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

• orzi 7y ago
  This is insane.
• toxik 7y ago
  Do metal working conferences cancel due to a lack of female participation? Getting women into the mix is nice, but... it’s computer science?
  • nl 7y ago
    I've done some work in (metal) mining, and I can say that absolutely has female speakers at conferences.
    • toxik 7y ago
      I feel like you missed the point of the analogy by taking it too literally.
      • nl 7y ago
        No I understand the point and gave a good example showing how misguided it is.
        • toxik 7y ago
          So because some mining conferences you were at had female speakers, every conference must have? I again think you didn’t really understand the point being made as you did not counter argue it very much at all.
• sp332 7y ago
  The reason given was that only one woman submitted a proposal from over 250 submissions. Lots of discussion on twitter about how talks were chosen. Not many brought up the fact that the submissions process itself was apparently broken.
  • abeisgreat 7y ago
    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.
    • ngngngng 7y ago
      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.
      • larkeith 7y ago
        Agreed that it's outreach, but it also seems necessary, unless <=0.4% of the PHP community is female (ratio of applications by gender).
      • busterarm 7y ago
        I don't know about you, but if I paid to attend a conference because of a certain speaker or talk that gets cancelled, I'm probably pretty pissed and also probably out some money if I decide not to go.
      • neilv 7y ago
        > 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.
• mattigames 7y ago
  Instead of every of them recommending a woman for one of the time slots at the conference or any non-white-male they just throw a fit like spoiled kids and say they are not going until someone else fixes the issue at hand for them, this kind of behavior is one of the things that deepens the gap between people in favor of diversity everywhere not by increasing diversity but alienating people that think different and considering that as a win.
  • abeisgreat 7y ago
    If you read the second post linked he tried very hard to help. He encouraged multiple solutions, offered to help from his experience and they opted not to take the help.
    • mattigames 7y ago
      The answer to this is summarized pretty well by another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797869 Still, a mature adult would have recommended someone for the next version of conference and if all points out your recommendation is being taken seriously you do your part and deliver your conference in the current version.
  • sp332 7y ago
    It's not weird to hold the conference organizers accountable for organizing a conference badly.
  • xrd 7y ago
    You sound really frustrated with this outcome. What would you propose those speakers do differently? A follow up question: why do you say that would be more effective than what they did? (And, I would ask you, is that something that still maintains their commitment to diversity, since they all mentioned that was more important than speaking opportunities?)
    • EdwardDiego 7y ago
      > What would you propose those speakers do differently? I always find in life that you get better traction when you approach people with a solution instead of just a problem. So perhaps they could've said "Hey, I think it'd be good to increase speaker diversity, and I really recommend person X, she's amazing at Y, I could approach her and ask if you'd like?" Instead of just yelling "There's not enough women!"
• larkeith 7y ago
  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 for their values.
  • Yver 7y ago
    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.
    • pluma 7y ago
      From one techie to another: people aren't code. We're not rational actors in a vacuum, treating us like we are is a leaky abstraction that will break in prod. The problem isn't simply "there aren't enough women", the problem is "we only hear from the same group of people with similar lived experiences". The problem is self-reinforcing: because women are underrepresented at those events, they're not attending those events, thus becoming more underrepresented and ultimately marginalised. Ironically a good solution for that is having more "women's events". Women-only events to strengthen the marginalised group, women-presenting-but-open-to-all-attendees events to settle in and finally quotas in general events to counteract the bias. Except this is not only true for women but for all marginalised groups.
      • sz4kerto 7y ago
        All marginalised groups? What are those? Are people living in poorer countries marginalised? Older developers? Obese people? People with childhood traumas who suffer from anxiety disorders? Should we have quotas for all these? I see where are you coming from, but the solution you're proposing is not workable as there are infinite amount of marginalised groups, unfortunately. :( picking one (eg. women) won't result in a fairer society.
• cdubzzz 7y ago
  Tangentially related, the second post linked in that announcement is from Larry Garfield, who was involved in some PHP/Drupal controversy a few years back — https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2017/10/drupal-gor-ayelet.html https://www.sonyaellenmann.com/2017/10/drupal-gor-ayelet.htm...
  • toxik 7y ago
    What a fascinating set of characters, and what fortitude it must take to go public with such an unorthodox relationship while being a public character. I find it difficult to change my hairstyle and letting my colleagues know.
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• numakerg 7y ago
  I'm reading through the Twitter thread, but I can't decipher the exact issue(s). Did the organizers select a lower ratio of diverse speakers than applicants? Were there very few diverse applicants and the organizers decided none of them qualified?
  • sp332 7y ago
    Twitter is never a great forum to discuss issues that need context. The two blog posts lay things out more clearly.
    • numakerg 7y ago
      I saw Mark's point about 1/250 but I couldn't locate the statement from the organizers. Larry says a number of speakers offered to swap their double sessions for more female speakers, but would those new speakers be the single applicant or other speakers who hadn't applied. Regardless, the conference organizers are at least partially responsible for lack of diverse applicants if their speakers were able to find candidates on short notice.
  • larkeith 7y ago
    From the second and third links (both blog posts rather than Twitter), only 1 out of 250+ submissions was from a woman, so the latter. Presumably a similar situation occurred in 2018, as there was a single female speaker out of the 39-person lineup.
    • numakerg 7y ago
      >only 1 out of 250+ submissions was from a woman Mark didn't cite a source for this, which is what I was looking for in the Twitter thread.
      • larkeith 7y ago
        Oh, that's a good point. It might be sourced from crell's post: "According to them, they had only a single woman submit a session proposal this year...", which was from conversations with the organizers, so potentially nonverifiable. You could probably check Mark's other claim more easily: "...the line-up last year was almost all male as well, just one woman out of 39 speakers."
• curiousgal 7y ago
  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?
  • duaoebg 7y ago
    It's a virtue signal in an industry that demands it. A weird but predictable side effect of using affirmative action to promote women is that statistically attendees will see female presenters as worse. (Availably heuristic / selection criteria bias).
  • abeisgreat 7y ago
    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 and without push back we'll continue to enforce a technological patriarchy. The only way to make things just about the tech is to address these things, however painful, and rebuild an environment where women feel equally accepted, respected, and praised.
    • curiousgal 7y ago
      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.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • sp332 7y ago
        Men are encouraged to go into CS just because they are men. https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-into-the-tech-industry-but-things-are-changing-18151047 https://www.bustle.com/p/girls-still-arent-encouraged-to-go-...
• noir_lord 7y ago
  I sometimes think they value signalling over actually constructively working to fix things. I’m moderate and think that anyone who wants to should program for a living should but stuff like this hurts my head enough I don’t engage with them on Twitter as it results in a mud slinging match that nothing improves from. It’s frankly tiring seeing the same crap repeated ad nauseum.
  • bonoboTP 7y ago
    This whole topic is something I'd never touch or even begin to discuss in public. It's very easy to put a negative spin on anything one might say. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. In today's algorithmic sort-by-controversial outrage culture, they will crucify you for anything and its opposite. It's the wisest to just switch the topic as fast as you can when it comes up.
• AlexB138 7y ago
  From the Twitter thread: > “Everyone has the same chances” is the exact problem. What are you doing to elevate women and POC? How are you showing your support as an ally and actively encouraging access to these “equal chances”?! These people have gone off the deep end. If you aren't actively following their political playbook you're to be shouted down. You can't even just opt out of participation in their crusade, if you're not elevating their chosen classes you're as good as the Klan. This is a tech event, not a political rally.
  • toxik 7y ago
    Spare yourself the headache of reading politically charged debates on Twitter. It’s been a megaphone war platform since day one. Shout the loudest to win. I think it’s a real shame to cancel what seems like a useful conference for an undesirable truth about their demography.
    • dmix 7y ago
      Preferring to have nothing at all if things aren't exactly how they like them is quite common in that ideology. As long as there are no good alternatives that fit their perfectionist ideological worldview then no one can have fun or live their life without constant disruption.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • bonoboTP 7y ago
    And then you can start counting gays and trans people, and disabilities and their intersections. It's a shame though because these groups do face actual hardships but I don't get the impression that the Twitter warriors are actually interested in how they fare, outside of scoring virtue points by being up to date on all these privilege topics. In my experience those who do real work for underrepresented groups are usually pleasant people tolerating opposing views and they don't search for the least charitable interpretation to get offended by, unlike how it looks on Twitter and Reddit.
• ngngngng 7y ago
  > we always struggled to get women from outside of Drupal to submit to that track, despite Drupal itself having a relatively large female population. We actively reached out to women both in the PHP community and local to the event and still sometimes had no submissions from women ^^ From the second link, blog post about a guy dropping out. I'm so lost. So this guy drops out because the organizers won't go to great lengths to find women, and then admits that in his own experience it is sometimes completely impossible to find women speakers. I think we're missing the forest for the trees here.
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    Great lengths? What "great lengths" were they asked to do here?
  • shkkmo 7y ago
    > Sadly from what the organizers told me they actively don't want to do outreach, and just let whoever wants to submit submit. > If they had tried and were unsuccessful I'd be more forgiving, but you need to at least try. And when multiple speakers offer to work with you to reduce costs so that you can at least try, that should be taken seriously. It sounds like he took issue with what he took as a complete lack of effort in trying to solicit submissions from women. I think that is quite reasonable, especially since he went out of his way to frame this as a "way to improve" rather than a "reason to hate"
    • hinkley 7y ago
      I don't think anyone appreciates how goddamned difficult it is to run an organization, especially a volunteer one, well. If you belong to a group, especially one that hosts events at least once a year, and you feel like it's run "adequately well", it's probably run better than 95% of the organizations out there. Head and shoulders above. You should take the time to thank the organizers for doing as well as they do. It's like being a member of the City Council, only you get paid even less (dollars or influence).
      • shkkmo 7y ago
• zsrxx 7y ago
  [clown emoji] [world emoji]
• esotericn 7y ago
  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 early on, or weren't supported, or whatever else. They fall behind at an early age. They're stuck in an environment that doesn't support them. Changing the statistical makeup of people at that sort of level - at the end of the funnel, after all of the filtering - is really difficult. You need good reason to do so. It's still not clear to me that it actually makes sense - is the world actually better off if half the Ivies are made of poor kids, or have you just shuffled around status (is it zero sum)? Do you get better results - what are the better results you're looking for? This stuff is difficult.
  • nikofeyn 7y ago
    > 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 environment. hyper focus on standardized testing and curriculum, which also needs to be changed, seems suffocating.
    • mysterydip 7y ago
      How would you change the hyper focus on standardized testing and curriculum? That comes at the administrative or local/state/national political level, doesn't it?
    • DannyBee 7y ago
      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_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#Complexity_mana... and going from there.
• throwanon77 7y ago
  This is really a non issue. Conference cancelled, who cares? And also, if women want to participate they can submit a request to have a talk. There's no reason to run around trying to recruit speakers to adhere to the completely irrational narrative of the sjw-extremists. This is becoming utterly silly in the society as a whole. Grow up people. This is a tech conference. If it is 100 percent male, so what? Women are of course welcome, but there's no reason running around, hauling them in. Is there folks running around hauling in men to speak at knitting conferences? Honestly, this is a non-issue. The diversity mania has gone too far. What matters is if presenters are good, not if they are gay, white, black, brown or whatever.
  • LudwigNagasena 7y ago
    First guess is that people who wanted to visit it care.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• o_p 7y ago
  Women are too smart to use php
  • tiku 7y ago
    We as men like crude tools.
  • conradfr 7y ago
    Ahah. And yet they seem more present in that mad front end JavaScript world.
• tiku 7y ago
  What group will be offended next year..
  • xtracto 7y ago
    What I find hilarious os that all this storm is coming from a group if men, as well as the vast majority of comments here in HN. Men trying to rationalise something related to women. Would be good to hear female voices in here... why was there only 1 application? Having studied in an all boys school, this looks to me as the times when me and my friends would get together to discuss how to approach a girl, or what would girls like. As you grow and mature, you understand that you only have to ask THEM, same as you would ask a random guy.
    • nf8nnfufuu 7y ago
      So how to find women who decided not to apply to the conference?
• LudwigNagasena 7y ago
  All of these people are so brave when "taking a stand" doesn't hurt their wallets and they seem comfortable to let millions of people live in poverty as long as female poc quotas are met. They could donate to software engineering schools in poor districts in their home countries or developing countries, but they decided to do something absolutely meaningless that benefits noone. I would suggest every person who finds this behaviour acceptable to look towards Effective Altruism (https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) and drop this ridiculoius posturing.
• Yver 7y ago
  There is something unsettling in men refusing to attend an event because not enough women wanted to be there. (only one woman applied) They asked the organizers to find more women for them. "Bring me some women!" said the male speakers.
  • shkkmo 7y ago
    There is something heart warming about people making personal sacrifices to promote divirsity. "Here, take back some of the money you were using to pay for our travel and use it to bring in some female speakers" said the male speakers.
    • PunchTornado 7y ago
      cancel the entire event and leave everyone with their plans in the air. tickets, hotels, trips, everything lost. that makes sense.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • shkkmo 7y ago
        The organizers canceled the event. The presenters just canceled their talks.
        • PunchTornado 7y ago
          because you can have the event without the scheduled talks. of course the event was going to be cancelled if main speakers don't attend
    • nf8nnfufuu 7y ago
      Men paying for access to women. Not that unusual, I'd say.
  • jbob2000 7y ago
    It’s very patriarchal, the men still control the event. They used their power to end the event when there are probably many people, women included, who would have liked it to continue so they could attend. But no, daddy event organizer knows best, make sure to follow him and listen to what he says!
• danmg 7y ago
  PhpCE should have just blocked him, as this was an argument in bad faith, and moved on.
• adonnjohn 7y ago
  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: nothing more, nothing less? Optimizing for non-sex factors, you would expect the selected lineup to more or less match the proportions of notable men and women in the space. If that holds true, then the issue is much further up the line in this case: there are still not enough women in technology. Do we cancel future events solely on this premise? Seems like a terrible idea to me.
  • gshdg 7y ago
    Except those proportions don’t hold true.
    • adonnjohn 7y ago
      Agreed. And as a result, more information is needed on why that turned out to be the case.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • sp332 7y ago
    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 proportions of the community.
    • adonnjohn 7y ago
      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.
• nl 7y ago
  I find it surprising that people here are defending an all-male speaker line up at a conference as being ok because "it's just about tech". It's become increasingly clear that no, tech is not just about tech. Tech has a huge impact on society and if your tech conference only has male speakers you aren't trying hard enough to make your conference reflect this. Further, if your tech group isn't actively working to bring people from other backgrounds into it then it becomes an echo chamber. Echo chambers are the worst, because people don't realise that's what they are in. This isn't some random political position, it's something based on real, measurable results where echo chambers make horrible technical decisions because of real-world blindness. I do machine learning for a living, and there are some particularly notorious examples of this happening in my field. The most obvious one is "Gender from Iris Images" where an entire series of papers by male-only teams ended up being discredited by a single devastating paper by (apparently) the first female to look at the problem. The paper title gives away the whole story: Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?[1] [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01304 https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01304
  • throwaway422 7y ago
    > I find it surprising that people here are defending an all-male speaker line up at a conference as being ok because "it's just about tech". Not because "it's about tech", but because selecting speakers based on their sex would be ... well ... sexist?! > Further, if your tech group isn't actively working to bring people from other backgrounds into it then it becomes an echo chamber. So, what exactly do you know about the backgrounds of any of the other speakers, other than that they are male and 'white'? Have you read their CVs? You know how they got into php, why they choose IT/CS, what drives them? Or what their parents went through to pave way for their children? Did they fight in Kosovo? Did their parents get detained while trying to leave East Germany? Are they refugees from any of the numerous inner-European conflicts? Or if their grandparents have been killed in WWII? Please, learn that Europe is not the US of A. Diversity in Europe does not related to skin color or sex. People can look somewhat similar and still have entirely different backgrounds. > Echo chambers are the worst, because people don't realise that's what they are in. I'll just leave your own words here for you to read again.
  • bonoboTP 7y ago
• hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Everything in this story points to the heart of why I hate Twitter, and why it so often just leads to people dug in, further apart on an issue, and demonizing the other side.
• grayed-down 7y ago
  I don't know Karl Hughes, but I think I hate him. Gray me down.
• aaron695 7y ago
  We NEED on a personal level to start ignoring Twitter. It is toxic. We also need to stop dealing with people who participate in Twitter. They are toxic. When they leave many will repair. But until then, don't deal with them. I'd go as far to say, most of the toxic behaviour on Facebook and other SM grows and is kept alive by Twitter.
• megakluntjes 7y ago
  Maybe this shows how smart female developers are because they avoid PHP.
• rurban 7y ago
  Position yourself into the minds of the conference organizers. Do you really want to deal with such an angry mob? Na, better resign and give up. It's not worth it. But I'll go to the next PHP meetup in Dresden and try to confirm my suspicion.
• throwaway0956 7y ago
  So... more evidence that the majority of women don't have any interest in tech. But let's just pretend that this isn't true.
• conradfr 7y ago
  That reminds me when they criticized the Silicon Valley show for the lack of women in their Techcrunch reenactment. Until it was revealed to be real footage...
• Wilem82 7y ago
  I've only ever watched one programming talk by a lady. The talk was about Rust, so I was interested. I thought: a lady, wow cool, let's hear it out. Like 5 minutes in, she said something like "we know Nodejs is fast..." and I did a double take. What? Who in their right mind would claim that, except frontend devs who don't know better? And this talk is about Rust, which is even more bizzare, as it's full of competent people who won't take such bullshit. I did not watch until the end, got quite disappointed. So... where are those excellent female specialists? In 15 years of programming, I've met exactly one and that's in a 20 million population city with tons of programming jobs.
  • lamaster 7y ago
    You could take a look at the talk about Entity Component System in Rust, by one of the creators of starbound(as far as i remember), she is a woman. And i don't understand your rage about nodejs. It's in fact very fast. That's wrong about that?
    • Wilem82 7y ago
      Very fast compared to what? Certainly not to Rust, and that was a Rust conference. Anything with a VM, even if it has JIT, is slower than a systems-level programming language that got no runtime overhead. VMs are slow by its very nature, simply because there an additional layers and more work needs to be done. If she meant support for non-blocking IO, that got nothing to do with Nodejs, it's an OS-level feature that's been around for almost 20 years. JVM can use non-blocking IO, doesn't make JVM fast, it's still relatively slow due to being VM in the first place.
• ffksq 7y ago
  There are few brilliant female developers. Even fewer good presenters. If the talk given by female is strong and interesting, it is really enjoyable. But if the talk is weak comparing to the other talks given by males, it is not helping with diversity, but only makes argument what women not good in science stronger. If I’m attending conference and instead of attending interesting talk you have to listen very weak presentation from female because of diversity, I’d feel really bad about the organization of conference.
• lyusinator 7y ago
  If you withdraw from a conference cuz of speakers skin color and gender that's racism and sexism.