I followed the link to Larry Garfield’s blog post.
At the start he says that the conference contacted him directly and asked him to submit proposals for talk.
Later in his post, he says that he asked the organizers to directly contact women and ask them to submit posts. Their response: "the organizers told me they actively don’t want to do outreach, and just let whoever wants to submit submit."
Based solely on that blog post, it would appear that they *did* do outreach, to an established speaker who was also a white man. Did they do any outreach to people not matching that profile? If not, they were limiting themselves and (presumably unintentionally and unconsciously) excluding people without an established track record. This does not exactly make for an exciting conference with new content.
"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." Is that what PHPCE is going for?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
