Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
A year ago I and others wrote on Pop!Tech and the lack of women and diversity in its speaker list. At the time, the conference had one woman speaking out of 30. I don’t know if what we wrote had an impact or not, but I was heartened to see a more diverse speaker list this year.
More, I noticed that the speakers who didn’t fall into the typical white, Euro-Pacific-Americas white male pattern are touching on some unusual and unique topics: from underwater exploration, to Saturn fly-bys, to patenting living things, and so on.
The representation still isn’t perfect, but it is better. If the organizers continue the trend into the future, I’ll have to start saving my pennies to attend Pop!Tech in 2008-9.