The purpose is two-fold. One is to encourage a diverse range of people to submit talk proposals to conferences. The other is to help with the specifics—coming with ideas, writing a good title and abstract, preparing the presentation, and all that.
But ... looking at those locations, I want to ask, is it diverse enough? Looking at the list of cities in the USA, I see the same set of places — large cities on the East and West coast dominated by financial and tech industries. Given what I think we learned about our country from the 2106 presidential election, the middle of the country doesn’t feel like their voices are being heard.
