Maybe this issue hasn’t quite hit mainstream news yet, but almost every blog I read is weighing in and I’ll be damned if I don’t use my position of privilege (by which I mean “a Mac user”) to contribute on the subject as well.

The most recent uproar began when Mike Monteiro called out Carson Workshops for it’s ovewhlemingly white list of presenters. Jason Kottke poured gasoline on the fire, presenting gender percentages of various web conferences.

A backlash began from the event organizers. Eric Meyer heroically blamed the system, saying “Call that decision a manifestation of old-boy clubbiness if you want, but it isn’t.” He cites the research they did about who would attend an event with X, Y, Z speakers… lo and behold, the “A-List” was mostly men.

Trying to cite Micki Krimmel in this whole affair gives me a “circular reference” error, because back to back posts from Mickipedia praise Monteiro and critique the recent rise of the word “poser” in tech circles. Violet Blue recently got called one, Leah Culver has come out in favor of the word, and Leah and Micki both shared spots on Violet’s Sexiest Geeks of 2006 list.

I bring up the poser discussion to illustrate the vastly different understandings of what an “expert” in this industry might be. Eric Meyer knows more about floating divs than I may ever, but his site is not nearly as nice looking as Becca Wei‘s, a top designer of WordPress themes (currently, two of the five “featured” themes are hers). Is he an expert because of the books he’s had published? Because of the panels he’s spoken on? How much of his success under these criteria are tied to his race, sexuality, or gender?

Before I jump in and tear anyone claiming that 0% of presenters at a conference being women is justified a new vagina (my first instinct), I should make sure my own house is in order. Of the blogs in my feedreader with single authors (so not Boing Boing, for instance), 41% are female. Yay, me. I am not a pig.

However, a closer look reveals most of the female blogs I subscribe to are people I know, not “experts” (though exceptionally talented writers, artists, designers, and otherwise crafty people). I really have as far to go as everyone else.

This is really what it comes down to: who do we, as a community, hold up as our experts? Who’s contributions do we say have value? While it’s easy to say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but this is the way the world works”, I can only say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but that puts you squarely in part-of-the-problem and not part-of-the-solution“. How should the world work, and what can you/I/we do with the power we’re afforded as white, heterosexual males to make it that way?

Disclaimer: I bear Eric no ill-will; these are really tough, personal, and often emotionally-charged issues. His follow-up post acknowledges as much.

Actually, San Francisco was awash in tech conferences last week. Bloggercon IV (“The Voyage Home”?), Jakob Nielsen’s big Usability Week, Gnomedex, and even Microformats got in on the party. Typically personified as the two-headed bitch goddess that bestows boons upon both oppressor and liberator alike, Technology was definitely on her best behavior last week. Even the most conventional conference, Usability Week (with tickets weighing in at over $3k for the whole deal), concentrated on making the web more accessible and generally suck less. Hard to argue with that.

But my attentions were lavished upon BarCamp. For the many of us who are not experienced BarCampers (this was my first), here’s a quick introduction: Spaces are typically donated, as is equipment and supplies like projectors, coffee, pizza, ice cream, and even presenters. No fancy experts are flown in from the Institute for Ivory Tower Position Papers That Are Completely Irrelevent to Your Day to Day Work. Panels are made up of people like you, including, in fact, you. One entire wall is the schedule and attendees grab a Sharpie^TM and sign themselves up to talk about whatever their area of expertise happens to be. These sessions then continue well into the evening (I think “Quiet Hours” began at 1am) after which follows a good deal of giggling, pillowfights, and talking about boys (or AJAX implementations of drilldown menus).

Working as a webperson at a progressive non-profit in San Francisco, perhaps I take too much joy in anti-hierarchical tech conferences. It’s entirely possible. Still, sometimes it seems that while the anti-capitalists and anti-globalists and anti-whateverelseists are arguing about inclusive processes and consensus-based decision-making, the web community (even while full of globalists and capitalists and certainly whateverelseists) seems to be quietly doing it.

While I didn’t actually attend Vloggercon itself, I did manage to make it to a number of after-parties, which we all know is where the serious education happens. The first night, I caught up with Josh Wolf, whom I first met looking for an apartment in SF. His roommate said I was “ungrounded” and couldn’t move in. A few years later, it seems Josh is under subpoena by the Federal Grand Jury for not surrendering his footage of a protest to the FBI. Before I left he said, “hey we should hang out again sometime—and before Thursday, since I might be going to jail.” Now who’s ungrounded?

A tech convention is incomplete without a visit to fave techie hangout House of Shields. I spent most of the evening chatting with Style Goddess Erica Falke. She mentioned that there’s an incredible feeling of camaraderie and revolution at tech conferences lately, and I totally agreed. The spirit at SXSWi 2006 was downright Das Kapital-esque. Talk of business strategies and “monetizing” were almost laughed out of the room, in favor of supporting the emerging global democracy and tearing down techno-hierarchies. It tasted like one big manifesto smoothie. And I do so like manifestos.

In short, I now have high expectations of these citizen journalists. The Fourth Estate is sleeping on the job and long in need of “the kicking in of a rotten door”, to borrow a quote from the late, great John Kenneth Galbraith. Go get ‘em vloggers.