There's nothing like jsconf for bringing out the meta! Since the conference ended two blog posts have created a lot of buzz, at least within my own twitter bubble.
First, Rebecca Murphey's JavaScript: It's a Language, Not a Religion. I take Rebecca's post as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hero-worship and the tendency to assume that the people we respect in one sphere share our views in other spheres. I bring it up here not because I want to discuss the content of her post but because I'm ripping off her title.
The second blog post was Ryan Funduk's Our Culture of Exclusion. Ryan talks about the culture of drinking that pervades many JavaScript conferences, meetups, and even workplaces. He sort of goes on and on while documenting this culture and in places he begins to sound like a righteous teetotaler. But I don't think that's his point. His point is right there in the title: the implicit assumption that everyone who likes JavaScript also likes drinking excludes those, like himself, who do not.
I don't get out to JavaScript events much, but I've got to agree with Ryan: even though I enjoy beer, I'd prefer post-conference activities that were not centered around drinking. But that's really all I've got to say about alcohol here. What I think was important about Ryan's post was the exclusion, not the drinking.
The phrase "the JavaScript community" gets used a lot at jsconf. (And I was certainly guilty of using it a lot while doing my "TeamJS" fundraising in December and January). If you think about it, though, that's an absurd concept. JavaScript is a huge language with many many thousands of active developers: we'd fill a small city, so obviously we're too big to be a community. (As a thought experiment, suppose we use ownership of my book JavaScript: The Definitive Guide as a way to distinguish casual JavaScript programmers from serious community members. My JavaScript book sold over 6000 copies in the 4th quarter of 2011. Just 6000 is way too many to form any kind of cohesive community.)
When we talk about "the JavaScript community", we are talking about a
JavaScript community, though. Perhaps its the community of a couple
thousand developers who vie to buy up 300 jsconf tickets in 30 seconds
when sales open? It's the JavaScript community that our social media
bubbles reinforce? It's the community of the JavaScript cool kids? Its
a community of JavaScript programmers who also like alcohol and bacon?
Maybe a better name for "the JavaScript community" would be "the jsconf
clique". (Or if the word "clique" seems harsh, substitue "the jsconf
tribe".) I don't mean any disrespect for the conference or for its
attendees, but I do think that might be a more accurate name for the
community we're talking about.
Ryan's blog post was about alcohol and exclusion. I think the alcohol is just one manifestation of a deeper issue. As soon as we start talking or thinking about community, we've got to start thinking about who is in the community and who is out of the community. Social psychologists have interesting things to say about in groups and out groups. This is basic primate stuff, and it is fundamental to the definition of community: you can't have a community without defining its boundaries and excluding people. If the membership criterion is just "programming JavaScript" then the community is too large and diverse to satisfy our social needs. So we narrow it down by adding additional criteria like youth and drinking. These are powerful social forces, and if you're human, then you're subject to them, too. Its what we do: we define communities and decide who is in and who is out.
This exclusionary impulse was, sadly, on full display in my Twitter bubble yesterday. A number of JavaScript event organizers tweeted defensive-sounding responses. Some were of the form "well I like to drink". Others took the form "go organize your own event". Just 140 characters, but the exclusion was pretty explicit. These responses said: "you're clearly not part of the JavaScript drinking community, and we have no interest in including you in our community. You should go start your own community".
It got worse, though: there were tweets telling Ryan what he should name the non-drinking events he was supposed to organize. Suggestions included "DryConf" and "BouncyCastleConf". These tweets weren't helpful suggestions; they purposefully ignored Ryan's points and were just plain mocking him. By my reading, the first said: "you should go hang out with straightlaced, uncool teetotalers and prohibition advocates". The second said: "if you don't drink then you're a child and should go play children's games". These were just pure social aggression. And the point, presumably unconscious, was to reinforce the boundaries of the in group and the out group.
We're human; that's how we behave. JavaScript is a programming language, not a community. We share an interest in JavaScript with many, many professional colleagues. Let's be collegial with them. But let's not deceive ourselves about community. Neighborhoods, schools, and churches define communities. Your group of drinking buddies is a community. The core developers on an open-source project are a community. But the universe of JavaScript programmers is just too big to be a community. Let's stop pretending that it is one.
[Edited to add these musings:]
- The set of attendees at boutique conferences like jsconf is also a community. (A community, in this case, that tends to call itself "the JavaScript community".)
- Hampton Catlin makes a great point: he tweets "I go to confs to hang out with people I collab with online." So for him, conferences are social reinforcement for existing communities of collaborators. That makes perfect sense, and an intimate conference like jsconf is a great venue for that.
- I wonder whether the friction between the organizers of jsconf and O'Reilly's fluentconf go beyond disagreements over the business model and have more to do with conference size and community.
- Would it be fair to describe jsconf as a "community conference" (for the jsconf community, not the JavaScript community) and fluentcont as a "collegial conference"?
Source : http://www.davidflanagan.com/2012/04/javascript-its.html
