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Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship
Under the heading, "Diversity Matters!" the website for the PHP Central Europe developer conference (PHP.CE) says, "PHP Central Europe Conference is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible."
Over the weekend, organizers of the conference, which had been scheduled for October 4-6 in Dresden, Germany, ended the event evermore after two scheduled speakers issued public statements that they would not be attending this year, citing concerns about the lack of diversity.
PHP.CE on Saturday posted a note on its website, stating "The conference has been cancelled and won't be continued*. Sorry for the inconvenience."
The asterisk points to three online posts as the reason for the decision. The first, a July 17 Tweet from Karl Hughes, CTO of educational consultancy The Graide Network, chastises the conference for a speaker list made up entirely of white men.
You can see how it was in 2018, including the list of speakers, presentation schedule, and a 9m41s "after-movie".
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Wednesday August 28 2019, @03:06AM (2 children)
If such trivial things can completely sidetrack a conference then it says a lot about the language itself.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @10:01AM (1 child)
Horse shit. These conferences have a lot of expenses including the venue, security, insurance, etc. And let's not forget they shell out travel and appearance compensation, which can add up quick when bringing in speakers from around the world. If industry insiders or presenters boycott the event by publicly bowing out and denouncing it, the conference can lose a lot of money.
Who wants to go through the motions simply for the sake of losing tens of thousands of dollars?
This "let's find a reason to be offended" mindset has become embedded in today's culture and has nothing to do with the programming language. I don't PHP (not that there's anything wrong with it), but if this happened to a C or Haskell or <insert your language of choice here>, would you still say it was reflective of the language?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:58PM
This whole story is a big conservative "let's find a reason to be offended."
People decided to not attend an event because of reasons I disagree with. MUH VICTIMHOOD!