[EuroPython] Lack of diversity within selected talks - a fix for EP14?

[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 ;)






On Wednesday 16 April 2014 00:26:59 Martijn Faassen wrote:
> On 04/15/2014 11:06 PM, Armin Rigo wrote:
>  > 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython

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Roberto Polli
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