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Beware the echo chamber chamber chamber -- Of conferences and filter bubbles

Abstract: Conferences tend to follow and reinforce a certain degree of homophily: we attend the conferences that cover the areas we work in and hear speakers talk about topics that we believe are relevant to our current interests. Most of the time we seek out validation of our own ideas, and so it is not surprising that most conferences have a very homogenous program. Within each community, we cater to the masses.

This reinforces each attendant's feeling that they get their money's worth out of a conference: if you know before attending that you will agree with everything (or at least the majority) that's said, then you later on are likely to rate the conference a smashing success. Which in turn leads to the conference organizers receiving lots of great feedback, patting their program committee on the back and planning an identical (but bigger!) conference the next year.

But this is not how we expand our horizons, how we learn new things. New ways of doing the old thing is not nearly as exciting or valuable as learning something actually new. It is rare to see a conference invite speakers presenting the exact opposing thought than the one that might underly the conference's theme.

The idea of DevOps is actually a pretty good example. If I understand its history, it was, effectively, born out of a serendipitous meeting at a conference that did not focus on 'Ops' at all. The idea of agile system administration was not something that would have likely been accepted as a pitch for a software development conference. But we are now running the risk of building our own echo chamber: if you look at the program for DevOpsDays Italy, it sure looks like every talk will be very exciting and interesting for all attendants, and I'm sure they will all like them very much and agree with the main points.

Don't we deserve a little more intellectual honesty? Don't we deserve new ideas, not just slightly improved old ideas? And don't we all tend to learn the most, the most interesting things when we're forced to look at something from an opposing view point? I would argue that every conference should strive to invite more than just one or two of its "opponents", the people who are on the opposite side of the spectrum.

What makes you uncomfortable? NoOps? Traditional separation between dev and ops? Outsourcing of ops? Let's invite the experts on those topics to the next DevOpsDays!

Speaker: Jan Schaumann