Gender diversity is popping up again in the blogs. Just thought I'd pass these along. http://www.kottke.org/07/02/gender-diversity-at-web-conferences

With that in mind, I collected some information about some of the most visible past and upcoming conferences in the tech/design/web space. I'm reasonably sure that the organizers of these conferences were aware of at least one of the above recent complaints about gender diversity at conferences (they were both linked widely in the blogosphere), so it will be interesting to see if those complaints were taken seriously by them.

And a site that lists potential speakers for conferences:

http://www.personism.com/2006/10/11/list-of-women-speakers-for-your-conference/

Making a list is just a start, but what a freaking list it is. I am psyched.

Many thanks to all the contributors to comment threads here on Personism, and over on design*sponge. Marc and Sara over at Wooster Collective also provided some excellent suggestions.

Technorati Tags: gender, pdx, pdxpug, perl, philosphy, diversity

After some comments from friends here about the fact that I personally did not submit any proposals for OSCON, I thought a little about why I didn't bother to do it. Other than the normal “I'm a busy person with other stuff to do”, I think that I am not sure exactly what I would present. So, rather than continue the cycle of apathy – I'm asking you all for your opinion. And I thought I should ask a couple people who have been successful speakers rather than just pass on the complaints.. What might I work on over the next year that would be of interest to OSCON, the PostgreSQL conference or a USENIX conference? I recently talked with Gabrielle about a talk on sustaining user groups – our experience with PDXPUG has been so good it would be a delight to share about it. I have a lot of IT things that I work on, some of it very specific to manufacturing, but a lot of it is just business and I use open source/GPL software for many things. Rather than bore you with a list of “stuff i might know enough about to give a talk on”, maybe what I'm asking about is more of a process question. How do each of you go about getting a talk together and submitting it? I sort of participated in a talk that was rejected (uh, back in '98) and have heard from a friend who submitted a talk that was rejected from OSCON a couple years ago. I haven't really talked with anyone about the process that actually *succeeded*.