Better technical content is the better choice for a technical conference.
That's only partly true, and even that part depends on what you mean by "better technical content"
It also depends on whose perspective you're measuring from.
If a conference is run purely as a business, then the "better choice" for the organiser is the one that has the highest return on investment (presumably "highest net profit"). And there are lots of things, over and above the merits of the content itself, that contribute to that. If your target audience is 30% women, but your speaker line-up is only 5% women, that might be a problem for you. It might cause some percentage of those women to decide not to attend. The alternative - creating an artificial quota of having women make up 30% of speakers, regardless of quality - might cause an even larger drop in attendance. There's a balance that's needed, and it takes work.
But even if we don't worry about that, "technical content" isn't a simple measure. If your conference has even a moderately broad scope, then you need to worry about the breadth of talks. Clearly a Ruby conference where all the talks are on Rails, is not an ideal lineup even if the best submissions (on individual merit) were all for taks on Rails. In terms of content, if nothing else, you need to worry about diversity.
So, if you're planning a Ruby conference, and you know that only 50% of your target audience are Rails users, but 90% of the papers submitted are for Rails talks, then it would appear that something has gone wrong in your process. It look like people have pegged you a a Rails conference, even though that's not your intent.
I'd argue that same applies to speaker demographics as well. If you think that 30% of your target audience are women, but only 5% of your submissions are from women, then there's a reasonable chance that something in the process caused the women not to submit papers. If that's the case, then your conference is going to suffer for it.
There a lots of things that conference organisers can do that either increase or decrease the diversity in their submissions/selection process. E.g.
- Placing too high an emphasis on previous speaking engagements in an industry segment where diversity has been lacking in the past.
- Having a selection panel that is overly skewed towards one group of people (selection bias)
- Putting out your call for papers in the wrong places (one that is skewed)
- Having a call for papers that contains biased language
Even if you are firmly decided on selecting speakers based purely on their content (even though, for some conferences, that might not produce the "best" result), there is work that can be done to make sure you're at least considering the widest selection of papers in the most effective way.
That's only partly true, and even that part depends on what you mean by "better technical content"
It also depends on whose perspective you're measuring from.
If a conference is run purely as a business, then the "better choice" for the organiser is the one that has the highest return on investment (presumably "highest net profit"). And there are lots of things, over and above the merits of the content itself, that contribute to that. If your target audience is 30% women, but your speaker line-up is only 5% women, that might be a problem for you. It might cause some percentage of those women to decide not to attend. The alternative - creating an artificial quota of having women make up 30% of speakers, regardless of quality - might cause an even larger drop in attendance. There's a balance that's needed, and it takes work.
But even if we don't worry about that, "technical content" isn't a simple measure. If your conference has even a moderately broad scope, then you need to worry about the breadth of talks. Clearly a Ruby conference where all the talks are on Rails, is not an ideal lineup even if the best submissions (on individual merit) were all for taks on Rails. In terms of content, if nothing else, you need to worry about diversity.
So, if you're planning a Ruby conference, and you know that only 50% of your target audience are Rails users, but 90% of the papers submitted are for Rails talks, then it would appear that something has gone wrong in your process. It look like people have pegged you a a Rails conference, even though that's not your intent.
I'd argue that same applies to speaker demographics as well. If you think that 30% of your target audience are women, but only 5% of your submissions are from women, then there's a reasonable chance that something in the process caused the women not to submit papers. If that's the case, then your conference is going to suffer for it.
There a lots of things that conference organisers can do that either increase or decrease the diversity in their submissions/selection process. E.g.
- Placing too high an emphasis on previous speaking engagements in an industry segment where diversity has been lacking in the past.
- Having a selection panel that is overly skewed towards one group of people (selection bias)
- Putting out your call for papers in the wrong places (one that is skewed)
- Having a call for papers that contains biased language
Even if you are firmly decided on selecting speakers based purely on their content (even though, for some conferences, that might not produce the "best" result), there is work that can be done to make sure you're at least considering the widest selection of papers in the most effective way.