I hate to say this, but where are the women? I see that Corante has managed to add a woman to the blog as a contributor – Kathleen Gilroy – who wasn’t there the last time I looked. But your blogroll has a significant lack of women (I spotted one lone female voice), and the line-up for the conference so far is equally male-only.

I’m raising this issue now because I don’t want this to turn into another ‘where are the women’ bloodbath later on, when it’s too late to do anything about it.

There’s not even a call for papers on the website, so how are people (male or female) who might be interested in speaking going to make their interest known? Or is this a ‘friends of the organisers only’ bash?

Sadly, I have prior commitments around that time, so I won’t be able to put myself forward as a speaker, but it’s disappointing to yet again see a blog/event that is so unnecessarily dominated by men, and lacking in openness regarding the process by which speakers are selected.

We’ve been through all this before with other conferences, so it’s sad to see the same mistakes repeated over and again.

That rant over, good luck with the blog – I am looking forward to some killer posts from you!