From the Flame Dept.

I’ve been getting complaints that the invite list to Newly Digital doesn’t include [insert group here]. Most complaints center around the fact that there were no women invitees, but there have been complaints from other interest groups as well.

Yes, the original list was all men. And as far as I know, all of them reside in the US, Canada, or Europe. And here’s something else. They might all be white, might all be straight, might all be middle-class. Or they might not. I really don’t know, because I didn’t care.

My goal wasn’t to fulfill some notion of diversity, fairness, or quotas. It was to spark conversation. To inspire people to write about their experiences. That meant getting various people, some well-known and some not well-known, to participate. I had dozens of people on the list of prospects, but I cut it down to 12. I didn’t look at the list to determine if some were women or minority or gay or Asian or Mac users or dog owners or anything else. All I was looking for was a set of people to write.

I wonder if people realize how petty and narrow-minded their flames sound. Here we’ve been trying to get people to view men and women as equals for years, but when I do that, I’m vilified because I didn’t go out of my way to include women. You can’t have it both ways. I can’t be both blind to gender, race or whatever and also ensure that all groups are included. And I shouldn’t have to. This was my project. Something fun done in my spare time.

Most of the people on the invite list had done something recently that I found interesting. Cameron is the developer behind Blogdex. Andy launched the Star Wars kid to fame. I use some of Torrez’s tools. Bill is my co-conspirator in Zempt. I enjoy Dan and Steve’s blogs. A conversation with Brad gave me the idea. That’s why these people were included. Because they have been contributing to the community in a way that I enjoyed.

I wanted the project to be open to the world. I wanted others to contribute. But I didn’t have the time or energy to manage an invite list of hundreds of people. And even if I did, I don’t know all of the interesting people in the world, so I couldn’t have invited them all. So I created a TrackBack repository, linked it to the page, put it in RSS, and threw it open to anyone who wanted to contribute.

If you like the project and want to contribute, please do. If you don’t like it then don’t contribute. It’s as simple as that.