I'm pretty furious about this. I was really forward to having a reasonably-accessable world-class ruby conference in UK. I'm really only care about whether the speakers are interesting and that I can learn from their talk.
I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the quality of speakers.
Race and gender can be (generally are) used by potential attendees to determine what comfort level they'd have at an event like that. The more people you can get to your event, generally the better the outcome will be - increased connections, networking and exchange of ideas from a broader range of people.
I made an earlier comment about my recent experiences organizing a conference, and linked to my blog which touched on this very reason.
Thanks, I hadn't considered that, and it's a good point.
Although perhaps I'm an oddity: I rarely see myself as among the speakers so I don't look at them as a guide. Also, I've been to "gender-equal" conferences where almost the only women there were speakers. So speakers != audience
Speakers != audience all the time - the audience won't be an exact match for the speaker demographics. But having done this for a bit, I've had enough feedback that indicates that having a more balanced/diverse set of speakers is a signal to a wider audience that there will more likely be a wider range of attendees to socialize and network with. Again, yes, not 100% all the time.
FWIW, at indieconf we had about 30% of the speakers were female. About half of the attendees were female as well. Interestingly 30% answered the 'gender' question as female - 30% answered 'male', 30% left blank - I'm assuming based on names given about half of the remaning were also female - that's where I'm getting the ~50% were female.
There was a RuPy conference[1] this weekend in Brno. I think it would be more accessible money-wise since accommodation + food in Czech Republic (or Poland last year) + travel (20-50GBP for return ticket from London) would be probably cheaper than accommodation + food in the UK.
Yeah, it's probably more exciting as well. But imagine somewhere you find pretty crappy at the opposite end of Florida to you. So it's a long drive and you're not a big fan of the area.. that's how Scotland is to me. They do a good conference by all accounts though so I appreciate I am being picky and Anglocentric ;-)
I hope that race & gender aren't used (positively or negatively) to assess the quality of speakers.