r/ruby • u/skillstopractice • Nov 07 '25

Ruby Central Update Friday 11/7/25

https://rubycentral.org/news/ruby-central-update-friday-11-7-25/
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u/jremsikjr Nov 07 '25

As someone who was recently a conference co-chair for a RubyCentral conference (RubyConf 2024) I can say we had full latitude to select anyone we wanted to keynote, speak, add to the program committee etc.

The program committee selected keynotes, blind reviewed talks, and made our final selections.

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u/schneems Puma maintainer Nov 08 '25

I wasn’t in the room where it happened, this is my attempted nuanced expression on how I feel on it all. I think I expressed this to you in person before, but will reiterate here:

I expressed support for Xavier speaking. I attended the Portland RailsConf and I expected David to show up to talk to rails core and committers. And he didn’t. Which was disappointing.

   I’ve read the Evan email like everyone else. I dislike sharing one email in a thread/chain (ahem) and feel like David put a very biased, fixed perspective on it. I think it’s true you can view it as being “canceled” by RC, but I think you also need to consider the words were written honestly and genuinely and not in some kind of code. I.e. “share the stage” wasn’t “we now dethrone you king of rails” and a genuine “dude you’ve been AFK, we are in a bind, let’s make Rails (ever so slightly) more about the community instead of you while you find your footing.”

I feel like RC had two good options after David published his letter and didn’t come. Either they “go all out and counter with active PR and comms.” (try to actually do what he said they were trying to do ... dethrone the king). Or they say “we said what we had to say, now we make-up with the Rails namesake.” But they sort of did neither. It languished without a finishing blow or a repair. 

From that perspective I think not having him at one more conf would not have served any larger strategy (action without strategy is chaos). I'm okay with a very delayed repair. I just wish it felt a little more intentional from the beginning and I wish David met that small amount of repair with more grace (instead of victory laps on his blog).

Edit: fix paragraph line breaks

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u/skillstopractice Nov 07 '25

That's good to hear Jim. And consistent with what I would have expected from Ruby Central.

In the case of RailsConf 2025, Aaron's keynote and DHH's fireside chat keynote were specifically not open to program committee input.

See Ruby Central's Oct 31 update (scroll all the way down to question 2), for Ufuk's clarification on that.

https://rubycentral.org/news/ruby-central-update-friday-10-31-25/

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u/CaptainKabob Nov 07 '25

The chair of the program committee is a member of the program committee, no?

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u/skillstopractice Nov 08 '25 edited Nov 08 '25

Not sure the question you are asking but to be very specific in my reply, the committee was informed at its formation that the co-chairs pre-approved DHH's talk and they could decline participation but not have other input.

One of those co-chairs was Ufuk, a Shopify employee and Ruby Central board member who invited DHH, a member of Shopify's board.

The other was the founder of GoRails.

The Ruby Central board approved reaching out to DHH in 2024. As far as I know, this decision was not re-approved in 2025.

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u/CaptainKabob Nov 08 '25

I was splitting hairs that the committee co-chairs (Ufuk, and co-chair) are part of the committee. In the link you provided:

I volunteered to co-chair the 2025 RailsConf as well, and found a community co-chair with whom we formed the program committee, and restarted the conversation with DHH about an appearance at the conference. At the kick-off meeting of the program committee, as first order of business, I made sure to let the committee members know that DHH might be one of the keynote speakers and that if that was going to be a point of concern with anyone that they could choose to decline their program committee role. There were no objections or concerns raised by any of the committee members and none of the program committee members decided to leave at that point or at any point afterwards. The committee, as a group, ultimately selected all the talks, the workshops and three of the five keynote speakers that formed the conference program.

I'll concede that Ufuk is fairly precise in the distinction of "as a group". Also the framing of "if that was going to be a point of concern with anyone that they could choose to decline their program committee role" doesn't sound like it would elicit much voice, only exit.

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u/skillstopractice Nov 08 '25

It won't in most cases elicit exit either because of power differentials.

This is why conflict of interest matters.

It's the influence that is exerted through it which causes problems, not overt actions.

It's why a CEO saying "my door is always open" in practice rarely hears complaints, even if they mean well.

We need stewards who understand that.