Skippy recently provided me a link to Ryan Funduk’s post on Our Culture Of Exclusion, which is all about how - in addition to the implication of women being excluded from technology by gender - technology conferences are exclusionary of anyone who doesn’t want to drink themselves into a stupor afterwards.
I have not personally ever excluded anyone based on their not wanting to drink. I have excluded non-drinking people based on their personality or other behavior, and have tried to be polite as possible about it. (Dude sat at our table while I was trying to chat with a couple of other guys about something not explicitly tech-related, like travel, and started yammering about his experience with Linux – time to get out of dodge.) But that they weren’t drinking wasn’t a factor in my decision.
I have personally been a non-drinker at some after-parties. I didn’t feel excluded at all. I knew in advance that others would be drinking, and it was my choice to show up and remain sober. Sure, I didn’t get the deep technical/philosophical conversation that Ryan craves (and I admit, I often crave these conversations, too), but I also arrived without that expectation.
This is why some conferences (like Drupalcon and Ohio LinuxFest) have “Birds of a Feather” (BoF) rooms where you can arrange to meet with like-minded people and discuss topics that concern you all. This happens during the conference proper, so there’s usually no booze.
As far as hack-a-thons go, I’ve not been to a coding event billed like this where the focus was more on the drinking beer than the producing code. Sure, there’s sometimes a little drinking, but there’s too often a goal of actually producing something that is useful the next day than one can afford to drink too much to think straight. Granted, I don’t hit every conference out there, but I’ve simply never experienced that scenario.
Sure, there have been a couple of conferences where the beer flowed more freely. But I attribute this to the events being more social in nature than technical. For example, I think it’s possible to have a technical conference where the sessions during the day are quite technical, and the evening activities are geared entirely toward social interaction. Perhaps that’s the intention that’s missing from Ryan’s thoughts.
No, I don’t think you should be forced to drink to feel included. But I do think that you can’t expect a room full of developers who want to be social with each other to suddenly go dry and discuss Hume and Kant. Every event has a different tone.
Let’s just call some of these conferences what they are: Throne of JS is a $700 per seat conference. The technical benefits of the conference feature, exclusively, sessions by the authors of the most popular javascript frameworks explaining what makes their framework superior to the others. That’s it. In addition to that, you get a vacation. The site bills the event as a “vacation for developers”! I’m not sure how you could confuse that with a strong day of technology discussion.
Is there a lack of serious conferences where you get to discuss technical topics with like-minded developers? Perhaps. But I never got the impression that I’d get to speak one-on-one about the impracticalities of infinitely nested node.js closures with Brian Ford even after paying my $850. If you want to chat with people on the ground, I think you really need to alter your expectations and find a local meetup for your interests. There may also be beer there, but I find that these meetings are less about being vacations for developers than interested people taking their own time to get together to discuss a topic.
To organizers of these technology events, yes, I understand that developers are a hedonistic bunch with their proclivities for whiskey and beer. I think it’s ok to offer some after-party accouterments for your events. But I agree with Ryan to a certain extent that these events are becoming too profligate, and we’re a short ride from hearing about drunken Ruby devs wrapping a rental car around a palm tree from too much afterparty exposure, and organizers getting sued into oblivion.
Add some BoF timeslots to your event and allow time for presenters and attendees to mingle. You’re pulling in hundreds from each attendee to have the speakers they crave; allow them some open discussion with those speakers. There are also other activities that afterparties can include that don’t necessarily involve drinking - biking, hiking, bowling, pool, disc golf… I’m sure there are dozens more that would be fun and give everyone a chance to mix together and get talking.
