A short talk arguing that conference organizers should pay speakers to respect their time, ownership of intellectual property, and to promote inclusion and diversity in tech. The speaker emphasizes covering travel, time, and family needs so a genuinely diverse roster can participate.
Chapters
I guess it kind of goes back to the fact that we started off as a grassroots conference, business and content, and is at the center of everything we put on. And our focus has always been on the audience and kind of the audience challenge and the problems that we're trying to solve for our audience. And our speakers come from our community and we just, we value their time. We're giving us their time, they're giving us their ip, I suppose, and we think it's worth paying them. And we also have a kind of founding principle, which is this belief that in some small way we think that we can have a positive impact on inclusion and diversity in the tech industry, which some, some parts of the tech industry can be quite homogenous, quite white, male, same kinds of people getting all the jobs, and we feel like we can give a platform to a kind of more diverse roster of speakers. And part of inclusion means that you need to pay people, because not everybody can afford to not be paid to speak. Not everybody can afford their time for free, and not everybody works for a big company that is willing for them to give their time for free. So if we want a genuinely diverse group of people to be able to speak to us, we have to make that possible for them. So we need to pay for their travel and we need to pay for their time and we need to make the experience comfortable for them. We need to allow them to bring their kids and their family if they need to. So it's about kind of respect for our speakers and our community, and it's about inclusion.
