't even close to matching the prop…

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I believe that the ratios should align for sure, and I believe that if they don't, that due diligence wasn't done, potentially with some direct or indirect form of prejudice (which cannot be discerned without knowing the details of how recruitment efforts took place). I also don't mean to derail the importance of human rights or equality on any particular playing field, I literally just…

Well I could have been clearer too. Under the hyperbole, I meant that working to make sure women are treated equally to men might be more important than having a tech conference. As Mark Baker put it, "Diversity matters more to me than speaking."

Re: The phpCE 2019 conference in Dresden has been cancelled and won't be continued

#90

Post by neffy »

abeisgreat wrote: post #22
curiousgal wrote: post #14

As a woman I find it pretty damn objectifying for someone to withdraw from a conference because it has no female speakers. Why should anyone care about anything other than php in a php conference?

Well one way to think about it is to view the current structure (one of male dominated events) is already enforcing a system that isn't just about PHP. It's a structure where we put men on stage and leave (a few) women to silently sit in the back. The attempts by speakers and organisers to level this field is trying to get the events to just be about PHP. However they realize that things are very off balance already…

No it's a bit more than that. The assumption is that there are no qualified women, so an unqualified woman has to be put up to meet a quota.

But there are actually qualified women. Putting up unqualified candidates to meet some notional quota is the best possible way of enforcing the status quo.

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