Yes, I did read it. I invited Nick but he could not make it unfortunately.

-Ismael

BTW, have you read Nick Carr’s post on future of personal productivity apps vs MSFT Office vs Office 2.0? Have you considered inviting him to your conference?

We did, and I’m glad you’re asking. This topic was not discussed before in fact. “Office 2.0″ was available as a trademark, and we recently filed an application for it as a preventive measure. I hope it will go through.

Congrats on all your great work on the conference, looks like a fantastic two days. I’m just emerging and catching up after a busy summer.

I was wondering, prompted by all the recent hype recently around YouTube’s potential copyright issues and the Apple vs. “podcast” dynamics, whether you have thought through any brand/trademark/copyright conflicts around using “Office” as the title for the conference? I’m sure there’s a discussion thread on this somewehere…

Anyway, good luck with the event, I look forward to keeping up with it.

-Biri

Very nice approach to sharing in a field of shop talk!

I suggest you mentor a female in tech. Just the way you would a guy. Invite her to meetings when you don’t have to. Give some advice. Make some introductions. Tout her good work to others. Mention her in your blog. Suggest she moves up, apply for a better position, become a speaker at conferences.

And most important, listen to what she has to say about her experiences in the technology world. They are different than they would be if she were a guy. That’s a straight fact, Jack.

You can educate yourself and do something positive at the same time. Who knows, maybe someday when you’re old and obsolete, she’ll throw you a lucrative consulting contract just for old times sake.

You may, and you don’t have to apologize. It’s a friendly discussion.

I reacted strongly in email. I was stunned to see the BlogHer logo. It’s gone now. May I say I think this was a good decision?

Anyway, I have been surly and agree or not that’s inexcusable. My apologies.

Yours is a corporate entity, not a ad-hoc organization of women. Yours is a for profit organization.

Let me clarify what this means: Elisa Camahort is helping us strengthen our speaker panel and is joining the conference as a moderator for one of the sessions. In exchange, we give BlogHer some visibility during the conference and include their logo on our sponsor page. I like to think of it as a fair deal.

I don’t believe this.

Sell out is right.

You’re very welcome! We want people to have fun, so we’re listening.

Thanks, Ismael, for responding so sincerely to the issues raised!

Thanks for the kind words. I’ve got good coaches and mentors.

By the way, BlogHer is now sponsoring the Conference.

Many thanks to Elisa Camahort for this.

Some conference organizers that have actually made an effort:

Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Radar)
Hugh Forrest (SXSW)
Debbie Landa (Under the Radar)
Chris Shipley (BlogOn)
Chris Pirilo & Ponzi L. (Gnomedex — used to be entirely men!)

And I think it’s all paid off for them.

Rick, you may want to read my post about Whose to blame.

I don’t think there is one single element here. Ismael isn’t to blame. Women aren’t to blame. I’m not to blame. You are not to blame. We are all in it together.

It isn’t just conferences, either. It’s the tech world on the whole. Someone told me that registration for Computer Science is actually dropping for women. Wow… in a growing, exciting industry, it is dropping? Tells me that it isn’t looking very attractive to the majority of females. Why?

Who knows… It’s a big issue, but I think Ismael handled this very well…

And PR indeed!

-Tara

Based on my personal experience with this particular event, I think there is an easy solution to this problem: organizers should pro-actively invite competent female speakers. If they do, they’ll end up building a diversified panel. But if they don’t, and wait for candidate speakers to offer their services on their own, they’ll build a male-dominated one.

Reasons for this are still unclear to me, but I suspect that women are a tad more shy than men. They don’t like to show off as much, and they tend to under estimate themselves and their ability to stand up among a male-dominated crowd. In that respect, they are partially responsible for the gender imbalance that IT conferences are showing today. But the ones who can really change this are the conference organizers.

The reason why the Office 2.0 Conference got such a bad panel from a representation standpoint is that we did not invite speakers. They came to us, real fast. And as a result, we ended up with an extremely strong panel from a subject-relevance standpoint, yet an extremely poor one with respect to gender representation. And let’s make no mistake: this is bad. But when this got brought to our attention, in a mostly professional manner, we started to pro-actively invite women, and went from 1 to 7 female speakers in three days. And these are every bit as qualified as their male counterparts to sit on their respective panels.

To make a long story short: the problem exists, conference organizers must take a pro-active role in trying to solve it, and women must actively collaborate if they really want it to be solved. This learning experience gives me faith in the process.