In this post to his site Larry Garfield takes a look at how insular the PHP community is and, instead of just expressing personal opinions on the subject, looks at data around some of the "same old faces" comments recently pointed at the PHP community.

Periodically, there is a complaint that PHP conferences are just "the same old faces". That the PHP community is insular and is just a good ol' boys club, elitist, and so forth. It's not the first community I've been part of that has had such accusations made against it, so rather than engage in such debates I figured, let's do what any good scientist would do: Look at the data!

He starts with a look at the Joind.in conference feedback site and the data it has to offer. This is what he's basing is research on, pulling the information from the site's JSON API to work through it locally. While the detailed information is attached on another page he does share a summary of his findings. Interestingly enough, just a bit over half of the speakers at these events were first-time speakers. His results show that there's an average of 13.1% of new speakers at each event too.