| TL;DR LambdaConf invited a controversial speaker and people got very upset. The whole story: LambdaConf accepted a talk by Curtis Yarvin [0] for his work on Urbit [1][2] through a blind selection process. Before announcing the speaker list they realized this could be controversial and wrote about their decision to invite him anyway [3]. There was enormous push back on social media [4, 5], causing a number of sponsors to withdraw. An IndieGogo was set up to raise money for the conference [6] and was funded within 24 hours [7]. Soon after, a number of people co-signed a statement opposing LambdaConf's decision [8]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin 1 - https://github.com/urbit/urbit 2 - http://urbit.org/ 3 - http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-inclusion 4 - https://twitter.com/seldo/status/714258138325626880 5 - https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=lambd... 6 - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-lambdaconf-and-an-op... 7 - https://twitter.com/ClarkHat/status/716242082696921088 8 - https://statement-on-lambdaconf.github.io/ (edit: formatting) |