I just received a fund raising email from Lawrence Lessig who is trying to raise money to support the isummit conference to be held in mid-June in Croatia. The goal is to raise $ 100,000 which will be matched by some anonymous donor.
I hope that they are also trying to meet the challenge of getting a few ladies on board as keynote speakers because so far they don’t even have one and there are barely any as workshop organizers. Oh hey, but at least someone noticed on their website.
Along with the cash, maybe they need to raise some “awareness.” I know I sound like a broken record when it comes to this issue, but the record is broken…
Do you believe that the conference has discriminated against female participants? Do you believe that they have selected less-qualified male presenters over more-qualified female presenters?
Comment by Anonymous — May 2, 2007 @ 10:14 pm
It may not be a matter of discrimination exactly in so far as no woman probably “applied” to be the keynote speakers. It is a matter of oversight perhaps because they are the ones who are contacting folks for the keynote speakers. And while this may not be quite the same as discrimination, it is nonetheless far from ideal.
I think they are losing out on valuable perspective and not because women should voice the “voice of gender” (I am totally against the politics of authenticity), but because they often do occupy different positions and have different perspectives, they can offer these to the table.
Comment by Biella — May 3, 2007 @ 5:43 am
“oversight” does not seem like the right term unless the selection criteria included gender and the actual selections failed to take that criteria into account. You seem to argue that their selection criteria should include gender. “Selection criteria should include gender” sounds a lot like discrimination, and it sounds like a giant step backward from not considering gender at all.
Comment by Anonymous — May 3, 2007 @ 9:22 am
So I am willing to entertain the argument that “discrimination” may occur if let’s say a female gets a job over a male by the basis of gender (but even in these cases, I think you can make counter-arguments but let’s hold this off for another time).
In the case of the isummit, it seems to me that since attracting women as speakers does not discriminate against the male ones or anyone (i.e., no male would be denied their right to speak), integrating female speakers would only add richness and depth to the program and not take away anyone’s else’s right to speak.
And for all I know the program directors asked dozens of women and for whatever reason, they could not come. And this would be great to know…
But perhaps they are overlooking the fact that they don’t have any female speakers, so why not throw it out there, out into the “pot of discussion,” and see what comes from it?
I would hope that we could be inclusive without booting people out in the process. And I think something like a conference, especially, can accommodate a plurality of people and perspectives that would not have the effect of cutting into anyone’s air time.
Comment by Biella — May 3, 2007 @ 9:53 am
Actually the entire roster list, as is, seems to have a resonance of old-boy digerati networking to me. This could be because they simply can’t find speakers, or it could be a lack of resources in putting the con together. That said, I feel that CC/open culture’s most valuable contributions and work will come from signing on and understanding how to work with people who aren’t in the core digital sphere — women, minorities, people who live outside of Boston or the Bay Area, etc.
Comment by dmh — May 3, 2007 @ 10:06 am
Uhmm just to clarify here, I don’t mean to imply that women and “minorities” (whatever that means in our global era) are outside the core digital sphere at all. In fact, the problem is that it is just the opposite: right now our online culture is exploded with talent from all over the globe.
One example that I think stresses the point I am trying to make: Indians (and much more so both men and women than a lot of western countries) make up a huge contingent of the IT workforce, but we don’t see the same representation yet in the open culture movement. I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just asking: why not? How do we spread our open culture memes through to all these untapped social structures? What sort of steps do we have to take? Sitting from San Francisco, it’s easy to miss a bit of this perspective, which is why I think it’s important to make an effort to get people from different walks of life on board.
Comment by dmh — May 3, 2007 @ 10:18 am