© CCO
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.
Larry Garfield, director of developer experience at Platform.sh and someone who has
personal experience with code of conduct controversies, raised the issue in a July 19
blog post. He said he had decided to skip PHP.CE this year because the speaker list didn't include a single woman.
Garfield expressed sympathy for the conference organizers,
saying he knows it can be challenging to arrange a diverse, inclusive lineup at tech events. He said he had emailed two other conference speakers who, like him, had multiple speaking slots to gauge interest of giving their second slots away to female presenters.
Comment: The solution is obvious: quotas. Even if it means kidnapping and forcing 12-year-old, non-white, wheelchair-bound, transgendered non-coders to speak at the conference, diversity must be the goal. How can that not be clear to the alt-right who seemingly make up the vast majority of the human population? It is so obviously not cool to just let people be free to apply if they want to, regardless of the color of the skin or the gender they identify with. And it is certainly not cool to have technical standards for the quality of the presentations. That discriminates against everyone who doesn't have any technical expertise in the field, a blatant crime against humanity.