)
)
)
)
)
If its not obvious that we’re trying to make #wcbos special, well, you haven’t been paying attention. If we had the room for a trapeze in the building, surely we’d be asking speakers for insurance waivers and their leotard sizes.
One of the content items we’re excited about is the Ignite WordCamp sessions, bringing the popular O’Reilly brand of lightning talks together with a WordCamp audience for extra goodness.
One of the proposed Ignite sessions, however, has sparked some controversy. Adria Richards, whom we had planned to have as a speaker on our Beginner’s track, was so offended by Danielle Morrill’s proposed Ignite session she’s planning to cancel her trip if it gets accepted. (You can find the full text of Danielle’s session proposal on our “Vote for Ignite” page, and Adria’s explanation of her objections here. Note we’ve reached out to Danielle for her reaction but haven’t heard back yet).
Two quick notes about the controversy:
- Let’s not jump to conclusions. All that anyone has seen from Danielle Morrill so far is her brief Ignite session proposal: a title and brief description. Yes, she references the term “money shot” and refers to “how thinking like a porn director will help you.” She doesn’t say she plans to spend the session showing pornographic images; in fact, the bulk of what she describes is advice on how to best do screencasts in WordPress. While I can imagine an offensive presentation resulting from such a description, I can’t say that any presentation resulting from that title and description will be necessarily offensive. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the title and description alone are so offensive that they should not be allowed as proposed Ignite sessions at a WordCamp.
- When you’ve got an issue with conference content, talk to the organizers (and the speaker). Rather than trying to reach out to any of us, or Danielle (as far as I know), Adria went for a public blog post. In that post, she lumped Danielle’s proposed session (and all of WordCamp Boston) in the same category as a series of nasty tech conference events, “booth babes,” and actually graphic sexual imagery in inappropriate contexts. Perhaps if Adria had shared her concerns directly with Danielle or with any of the organizers, a different outcome could have been achieved. Note that I’m not saying Adria shouldn’t speak out on what she sees as offensive – just saying that it might be best to start with the conference organizers and speaker, rather than assuming they won’t understand your concerns.
Obviously it pains me to see any WordCamp speaker or attendee offended enough to request a refund. I want everyone to see WordCamp as an event they are proud to be associated with and feel comfortable attending.
That said, as organizers, we will not be demanding that Danielle remove her Ignite proposal from consideration, or requiring her to change her title.
I’m confident that she understands the context of a WordCamp and the objections Adria has raised, and that she will present an appropriate set of images if her talk gets accepted. I will leave it up to her whether to revise the title or description.
If this makes it such that Adria can’t be one of our speakers, we will reluctantly (and with real disappointment) accept her decision and refund her ticket cost.
The one point we want to be serious about – which we don’t want to get lost in this discussion – is how integral women are to WordCamp Boston.
1. 150 of our attendees are women, meaning that near 40% of our attendance is female. That’s exceptionally high for a WordCamp.
2. We have a wonderfully high ratio of women speakers at WordCamp Boston. In fact, Jake Goldman’s startup panel is all women.
3. WordCamp Boston has strong female leadership: Amanda Blum has been the driving force behind much of what we think will make WordCamp Boston special. The website for WordCamp Boston was also built, hacked and maintained by a woman: Daisy Olsen.
4. WordCamp Boston will feature the first #WPChicks brunch, an event specifically for women using WordPress.
5. WordCamp Boston is donating all excess funds to the WordPress Foundation, specifically to help encourage women in WordPress.
6. When presented with a sponsorship opportunity from a company known for racy advertising, we laid out conditions on their participation so strongly that the sponsorship didn’t happen and turned away $2500.
So, if you have concerns about anything we’re doing at WordCamp, frankly, just let us know. We’re pretty flexible here and ultimately, we want to create a great camp for everyone.
The term originates from mainstream feature filmmakers, who used the term “money shot” as slang for the image that costs the most money to produce.
As one of the organizers who went through the Ignite proposals and put them together into the ballot blog post (and the one who has their name on it), I’d like to mention that—and apologize for the fact that—I did not recognize “money shot” was a reference to pornography when looking at the entries. I thought the “thinking like a porn director” was an odd turn of phrase, but that people will judge these proposals by their descriptions and that if people do not like it or are uneasy about it, they can vote for other proposals.
Yikes! I’m not sure you had to write a blog post about this. Clearly this woman is one of those people who only sees things through her own lens, and expects others to do the same. Good thing that’s not how WordPress sees the world…
@Jenny – I felt it necessary to write a post because I take people’s objections seriously. I wouldn’t want to be associated with a conference that made 40% of its attendees feel unwelcome, objectified, or otherwise insulted.
That said, obviously I disagree with Adria about this particular case, if not the problem in general.
I think it’s really ridiculous how this has all happened. Not contacting the organizers and firing off negative blog posts (when all Adria knew of the session was the title) is what is inappropriate if you ask me.
But here I am, still talking about it and giving her even more attention…which was raised by the term “sex”….so Adria, how is what you’re doing any different???
Regardless…WordCamp Boston is going to be great, and hopefully we can all move forward, forget this ridiculous occurrence and all have a great time!
John,
In hindsight, I should not have talked about my intent to cancel my attendance on my live show yesterday before talking with the organizers of Wordcamp Boston.
During the episode, I was laying out upcoming events and training and could not honestly say I was going to attend Wordcamp Boston as just before the show, I had read the Ignite descriptions. It was weighing heavily on my mind.
I explained in the show that I was going to wait for the voting to end on Tuesday and then contact folks. If the session wasn’t selected, no one would have been the wiser that I had an issue about this.
Someone watching the show contacted Wordcamp Boston.
After my show ended, I received an email from Amanda at 9:47pm, one of Wordcamp Boston’s organizers. I replied promptly at 10:02pm and forwarded you the email at 10:05pm. Both of these emails are in my blog post.
I then saw Amanda put the same content into a comment for yesterday’s show. I immediately DM’d her to ask if she intended to make her communication public. I also asked if she wanted to make the conversation public. She said yes.
I then thought about this and why I wasn’t willing to attend a conference where a session with this topic had been approved by the organizers.
Those are the facts. Pornography is not funny. It is hurtful to women. It is not an appropriate topic for a technical conference.
Wordcamps are run by the organizers, not Automattic, the parent company of Wordpress. Because of this, my plan was to opt out because I don’t support the logic that women attending an event automatically support all sessions even ones that use sex to sell.
Hi Adria – thanks for your comments here.
I was actually offline last night and didn’t get the thread of emails and posts until this am.
I honestly respect your concerns – I take quite seriously the need for conference organizers to create an environment that is encouraging to underrepresented populations, and specifically to avoid the kind of “old boys club” that tech conferences can be.
I’d have been (and still am!) perfectly happy to share your concerns with Danielle, who submitted the talk, and try to reach a mutually agreeable conclusion. (She’s gonna have a big queue of emails and tweets waiting for her next time she gets online).
If you don’t feel that the conference accords with your values on the whole then you certain are right to back out. But I continue to maintain that Danielle’s a perfectly reasonable person who had no intent of doing an offensive, degrading presentation, just because she mentioned “the money shot.” When people submit an Ignite talk they often stretch to be creative, funny, original, etc – and in the process may miss the mark and head into risque territory.
WordCamp organizers can’t guarantee that nothing offensive will be shown or said at the conference, of course, but we do try in general to set a tone of professionalism and support for diversity of gender, class, race, and sexual orientation.
Anyway, I can see I’m starting to ramble now so I’ll stop. Thank you (sincerely) for raising the issue and sorry to hear you might miss the show.
Well, clearly Danielle’s use of the words “thinking like a porn director” were to provide a metaphorical reference, and clearly, since Danielle is a woman, she doesn’t find metaphorical references to pornography offensive, thereby refuting your “facts.” Nothing in Danielle’s proposal explicitly conveys that she intends to use pornography as a subject in her presentation.
Wow, I just got online after working until 3am so I’m still catching up with all of this. Just to be clear, I never heard from Adria directly regarding her objections to my talk and I appreciate Amanda bringing me up to speed, and John’s blog post and comments in this thread.
I’m going focus on what really is important: I’m looking forward to speaking about creating professionally produced screencasts on a shoestring budget, and I’ve done for my current startup and previous one. I think I can teach something valuable to a lot of people, while sharing something I’m deeply passionate about. I am a long time Wordpress user and I manage over 20 installs. I love blogging and have been doing it for 10 years, since I was 14 (anyone remember mydiary.net?).
To be clear, I won’t be subjecting attendees to any pornographic imagery. My use of the term “money shot” specifically refers to the 2 minutes which are both the most costly to produce and the content the viewer is actually paying for. Since most screencasts need to be this short to compete for the attention of the ever-fickle and easily distracted YouTube viewer I think it is important to focus on packing as much value as possible into this time.
I don’t have the bandwidth to run a big campaign about why you should vote for me, but feel free to check out an example of my screencasting work here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnnNh0putWc
See you all in Boston!
-Danielle
As another woman that was named in Adria’s post as using sex to sell, I’d just like to say I find it pretty obvious that this is exactly what she has done herself.
Someone uses a sexual innuendo to promote their work. It works. Someone else cries “sexism” and “women’s rights” by quoting it & promoting their work. How are they different? It’s the same marketing ploy with a different spin.
I would have never thought Danielle’s session subject was demeaning by a simple metaphor. Just as my silly title of a blog article was not a bash on women.
What I see in Danielle’s description is an educational and entertaining way of sharing her expertise on screencasting. Good luck to you Danielle! You have my vote.