Hi All,

There's so many parallel threads here that it's hard to determine which 
one to respond to. Nice to see all this open discussion though! :)

In any case, in regards to choosing future talks and attempting to 
ensure speaker diversity, this blog post from Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries 
(author of "The Lean Startup" which is also worth a read) just came 
across my radar.

It details how The Lean Startup Conference has attempted to achieve a 
more diverse set of speakers.  Obviously all of what they did may not 
apply easily to the code4lib conference, but it's at least worth 
reading/skimming in light of all these recent threads.

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2012/11/solving-pipeline-problem.html

- Tim

-- 
Tim Donohue
Technical Lead for DSpace Project
DuraSpace.org