Letter to Mike Gunderloy
The controversy about the CouchDB talk at GoGaRuCo has gotten out of hand. It has caused real damage as Mike Gunderloy has quit as a Rails Activist over it. Here is the comment I made on his blog post.
Mike,
Sorry to hear this, Mike. All rails users have benefitted from your efforts and it will be a great loss to the community.
I was one of the 200 people who were actually at the GoGaRuCo conference. It was a great conference and it’s a shame that this mess seems to be the main outcome of the conference. I saw Matt’s presentation live and it went too far but it was not a big deal. I can understand how women might be offended but it was nothing like spam with images on or what you’d see on the street within a couple of blocks of where the conference was held although gender may have been different or ambiguous. There was only one image I would consider pornographic-that is people having sex. Nothing you wouldn’t see channel-surfing in a hotel room. The presentation was actually quite good and used the images as metaphors to get key points across. Were some images in bad taste? Yes. Did they objectify women? Hey, Ruby is an object-oriented language. I’m sorry, I don’t see this as a big deal. I think the woman who complained had a right to do that but it was like complaining that the lunch was bad (which it wasn’t). It should have ended there.
I suppose it is a sign of puberty and approaching maturity in a community to have a spat like this with knee-jerk reactions on all sides. Isn’t free speech wonderful? Did anyone expect DHH to act like the parent and punish the bad boy Matt? Not likely. Should the conference organizers have screened the presentations for content and censored them? That would hardly be the open source way.
I hope that everyone calms down and considers the ramifications of their words and actions. Do we really want a few images projected on a screen for a few seconds in front of 200 people on a Sunday in San Francisco to lead to a range war and people quiting and the community splitting apart? I don’t think anyone really wants that. There are feedback and amplification issues with this internet thingy that our lizard-brains have trouble dealing with. Fight or flight and all that. It is hard to know the effects of your actions and it is hard to backtrack from a stance you take, but I hope everyone can do that here. Matt should admit he crossed the respect line. DHH should only speak for himself. (Actually, I went back and read his posts on the subject and he does only speak for himself. ) He’s not God, folks, and the more people push him toward that, the more he will do to disprove it. People should continue discussing what is acceptable in public presentations but in a calm manner without so much baggage attached.
Mike, I hope you will reconsider quitting. You can do much more good as a rails activist on the inside than on the outside. I don’t think your being a rails activist is a stamp of approval for anything shown at a ruby conference. I think it means that you are caring person who puts his good energy into valuable work for the ruby community. I hope you will continue to do that.
Sincerely, Will Emerson
Posted by will on Tuesday, April 28, 2009