[EuroPython] Lack of diversity within selected talks

Laura Creighton lac at openend.se
Wed Apr 16 01:24:24 CEST 2014


In a message of Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:26:59 +0200, Martijn Faassen writes:
>* 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



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