But the reality is, you’re looking at this from a tech perspective – all of your examples are about tech and tech content and tech experts. The problem with that is: This is not a tech community. Kathy Sierra would be the first to say she’s not a woman blogger; yet I’d imagine the majority of BlogHer attendees self-identify as women first. It’s no better or worse, it’s an entirely different perspective. And in this community, a keynote from Heather Armstrong would be far more well-received than one from, say, Ev. It’s who the community is. And that, as my parents would say, is why they make vanilla and chocolate.

But the reality is, you’re looking at this from a tech perspective – all of your examples are about tech and tech content and tech experts. The problem with that is: This is not a tech community. Kathy Sierra would be the first to say she’s not a woman blogger; yet I’d imagine the majority of BlogHer attendees self-identify as women first. It’s no better or worse, it’s an entirely different perspective.And in this community, a keynote from Heather Armstrong would be far more well-received than one from, say, Ev. It’s who the community is. And that, as my parents would say, is why they make vanilla and chocolate.

Also, I have to take issue with your assertion (however cheekily it was intended) that if we’re not learning about coding issues, we’re writing about hand cream. For years, women have been diminished and marginalized for writing about things like relationships and family. I love that, as a memoirist (among other things) that I have found my tribe through blogher.

Let’s leave the Geek Lab aside for a moment and talk about a couple of your other perceptions.

We do not do pay-to-play, so no speaker was on a panel because of sponsorship, period.

We are about sharing community/user experience and opinion. The word expert appears in our agenda regarding only 3 our of more than 100 speakers. Instead our agenda talks about unique perspectives or experiences people bring to the table. I think that most of our panels are simply not pitched or planned to be what you were expecting, so I can understand why you were disappointed.

That being said, sounds like a couple of specific panels could have had more meat. I think I can tell which ones you are referring to, and you’ve provided very good food for thought on augmenting our panels with additional specific kinds of expertise when we’re talking about certain topics.

I will say I disagree completely that hearing from someone within a company about their offering is inherently more valuable than hearing from real-live users about how they use said products. I’ve gone to LOTS of conferences where I can hear from folks like that, and rarely come away impressed. In fact, I rarely come away impressed with *most* of the typical tech conference circuit speakers. There are plenty of regular speakers who are nothing more than power users. Not serious techbical experts. And yet we fall at their feet to listen to their pearls of wisdom.

Given how frustrating I find that at typical conferences, I’m actually mot sorry you felt that way about some of our panels I would just disagree that this is a gender thing. I’ve suffered from some male-speakers-who-shall-not-be-named enough to counter that!

Finally, I’m glad you enjoyed Geek Lab. We should get you in there next year. This was the first year we tried that format, and we learned a lot. It’s going to be bigger and better next year!

And I’m glad we’ll see you there

I have personally seen men who have not done anything/experience or any contribution in a particular field and be considered a leader.

The twitter “expert” only be the founders, is also a bad idea. It is clear by the many times I have heard them talk that they don’t understand how it’s used in certain communities. They can tell you the mechanics but on the rest they are clueless. Many attendees at BlogHer and other conferences want to know how to apply it to topics, issues or community building projects they are working on. The founders have never answered those questions accurately in my opinion which means they are “not” experts on community engagement.

I have been programming since the age of ten, building BBS boards in the 90′s, HTML when there were no books or classes, worked on every script you can imagine. I am a tech expert because I have the experience but I have not been on a tech company board. There are so many men in tech who can’t claim any of that but are called experts.

I would say there are more factors going on in the field that is rarely addressed in area of “experts”.