[EuroPython] Lack of diversity within selected talks

[Lynn Root]

To the EuroPython organizers, talk reviewers, and community at large,

For those of you who do not know me, I am a board member of the Python
Software Foundation, the founder and leader of PyLadies San Francisco,
and an engineer at Spotify. I have been a speaker at the last two
EuroPythons, with 3 talks last year, and a keynote the year before.

I see that the list of preliminarily talks are publicly available. Side
stepping my issue with lack of communication to proposers of talks at
large, I am writing to bring light to the lack of diversity of the
current list of talks, and propose some action items.

There is how I understand things as they are. Please correct me if I am
wrong.

- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
- there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
- there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks

If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.

Here are my suggestions to rectify this issue:
- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.
- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.
- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers. First time speakers may need far more help writing
a proposal tailored to the EuroPython audience. As reviewers, you have
an understanding of the EP community and should help pull up new
speakers.
- related to #2, and #3, have open office hours or create general
availability during the time that the CfP is reopened to help those who
want it craft a good proposal.
- select talks for the remainder of the program with the context of the
preliminarily talks in mind.

I understand that the blind selection process was meant in good faith to
remove bias. However, the result is troubling, and needs to be looked at
in context. If this preliminary list has any influence on the actual
program, the conference will suffer in terms of overall diversity in
attendance. I'm not writing to discuss the merit of diversity at a tech
conference, because I have faith that the reviewers and organizers
already grasp its importance. But this email is to address what I feel
needs to change.

Thank you,

Lynn Root

[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r=0

[Markus Zapke-Gründemann]

Post by Lynn Root
To the EuroPython organizers, talk reviewers, and community at large,
For those of you who do not know me, I am a board member of the Python
Software Foundation, the founder and leader of PyLadies San Francisco,
and an engineer at Spotify. I have been a speaker at the last two
EuroPythons, with 3 talks last year, and a keynote the year before.
I see that the list of preliminarily talks are publicly available. Side
stepping my issue with lack of communication to proposers of talks at
large, I am writing to bring light to the lack of diversity of the
current list of talks, and propose some action items.
There is how I understand things as they are. Please correct me if I am
wrong.
- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
- there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
- there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.
- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.
- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.
- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers. First time speakers may need far more help writing
a proposal tailored to the EuroPython audience. As reviewers, you have
an understanding of the EP community and should help pull up new
speakers.
- related to #2, and #3, have open office hours or create general
availability during the time that the CfP is reopened to help those who
want it craft a good proposal.
- select talks for the remainder of the program with the context of the
preliminarily talks in mind.
I understand that the blind selection process was meant in good faith to
remove bias. However, the result is troubling, and needs to be looked at
in context. If this preliminary list has any influence on the actual
program, the conference will suffer in terms of overall diversity in
attendance. I'm not writing to discuss the merit of diversity at a tech
conference, because I have faith that the reviewers and organizers
already grasp its importance. But this email is to address what I feel
needs to change.

Thank you for pointing out that problem, Lynn. Speaking of myself my thought
after PyCon DE 2012 was: How can we get more women to speak at PyCon DE?
Because the number of women participating or even giving a talk was very low.

I had a short discussion with Jan Lehnhardt and he pointed me at "Beating the
Odds ? How We got 25% Women Speakers for JSConf EU 2012"[1].

The PyCon DE community was always using their own software[2] for organizing
the conference. So anonymous reviews were added to the version that was used
for PyCon DE 2013, because [1] said this is one of the things to increase
diversity.

The software used for EuroPython[3] is based on the software used for PyCon DE
in the years before. This is why it also has the feature of anonymous reviews.

So far for the "technical" reasons behind the blind review feature.

But looking again at the list of things to do at [1] I can see that one thing
has not been done:

3. Encourage people from under-represented groups to submit to the CFP.

And I think this also one of the things you blame, Lynn.

Even if it hurts and the time is pressing I think we have to discuss the review
process again. Lynn made a few good proposals for that.


Regards

Markus

[1]
http://2012.jsconf.eu/2012/09/17/beating-the-odds-how-we-got-25-percent-women-speakers.html
[2] https://bitbucket.org/PySV/pycon_de_website
[3] https://github.com/EuroPython/djep

[M.-A. Lemburg]

If it helps, I'd happily free up this slot in the selected talks
list (https://ep2014.europython.eu/en/event/schedule/):

43 - Embedded Devices - Marc-Andre Lemburg - Home Automation with Kivy, Raspberry Pi and MQTT

and perhaps do the talk as open space session, if there's interest.

BTW: This talk entry:

56 - Other - Marc-Andre Lemburg - EuroPython 2015 - Let's build it together

is not me, but the EuroPython Society. I just entered it on the EPS'
behalf and at the request of Mike M?ller. Those "talks" are only
organizational ones, which probably just got into the review by
mistake.

Thanks,
--
Marc-Andre Lemburg
Director
EuroPython Society
http://www.europython-society.org/

[Daniel Kraft]

Absolute ack!

----- Urspr?ngliche Mail -----

Post by Lynn Root
To the EuroPython organizers, talk reviewers, and community at large,
For those of you who do not know me, I am a board member of the Python
Software Foundation, the founder and leader of PyLadies San Francisco,
and an engineer at Spotify. I have been a speaker at the last two
EuroPythons, with 3 talks last year, and a keynote the year before.
I see that the list of preliminarily talks are publicly available. Side
stepping my issue with lack of communication to proposers of talks at
large, I am writing to bring light to the lack of diversity of the
current list of talks, and propose some action items.
There is how I understand things as they are. Please correct me if I am
wrong.
- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
- there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
- there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.
- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.
- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.
- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers. First time speakers may need far more help writing
a proposal tailored to the EuroPython audience. As reviewers, you have
an understanding of the EP community and should help pull up new
speakers.
- related to #2, and #3, have open office hours or create general
availability during the time that the CfP is reopened to help those who
want it craft a good proposal.
- select talks for the remainder of the program with the context of the
preliminarily talks in mind.
I understand that the blind selection process was meant in good faith to
remove bias. However, the result is troubling, and needs to be looked at
in context. If this preliminary list has any influence on the actual
program, the conference will suffer in terms of overall diversity in
attendance. I'm not writing to discuss the merit of diversity at a tech
conference, because I have faith that the reviewers and organizers
already grasp its importance. But this email is to address what I feel
needs to change.
Thank you,
Lynn Root
[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r=0
_______________________________________________
EuroPython 2014 Berlin, 21th27th July
EuroPython mailing list
EuroPython at python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

--
*Daniel Kraft*
Gesch?ftsf?hrer

D9T GmbH - Magirusstr. 39/1 - D-89077 Ulm
Tel: [phone] - Fax: [phone]

Gesch?ftsf?hrer: Daniel Kraft
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Ust.IdNr: DE 260484638

http://d9t.de - D9T High Performance Hosting
info at d9t.de

[Simon Cross]

Greetings

Is it possible to get some demographics on authors who submitted talks
vs authors of accepted talks? It would be good to know whether the
blind selection process functioned as intended (i.e. the demographics
of the two are statistically similar) or not.

The answer probably won't help us fix things for this year, but it
will tell us where more effort is needed next year.

Schiavo
Simon

[Radomir Dopieralski]

Post by Simon Cross
Greetings
Is it possible to get some demographics on authors who submitted talks
vs authors of accepted talks? It would be good to know whether the
blind selection process functioned as intended (i.e. the demographics
of the two are statistically similar) or not.
The answer probably won't help us fix things for this year, but it
will tell us where more effort is needed next year.
Schiavo
Simon
_______________________________________________
EuroPython 2014 Berlin, 21th27th July
EuroPython mailing list
EuroPython at python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

[Radomir Dopieralski]

Post by Simon Cross
Greetings
Is it possible to get some demographics on authors who submitted talks
vs authors of accepted talks? It would be good to know whether the
blind selection process functioned as intended (i.e. the demographics
of the two are statistically similar) or not.
The answer probably won't help us fix things for this year, but it
will tell us where more effort is needed next year.

I'm sorry for the previous, empty reply, I hit "send" too soon.

I'm all for checking the statistics, especially to check if, by any
chance, all the more diverse speakers are not in the "disputed" group of
talks, which still have a chance of being accepted. It wouldn't be
surprising at all, since they are likely to stand out and therefore
attract votes both in plus and in minus.

There is also the fact, that blind review doesn't really work so well,
if the talk submitters know some of the reviewers, and can ask them for
voting on them (or even without asking, when the reviewers know the
topics of the talks submitted by their friends). The effect is opposite
to the intended -- the club becomes even more closed.

[Andreas Jung]

Post by Radomir Dopieralski
There is also the fact, that blind review doesn't really work so well,
if the talk submitters know some of the reviewers, and can ask them for
voting on them (or even without asking, when the reviewers know the
topics of the talks submitted by their friends). The effect is opposite
to the intended ?

At least for the last EuroPython in Florence you could vote for talks
(can not recall if you could see the speaker and its gender) - did it make
a huge difference?

Andreas

[Filip Kłębczyk]

Post by Andreas Jung
At least for the last EuroPython in Florence you could vote for talks
(can not recall if you could see the speaker and its gender)

you could see speakers data in EP2013

Post by Andreas Jung
- did it make
a huge difference?

The question is how many talks conducted by women are this year? I think
I've counted at least 1 from this years partial list that was published.

Last year (after quickly checking EP2013 talk list; I might miscounted)
there were 4 such talks.

Regards,
Filip

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

Yes!

Post by Lynn Root
- limit speakers to only give one talk.

[phone]

Perhaps too late for this year, but I wish this were the case for
every conference.

N.

[Hynek Schlawack]

Post by Nicholas H.Tollervey
Yes!

Post by Lynn Root
- limit speakers to only give one talk.

[phone]
Perhaps too late for this year, but I wish this were the case for
every conference.

First of all I?m glad that after the troubling discussion style in the
not so far past this sensitive topic is approached appropriately. The
consequences of having a diverse speaker roster go much farther than
that it looks good on paper.

I think that blind reviews are problematic if you have an unleveled play
field and are trying to do something about that. The solution is to
accept one has certain biases and fight them instead of trying to avoid
them because that apparently took away a tool you could have used.

***

That said, I don?t think it's too late. The conference is in July and
there?s a few things you can do:

- Get a keynote speaker who is not a white dude.
- Having speakers have 3 slots is ridiculous, 2 should be a very rare
exception. So ask them which talk is more important and there you have
some free slots.
- Reach out to outreach groups. The most obvious one are our PyLadies
but there are more: http://www.callbackwomen.com/reach-out.html Tell
them our blind audition resulted in a roster you?re unhappy with and
we?re trying to fix it. Let some special committee review those
proposals. Keep a few slots free for them and just mark them TBD if you
need to get it out to print.
- And finally walking the walk: my talk is still in the queue and I will
happily retract my proposal if it helps to have a more diverse
conference. I have no interest to be part of an all-male schedule
anyway.

Cheers and good luck,
Hynek

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Post by Hynek Schlawack
- And finally walking the walk: my talk is still in the queue and I will
happily retract my proposal if it helps to have a more diverse
conference.

Good point.

My talk is also in the queue. I don't know whether it's rejected or not.

If the conference takes the steps you suggested (1 talk per speaker,
outreach to various groups to create a more diverse schedule), I'll
unhappily retract my possibly-not-rejected proposal too, if it helps
free up a slot.

Regards,

Martijn

[Stefan Scherfke]

- Having speakers have 3 slots is ridiculous, 2 should be a very rare exception. So ask them which talk is more important and there you have some free slots.

I wrote an email to the EP help desk a few days ago and offered to withdraw one
of my talks in order to give someone else the chance to present his/her ideas.
Got no reply so far ? :-/

I don?t feel very comfortable having multiple talks while others may not be able
to attend EP.

Cheers,
Stefan

[Andreas Jung]

Hi Stefan,

we got your message and it has been noticed. Some people of the orga
team have been busy at the PyCon in Montreal and/or are still traveling.

Andreas

Post by Stefan Scherfke

- Having speakers have 3 slots is ridiculous, 2 should be a very rare exception. So ask them which talk is more important and there you have some free slots.

I wrote an email to the EP help desk a few days ago and offered to withdraw one
of my talks in order to give someone else the chance to present his/her ideas.
Got no reply so far ? :-/
I don?t feel very comfortable having multiple talks while others may not be able
to attend EP.
Cheers,
Stefan
_______________________________________________
EuroPython 2014 Berlin, 21th27th July
EuroPython mailing list
EuroPython at python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

[Valerio Maggio]

Hi everyone.

Post by Stefan Scherfke

- Having speakers have 3 slots is ridiculous, 2 should be a very rare exception. So ask them which talk is more important and there you have some free slots.

I wrote an email to the EP help desk a few days ago and offered to withdraw one
of my talks in order to give someone else the chance to present his/her ideas.

I did exactly the same, of course.

I do believe that **diversity** is a very important thing (in general), which turns to be even more important for a conference like EuroPython, where there are a lot of people who would like to contribute.
Thus different perspectives on both sides, i.e., talks' proposers and reviewers, are surely needed to make this possible.

This community and this conference deserve a very high quality list of talks, and there are many valuable proposals that are still waiting to be accepted.
So not a problem at all in withdrawing one (or more, if needed) proposals to favour somebody else !-)

Btw, as for clarification, I would like to point out that the list of the talks reported so far refers **only** to the talks that have been accepted after the first round of reviews, i.e., they got only +0 and +1 ratings after the first round.
Thus, the organisers didn't make any additional decisions on these talks that changed the original results of the community voting/reviews :-)
They took the entire list as it was after the first round of reviews, filtering out training proposals, namely 72 talks out of 86 accepted (as far as I know, btw!)

That said, I would kindly suggest the organisers to publish as soon as possible some statistics about submitted talks, corresponding reviews and reviewers.
In this way, It would be easier to reason about possible remedies and workaround to tackle this situation.

For example, I'm wondering if limiting one single talk per speaker would be enough to reach the total number of talks required for the conference. Maybe yes, but only *numbers* can speak :)

m2c.


All the Best,
Valerio

[Roberto Polli]

For those of you who do not know me..

Everybody.py knows you, Lynn!

- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
-#2 there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
-#3 there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.

I agree diversity (of speakers/subjects) is a value, in every declination
(we're not only our gender).

I'm sure Guido van Rossum and Alex Martelli could have send ten (all award
winning) talks. But a two-rockstar conference doesn't mean a better
conference for the community.

I think the committee consider that, and made their choice.

- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.

imho we could gently ask to the selected speakers to give away one or more
talk in favor of the others: limiting the talks to one is unfair at the
moment. And I'm sure that we'll reach the same aim without forcing out
anybody.

- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.

Not entirely fair, even for ladies awaiting for the final schedule.
I agree instead to set gender quotas (eg. 40% minimum for the less-represented
gender). But imho rules should be set *before* the review process.

- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers.

Agree to some precedence to first-time speakers and grow our community.

..create general availability during the time that the CfP is reopened
to help those who want it craft a good proposal.

imho again: reopening is unfair towards people who made their homework ;)
During the review process, author had all the time to browse all proposals and
fix their one.

... the blind selection ... the result is troubling...

Identifying authors won't have changed anything, but in any case I'm on the
full-disclosure side.

But this email is to address what I feel needs to change.

Thx for writing! Your contribution is always a precious spark!

Peace,
R.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r
=0 _______________________________________________
EuroPython 2014 Berlin, 21th27th July
EuroPython mailing list
EuroPython at python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

--
Roberto Polli
Community Manager
Babel - a business unit of Par-Tec S.p.A. - http://www.babel.it
T: +39.06.9826.9651 M: +39.340.652.2736 F: +39.06.9826.9680
P.zza S.Benedetto da Norcia, 33 - 00040 Pomezia (Roma)

CONFIDENZIALE: Questo messaggio ed i suoi allegati sono di carattere
confidenziale per i destinatari in indirizzo.
E' vietato l'inoltro non autorizzato a destinatari diversi da quelli indicati
nel messaggio originale.
Se ricevuto per errore, l'uso del contenuto e' proibito; si prega di
comunicarlo al mittente e cancellarlo immediatamente.

[Nelle Varoquaux]

Post by Roberto Polli

For those of you who do not know me..

Everybody.py knows you, Lynn!

- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
-#2 there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
-#3 there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.

I agree diversity (of speakers/subjects) is a value, in every declination
(we're not only our gender).
I'm sure Guido van Rossum and Alex Martelli could have send ten (all award
winning) talks. But a two-rockstar conference doesn't mean a better
conference for the community.
I think the committee consider that, and made their choice.

- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.

imho we could gently ask to the selected speakers to give away one or more
talk in favor of the others: limiting the talks to one is unfair at the
moment. And I'm sure that we'll reach the same aim without forcing out
anybody.

- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.

Not entirely fair, even for ladies awaiting for the final schedule.
I agree instead to set gender quotas (eg. 40% minimum for the

less-represented

Post by Roberto Polli
gender). But imho rules should be set *before* the review process.

As a member of a "minority ", I feel very uncomfortable with such quotas,
and if you ask women in computer science around Europe, they tend to feel
the same way (this may be very different in North America, as we have two
very different cultures when coming to these subject). I want my proposal
to be accepted for my work and not because I'm a woman, and I don't think
I'll ever submit to a conference where such rules are applied.

I also think it gives a very negative image of women in science, specially
when the abstracts are just not good (an abstract accepted at pycon us
contained an error in the name of a python module *in the title* - it is
hard to take the talk seriously, and this is a disservice to do to the
speaker).

Post by Roberto Polli

- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers.

Agree to some precedence to first-time speakers and grow our community.

..create general availability during the time that the CfP is reopened
to help those who want it craft a good proposal.

imho again: reopening is unfair towards people who made their homework ;)
During the review process, author had all the time to browse all proposals and
fix their one.

... the blind selection ... the result is troubling...

Identifying authors won't have changed anything, but in any case I'm on the
full-disclosure side.

But this email is to address what I feel needs to change.

Thx for writing! Your contribution is always a precious spark!
Peace,
R.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r

Post by Roberto Polli

=0 _______________________________________________
EuroPython 2014 Berlin, 21th27th July
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https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

--
Roberto Polli
Community Manager
Babel - a business unit of Par-Tec S.p.A. - http://www.babel.it
T: +39.06.9826.9651 M: +39.340.652.2736 F: +39.06.9826.9680
P.zza S.Benedetto da Norcia, 33 - 00040 Pomezia (Roma)
CONFIDENZIALE: Questo messaggio ed i suoi allegati sono di carattere
confidenziale per i destinatari in indirizzo.
E' vietato l'inoltro non autorizzato a destinatari diversi da quelli indicati
nel messaggio originale.
Se ricevuto per errore, l'uso del contenuto e' proibito; si prega di
comunicarlo al mittente e cancellarlo immediatamente.
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[Armin Rigo]

Hi all, hi Nelle,

Post by Nelle Varoquaux
As a member of a "minority ", I feel very uncomfortable with such quotas,
and if you ask women in computer science around Europe, they tend to feel
the same way (this may be very different in North America, as we have two
very different cultures when coming to these subject). I want my proposal to
be accepted for my work and not because I'm a woman, and I don't think I'll
ever submit to a conference where such rules are applied.
I also think it gives a very negative image of women in science, specially
when the abstracts are just not good (an abstract accepted at pycon us
contained an error in the name of a python module *in the title* - it is
hard to take the talk seriously, and this is a disservice to do to the
speaker).

I'll take the risk of projecting a misogynistic image of myself, just
to give you a thumb-up. Adding rules to promote a member of a
minority group looks to me, at best, artificial. In this case, woman
participation is going slowly up year after year. I certainly think
(and hope!) that it's not just because of favorable discrimination;
instead, it is most probably just a slow process of natural regulation
that occurs inside a historically strongly biased subculture. This
process can be encouraged, e.g. I'm fine if some grants are reserved
to women; but I think that judging technical merits on a different
scale is not a good way to do that.


A bient?t,

Armin.

[Martijn Faassen]

Post by Armin Rigo
In this case, woman
participation is going slowly up year after year. I certainly think
(and hope!) that it's not just because of favorable discrimination;
instead, it is most probably just a slow process of natural regulation
that occurs inside a historically strongly biased subculture. This
process can be encouraged, e.g. I'm fine if some grants are reserved
to women; but I think that judging technical merits on a different
scale is not a good way to do that.

There are a lot of things that can be done instead of quotas.

I think one function of a Python conference is to help foster the Python
community. If we agree that we would like to have more women speakers
and participants, or just plain broaden the nature of our conference in
general, then you can actively work towards in a whole range of ways:

* Looking for high-profile female invited speakers.

* Broadening the scope of topics. The conference should still be Python
themed, but the occasional talk about, say, morality or astronomy or
game development or business can be fit in. I remember such talks from
previous EuroPythons. Keynotes tend to do this already, but there's no
reason to restrict this to keynotes. I myself find that such variety
improves the conference and makes it more inspirational for me.

* Considering whether we want a self-selected democracy for anonymously
selecting talks based on individual merits, or whether we want to
involve other methods too. Say a smaller group of people that looks at
the overall balance of things.

* Judging talk proposals on other things than technical merit only.
Originality, presentation, humor, all of these count. Armin is a good
example actually: your talks wouldn't be half as much fun for people
without your presentation style. This may be written down somewhere
already for all I know in the talk selection guidelines actually, but if
not, that may make sense.

* Having women visibly be present at the conference. PyCon DE last year
was a good example; there were a lot of women involved with its
organization. You can also make this visible explicitly, like at PyCon
DE: everybody involved was called onto the stage in the end. I
understand many of them are involved in the organization of EuroPython
this year. I would certainly recommend getting folks on the stage again
at some point (though I would be bold enough to ask whether you could
speed up that procedure compared to PyCon DE).

* As was proposed, simply increase variety of speakers by having each
speaker only have one talk.

* Active outreach to PyLadies and such. It's my understanding that this
exactly that was done.

* Some conferences let sponsors give some talks. That's a tricky thing
to get right. But here's a less controversial idea: for a community
organized conference I think it's fair if active organizers get a good
chance at getting *their* talk submissions approved. And then if
PyLadies is involved...

* Grants, as you mention.

Some of these ideas *do* influence the talk selection process, but not
in the form of quotas. The talk selection process is influenced by many
factors already, and we shouldn't pretend that the current way is only
fair way to do things.

PyCon is the obvious place to go look for more/better ideas.

Regards,

Martijn

[Laura Creighton]

Post by Martijn Faassen
* Considering whether we want a self-selected democracy for anonymously
selecting talks based on individual merits, or whether we want to
involve other methods too. Say a smaller group of people that looks at
the overall balance of things.

I've never seen a relationship between the quality of the proposal and the
quality of the talk. But then, I may be valuing talks for different things.
The thing I care most about is _who_ is presenting the thing.

To give a concrete example -- Armin Rigo isn't a particularly good speaker.
He's been known to write some fairly bad proposals, as well. It would be
extremely simple to find somebody who writes English better than Armin does,
who speaks with less of an accent, and who organises his or her talks in such
a way that people who are not at all familiar with the topic do not feel
excluded.

And I don't care. While it could be nice to have a hypothetical PyPy talk
by such a speaker, if due to time and space constraints, I can only have one,
I want the one by Armin. I _always_ want the one by one of the principal
developers of the program involved, regardless of their merit as a speaker,
because what I want to hear is whatever the principal developers of the thing
want to show and tell me, precisely because of who they are.

Other people, it is clear, have very different priorities.

Laura

[Martijn Faassen]

Post by Laura Creighton

Post by Martijn Faassen
* Considering whether we want a self-selected democracy for anonymously
selecting talks based on individual merits, or whether we want to
involve other methods too. Say a smaller group of people that looks at
the overall balance of things.

I've never seen a relationship between the quality of the proposal and the
quality of the talk.

That's another problem, yes. That's also why I think looking at the
overall balance of talks can be a good thing.

Post by Laura Creighton
The thing I care most about is _who_ is presenting the thing.
To give a concrete example -- Armin Rigo isn't a particularly good speaker.

It's not important in this discussion, but I beg to disagree. Armin,
being Armin, has a speaking style all his own, but it's highly
entertaining to me to watch him speak and he clearly has a sense of
humor that helps make his talks engaging to people.

Post by Laura Creighton
He's been known to write some fairly bad proposals, as well. It would be
extremely simple to find somebody who writes English better than Armin does,
who speaks with less of an accent, and who organises his or her talks in such
a way that people who are not at all familiar with the topic do not feel
excluded.
And I don't care. While it could be nice to have a hypothetical PyPy talk
by such a speaker, if due to time and space constraints, I can only have one,
I want the one by Armin. I _always_ want the one by one of the principal
developers of the program involved, regardless of their merit as a speaker,
because what I want to hear is whatever the principal developers of the thing
want to show and tell me, precisely because of who they are.

I think that's part of being in a community; we know each other and want
to hear from each other. It's an important aspect of EuroPython, indeed.
If fostering community is part of the mission of the conference, then it
should support that. And I think it does that quite well.

I see though that anonymous speaker selection paradoxically risks
pushing that real desire to see the principal developers speak about
their project into the "underground", which is where accusations of "old
boys network" actually seem more plausible than if this speakers were
known in the open during selection.

But fostering the community also can mean trying to get new people
involved, with different perspectives and different backgrounds and
different ideas. I believe that can enrich the community and make the
conference more inspiring. So we should balance the two. Again, that's
why looking at the whole mixture of talks is a good thing, besides just
looking at each individual talk.

Regards,

Martijn

[Roberto Polli]

The thread is forking fastly: I suggest to move proposed patches to a new
thread (this one?) and continue general discussion on the old one.

We could even create a single thread for each of the following patch.

A list follows.
Peace,
R.

# Reopening C4P
imho it's unfair against people who did their homework: this could even damage
the equality cause.


# One talk per speaker
Seems everybody agrees. I think that two can be a very special case.
imho: annunced speakers can't be forced out, only invited to renounce to a
slot.


# Quotas @EP14
I understand the "quotas are offensive" argumentation: but capping the most-
representative gender could even favor "males".

conference_value > sum(talk_values)

@Nelle: applying quotas only to promoted talks, we won't damage level: many
good proposals were discarded, and the "EP scientific committee" is not the
ACM, as they consider other things (which we may subscribe or not :D ).


# Diversity slots @EP14
Those slots are fine, but I will leave the talk selection to Nelle ;)

Post by Martijn Faassen

Post by Armin Rigo
In this case, woman
participation is going slowly up year after year. I certainly think
(and hope!) that it's not just because of favorable discrimination;
instead, it is most probably just a slow process of natural regulation
that occurs inside a historically strongly biased subculture. This
process can be encouraged, e.g. I'm fine if some grants are reserved
to women; but I think that judging technical merits on a different
scale is not a good way to do that.

There are a lot of things that can be done instead of quotas.
I think one function of a Python conference is to help foster the Python
community. If we agree that we would like to have more women speakers
and participants, or just plain broaden the nature of our conference in
* Looking for high-profile female invited speakers.
* Broadening the scope of topics. The conference should still be Python
themed, but the occasional talk about, say, morality or astronomy or
game development or business can be fit in. I remember such talks from
previous EuroPythons. Keynotes tend to do this already, but there's no
reason to restrict this to keynotes. I myself find that such variety
improves the conference and makes it more inspirational for me.
* Considering whether we want a self-selected democracy for anonymously
selecting talks based on individual merits, or whether we want to
involve other methods too. Say a smaller group of people that looks at
the overall balance of things.
* Judging talk proposals on other things than technical merit only.
Originality, presentation, humor, all of these count. Armin is a good
example actually: your talks wouldn't be half as much fun for people
without your presentation style. This may be written down somewhere
already for all I know in the talk selection guidelines actually, but if
not, that may make sense.
* Having women visibly be present at the conference. PyCon DE last year
was a good example; there were a lot of women involved with its
organization. You can also make this visible explicitly, like at PyCon
DE: everybody involved was called onto the stage in the end. I
understand many of them are involved in the organization of EuroPython
this year. I would certainly recommend getting folks on the stage again
at some point (though I would be bold enough to ask whether you could
speed up that procedure compared to PyCon DE).
* As was proposed, simply increase variety of speakers by having each
speaker only have one talk.
* Active outreach to PyLadies and such. It's my understanding that this
exactly that was done.
* Some conferences let sponsors give some talks. That's a tricky thing
to get right. But here's a less controversial idea: for a community
organized conference I think it's fair if active organizers get a good
chance at getting *their* talk submissions approved. And then if
PyLadies is involved...
* Grants, as you mention.
Some of these ideas *do* influence the talk selection process, but not
in the form of quotas. The talk selection process is influenced by many
factors already, and we shouldn't pretend that the current way is only
fair way to do things.
PyCon is the obvious place to go look for more/better ideas.
Regards,
Martijn
_______________________________________________
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EuroPython mailing list
EuroPython at python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

--
Roberto Polli
Community Manager
Babel - a business unit of Par-Tec S.p.A. - http://www.babel.it
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CONFIDENZIALE: Questo messaggio ed i suoi allegati sono di carattere
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E' vietato l'inoltro non autorizzato a destinatari diversi da quelli indicati
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[Markus Zapke-Gründemann]

The most important and urgent thing to do is IMHO to open the CfP again and to
reach out to the communities than can help to get a more diverse program. Lynn
proposed to get in touch with the global PyLadies organization for example.

All the other things can be discussed later.


Regards

Markus

[Hynek Schlawack]

Post by Roberto Polli

Post by Roberto Polli
Not entirely fair, even for ladies awaiting for the final schedule.
I agree instead to set gender quotas (eg. 40% minimum for the

less-represented

Post by Roberto Polli
gender). But imho rules should be set *before* the review process.

As a member of a "minority ", I feel very uncomfortable with such quotas,
and if you ask women in computer science around Europe, they tend to feel
the same way (this may be very different in North America, as we have two
very different cultures when coming to these subject).

I would be very careful with such blanket statements; Scandinavian
countries had quotas for decades.

But this is an overall derailment, because there is a *huge* gap between
?not doing enough active outreach? (and thus not getting enough
proposals) and ?setting hard quotas? (and thus accepting
sub-standard proposals just to fulfill them).

The truth is somewhere in between.

Post by Roberto Polli
I want my proposal
to be accepted for my work and not because I'm a woman, and I don't think
I'll ever submit to a conference where such rules are applied.

That would assume that being a woman is a sufficient requirement.
Quotas *should* mean that the PC has to look harder and actively reach
out to potential target groups. It?s a logical ?and? operation,
not an ?or?.

[Amirouche Boubekki]

Post by Lynn Root

Post by Roberto Polli

For those of you who do not know me..

Everybody.py knows you, Lynn!

- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
-#2 there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
-#3 there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple

selected

Post by Roberto Polli

talks
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.

I agree diversity (of speakers/subjects) is a value, in every declination
(we're not only our gender).
I'm sure Guido van Rossum and Alex Martelli could have send ten (all

award

Post by Roberto Polli
winning) talks. But a two-rockstar conference doesn't mean a better
conference for the community.
I think the committee consider that, and made their choice.

- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on

the

Post by Roberto Polli

original acceptance.

imho we could gently ask to the selected speakers to give away one or

more

Post by Roberto Polli
talk in favor of the others: limiting the talks to one is unfair at the
moment. And I'm sure that we'll reach the same aim without forcing out
anybody.

- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.

Not entirely fair, even for ladies awaiting for the final schedule.
I agree instead to set gender quotas (eg. 40% minimum for the

less-represented

Post by Roberto Polli
gender). But imho rules should be set *before* the review process.

As a member of a "minority ", I feel very uncomfortable with such quotas,
and if you ask women in computer science around Europe, they tend to feel
the same way (this may be very different in North America, as we have two
very different cultures when coming to these subject). I want my proposal
to be accepted for my work and not because I'm a woman, and I don't think
I'll ever submit to a conference where such rules are applied.

Mostly agree, in the sens that the community should aim for good
representation. Setting a quota as a definitive unbreackable rule can
undermine the "cause" and the event. That said quotas doesn't necessarly
mean to lower the quality of the event. Especially since different equals
in some minds to low quality. Even so it might be more relevant to the fact
that the context is poor for the quality to be at the perceived good
quality level e.g. lone wolf development, niche subject etc... The subject
and ideas might still be interesting, even when the next startup bus stop
is no where near in the foreseeable future. This strikingly reminds me of
myself and others (I'm not saying I have something to talk about in Py
events). This might be just a bias and I've read no scientific papers
relating "marginal behavior in marginal people" or I don't need to. A
"break the loop" thinking pattern that deep down settled in my brain
against which I don't even try to fight that much, since it introduced me
twice to the "wonderful" noosphere of the evil snake while making my life
easier.

"Breaking the loop" is another way to say "open up". It's kind of
depressing and enlightening for me to remind myself and others of this.
Anyway, I would have gladly paid twice as much as current price to be able
to listen to Mez Breeze and being able to discuss it with fellow
Pythonistas.

My 30 mins.

Post by Lynn Root
I also think it gives a very negative image of women in science,
specially when the abstracts are just not good (an abstract accepted at
pycon us contained an error in the name of a python module *in the title* -
it is hard to take the talk seriously, and this is a disservice to do to
the speaker).

Post by Roberto Polli

- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers.

Agree to some precedence to first-time speakers and grow our community.

..create general availability during the time that the CfP is reopened
to help those who want it craft a good proposal.

imho again: reopening is unfair towards people who made their homework ;)
During the review process, author had all the time to browse all

proposals and

Post by Roberto Polli
fix their one.

... the blind selection ... the result is troubling...

Identifying authors won't have changed anything, but in any case I'm on

the

Post by Roberto Polli
full-disclosure side.

But this email is to address what I feel needs to change.

Thx for writing! Your contribution is always a precious spark!
Peace,
R.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r

Post by Roberto Polli

=0 _______________________________________________
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--
Roberto Polli
Community Manager
Babel - a business unit of Par-Tec S.p.A. - http://www.babel.it
T: +39.06.9826.9651 M: +39.340.652.2736 F: +39.06.9826.9680
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E' vietato l'inoltro non autorizzato a destinatari diversi da quelli

indicati

Post by Roberto Polli
nel messaggio originale.
Se ricevuto per errore, l'uso del contenuto e' proibito; si prega di
comunicarlo al mittente e cancellarlo immediatamente.
_______________________________________________
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[Daniel Kraft]

Nelle,

As a member of a "minority ", I feel very uncomfortable with such quotas, and
if you ask women in computer science around Europe, they tend to feel the
same way (this may be very different in North America, as we have two very
different cultures when coming to these subject). I want my proposal to be
accepted for my work and not because I'm a woman, and I don't think I'll
ever submit to a conference where such rules are applied.

same with me and I even don't care about minorities if they don't add diversity or value to the concrete case. But women, old people and eco-activists (not exclusively) actually ADD diversity AND value to joung and possibly male listeners at a tech conference as far as I had the privilege to learn for myself. And the value of what they say is often not probably described in the papers or valued by the reviewers. For an example of this value, just view some TED talks, which are eye-opening and from really different people.

SO,
how many women were among the reviewers? Men an women tend to prefer different words (male and female words) and so would possibly vote for different talks, just because their vocabulary is more familiar. So there might be quite "some" imbalance on the anonymous reviews.

Optimisically I think quotas are unnecessary. But it turns out that the majority often (even if not willingly) surpresses the minorities - not just women. And this is bad for all of us for different reasons, and I think we're at a point where we all know this. We're simply often unable as individuals to work around this issue.

Now we have two options (correct me please!):
1. We accept this imbalance for EP2014 which would disappoint me really and which would hurt the conference experience
2. We do something about it

I have no concrete idea about "2", partly because I don't have all CFP and reviewer voting data. But two talks from women is just WAY too less.

And btw: stop ranting and make proposals for "2"

My proposal (which invalidates the "no concrete idea"):
Repeat 1 week of reviews for all reviewers but add women so they reach their representative amount of ~47% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio).

Daniel

[holger krekel]

Hi Lynn,

i am just one member of the programme committee of EP2014 but would like
to share some information and my own perspective on the discussion and
issues. We hopefully can arrange a committee meeting soon and can
conclude on the path forward, also taking your suggestions into account.
So this mail is no official answer or so but hope it contributes to
clearing things up a bit.

Post by Lynn Root
To the EuroPython organizers, talk reviewers, and community at large,
For those of you who do not know me, I am a board member of the Python
Software Foundation, the founder and leader of PyLadies San Francisco,
and an engineer at Spotify. I have been a speaker at the last two
EuroPythons, with 3 talks last year, and a keynote the year before.

I enjoyed your talks, also the DNS one a few days ago :)

Post by Lynn Root
I see that the list of preliminarily talks are publicly available. Side
stepping my issue with lack of communication to proposers of talks at
large, I am writing to bring light to the lack of diversity of the
current list of talks, and propose some action items.
There is how I understand things as they are. Please correct me if I am
wrong.
- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed

Yes, about 250 reviewers went through the 300 submissions and we
got 3-5 reviews on most. The reviewers could not see other reviewers
comments/evaluations in the first round. And they could not see
authors or genders or countries. Which doesn't mean that gender-bias
doesn't take place otherwise, of course.

Post by Lynn Root
- there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak

yes but there are still 50 free slots awaiting allocation. The
currently published talks include only those which received "+1"s but no
negative ("-0" or "-1"). The others we call the "conflicted talks" and
there are many that got several positive but one negative vote. They
were not included in the first published list.

Post by Lynn Root
- there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks

I am not sure how many "multi-talkers" we actually have. We should be able
to find out shortly. FWIW i submitted three talks myself and one got accepted
in the first round. Of the two not-accepted ones there was one that made it
to Pycon 2014 surviving harsher competition. On the other hand, one
talk i gave as a well-received keynote at EP2013 was not accepted at all
for Pycon 2014. So judging from my personal experience, I believe we
have quite some randomness in talk selection at python conferences.
But that's more of a general sidenote.

Post by Lynn Root
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.

I also do see a problem particularly in #2.

Post by Lynn Root
- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.

I am certainly fine with asking multi-talkers to cut down. If the programme
committee revokes already accepted talks is a different question. I'd like
to see how many cases we actually have.

Do you know, btw, if Pycon 2014 employed a "one talk only" policy?
It seemed to me that some people gave 2 or maybe three talks at Pycon.
And personally, i wouldn't totally rule out the possibility of allowing
more than one talk but such cases should be considered explicitely
and carefully.

Post by Lynn Root
- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.

Working with PyLadies sounds like a great idea and it's bad we missed
out on this so far. I'd like to discuss the idea of doing an additional
specialized CFP in the context of the still remaining question of the 50
to-be-allocated slots. Obviously a full re-open of the CFP would be
quite a challenge, also given that eastern and vacations are quickly
approaching.

Post by Lynn Root
- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers. First time speakers may need far more help writing
a proposal tailored to the EuroPython audience. As reviewers, you have
an understanding of the EP community and should help pull up new
speakers.

For the 50 remaining slots i'd like to increase focus on "does this talk
help to grow the community" with a particular focus on diversity. As a
secondary measure, looking through the already accepted talks might be
feasible but i hope we don't need to consider reverting acceptance
against a proposers will.

Post by Lynn Root
- related to #2, and #3, have open office hours or create general
availability during the time that the CfP is reopened to help those who
want it craft a good proposal.
- select talks for the remainder of the program with the context of the
preliminarily talks in mind.

right, that's what I'd like to aim for.

Post by Lynn Root
I understand that the blind selection process was meant in good faith to
remove bias.

I am personally skeptical of the "double blind" selection process.
It probably better fits for answering "is this a valuable study/paper
contributing to the advance of science" rather than the question i see
Python conferences having: "Does this talk interest a part of the
community and does it help to grow our communities? Do we have a
diverse range of topics, countries, personal backgrounds including gender
properly reflected in the schedule?"

Post by Lynn Root
However, the result is troubling, and needs to be looked at
in context. If this preliminary list has any influence on the actual
program, the conference will suffer in terms of overall diversity in
attendance. I'm not writing to discuss the merit of diversity at a tech
conference, because I have faith that the reviewers and organizers
already grasp its importance. But this email is to address what I feel
needs to change.

Thanks a lot Lynn. I hope we can all work this out and move to a better
direction now. Hopefully i can say a bit more after we get some more
involved people together, part of which are currently travelling
or otherwise busy etc.

best and hope you also recover well from the Pycon blast :)
holger

Post by Lynn Root
Thank you,
Lynn Root
[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r=0
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[Martijn Faassen]

Hey Holger,

Thanks for your answer, it certainly helped clear up things for me about
what was going on with talk selection - that as much as 50 slots were
remaining was not clear, for instance. I also agree that the double
blind selection process does not fit the goals of EuroPython so much --
I already gave feedback on that elsewhere in this thread.

I complained earlier that publishing this half-baked schedule was rather
frustrating for those of us who submitted talks but whose talks were not
selected. We're in some kind of limbo where we don't know whether the
talk is rejected or accepted, which feels rather odd.

On the other hand, if the half baked schedule triggered a rebalancing
for diversity that otherwise might not have happened I'd call it a good
thing after all.

Regards,

Martijn

[Stefan Behnel]

I also agree that the double blind
selection process does not fit the goals of EuroPython so much -- I already
gave feedback on that elsewhere in this thread.

Agreed.

1) It didn't always work, because some proposals included references to
previous talks, links to prepared slides or because authors signed their
responses to reviewer requests with their names. And even if not, for some
topics it's just obvious who's behind them. At least some of the reviewers
will always know.

2) I agree with Laura that it sometimes helps to know that the person who's
written the proposal is the best to give a talk on that topic, regardless
of what the proposal says specifically. Letting people represent their
topics in the community (i.e. giving well known speakers their play ground)
is IMHO as important as growing the community (i.e. getting new speakers in
because they add a value to the community and/or the conference in *some* way).

For me as a reviewer, it's helpful to see the names. Either I know them and
can make that part of my review decision, or I don't know them and can make
*that* part of my review decision. Or not, if the proposal is so good that
I don't need to think any further anyway, but that's surprisingly rare. As
long as it's clear to all reviewers that getting new people in is an
explicit goal of the selection process, I think having name and bio visible
would work better. And stating this goal publicly in the CfP might even
make it easier for first-time participants to send us a proposal at all.

In the worst case, there could still be a (soft) quota to limit the number
of recurring speakers. :)

Stefan

[Lynn Root]

Hi all -

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this discussion. A
couple of things that I noticed:

1. Everyone was polite and civil - a breath of fresh air when talking
about this sort of topic
2. Folks seem to generally accept that diversity is an asset at a
conference, and that the current preliminary talk list lacked that. So
thank you - it seems that this community really "gets" it.
3. The amount of communication from the organizers - thank you. I
appreciate you addressing this in a positive and quick manner.

I look forward to the final schedule, and I trust that curating the
final talk list will have a lot of thought towards it.

So - thank you all.

Lynn Root

[holger krekel]

Hi Lynn and everybody interested in a better EP2014,

we recognize that you raised some serious and valid concerns and would
like to lay out to the best of our ability how we plan to address them.
Many of you also are eagerly awaiting the final programme for EuroPython,
and there has been some confusion about the current status. Please
let us clarify where we stand and how we proceed from the programme
comittee side.

We had an open review process for 300+ submitted proposals with about
250 people participating in reviews, and about 1500 reviews delivered.
The initial batch of around 70 accepted talks was selected by
determining all talks that got positive and no negative reviews.
We did not filter out "multiple talkers" because at the time we
didn't think it's a good criterion but we realize that many think
it's good to be more restrictive to allow for more individuals to give
talks.

We have now about 50 slots remaining that we can accept and something
like 230 talks to choose from. Anna, Holger, Kristian and Sarah with
support from others of the programme committee agreed to walk through
the pending list now and review the reviews and also chime in regarding
increasing overall diversity. We also will try to reduce the amount
of people giving multiple talks in our future acceptance decisions and
ask talkers for already accepted talks to consider freeing up slots.

Apart from gender diversity of talkers we also try to be diverse on
topics, i.e. duplicate topics or too many topics from one sub community.
As you may imagine this is not a trivial task and we are doing our
best to take all considerations into account.

We also are reaching out to Berlin PyLadies and would be happy if
someone there or from another group could help with sorting through the
current reviews and participate in the final decision making process.

Given the desire from people wanting to know about acceptance of their
talks, also affecting their EP conference attendance and travel plans,
we do not feel we can re-open an already complex reviewing process
and accept new proposals. We also think that because of the 50 slots
we can still fill and the increased scrutiny now on diversity issues
we will end up with a very good programme that is at least much more
diverse than what the initial snapshot suggested.

We hope for your understanding and agreement for this course of action
which was positively discussed by many members of the conference
organisation teams. We are certainly aware that increased outreach and
diversity activities remain an ongoing topic and a shared challenge. Doing
it again, we would definitely try to do a better and earlier job at involving
groups like PyLadies to help with spreading the word of submitting and
helping with proposals.

For the programme and orga teams of EP2014,
Holger and Veit

Post by Lynn Root
To the EuroPython organizers, talk reviewers, and community at large,
For those of you who do not know me, I am a board member of the Python
Software Foundation, the founder and leader of PyLadies San Francisco,
and an engineer at Spotify. I have been a speaker at the last two
EuroPythons, with 3 talks last year, and a keynote the year before.
I see that the list of preliminarily talks are publicly available. Side
stepping my issue with lack of communication to proposers of talks at
large, I am writing to bring light to the lack of diversity of the
current list of talks, and propose some action items.
There is how I understand things as they are. Please correct me if I am
wrong.
- talk selection was/is being done blindly, as in no identifying
information about the speaker is revealed
- there are very little women on that preliminary talk list slated to
speak
- there are multiple selected speakers slated to give multiple selected
talks
If you do not find a problem with item #2 and #3, please read this
article [1] about importance of diversity in a technical field.
- limit speakers to only give one talk. Yes this means going back on the
original acceptance.
- reopen CfP and reach out to PyLadies globally to help get the word
out. As one of the main leaders of the global organization, I know this
did not happen originally.
- re-review the talks. Give preference or help for those who would be
first time speakers. First time speakers may need far more help writing
a proposal tailored to the EuroPython audience. As reviewers, you have
an understanding of the EP community and should help pull up new
speakers.
- related to #2, and #3, have open office hours or create general
availability during the time that the CfP is reopened to help those who
want it craft a good proposal.
- select talks for the remainder of the program with the context of the
preliminarily talks in mind.
I understand that the blind selection process was meant in good faith to
remove bias. However, the result is troubling, and needs to be looked at
in context. If this preliminary list has any influence on the actual
program, the conference will suffer in terms of overall diversity in
attendance. I'm not writing to discuss the merit of diversity at a tech
conference, because I have faith that the reviewers and organizers
already grasp its importance. But this email is to address what I feel
needs to change.
Thank you,
Lynn Root
[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html?_r=0
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