I think I tried to hard to make it short and sweet but lost a bit in translation. I'm not supporting their reaction but there aren't enough people out there crazy and skilled enough to run an annual event that pulls people in from hundreds of miles away. I belonged to such a group when I was too young to understand how much work it took for them to make it look easy. And I recall someone trying to replace the leader at some point.
What I have is sympathy for people who discover at the "last minute" that they have fucked up. It's never a situation I like being in, and it brings out better things in some people and worse things in others.
Uncle Bob started one of his presentations with a call out to notice the shortage of women in the room and an ask that people try to think about fixing that. I think a more productive approach for these presenters would be to say, "Look, I'm gonna present this year, but I'm gonna mention this in my presentation, and I'd like to help you figure this out for next year or this is the last time I'll be presenting with you." Nobody is on the spot, you have time to reason with people and appeal to their values instead of threatening them and their conference.
Daryl Davis doesn't get people to leave the KKK by issuing ultimatums. If a black blues musician can have a productive conversation with a Klan member we can have an adult conversation about representation in volunteer run tech conferences.
What kind of pisses me off about this SJW thing is that it's a lot of people who have only recently discovered that their world view is wrong and they are in what someone brilliantly called 'the asshole phase' of new understanding. Now they're punishing people for being a couple years behind them on the clue train.
My classmates decades ago were pointing out and volunteering to address these sorts of inequalities. One in the general case, the other in the specific case of CS degrees. None of this is even a little new and I have some pretty bad whiplash from the sudden uptick in activity and anger.
I love safe spaces. Some of the best, most at-ease times of my life have happened in someone else's safe space. I may not know everything about how they get built, but I know this for sure: You can't create them by threatening people.
