One year on: What happened to ElectronConf2017?
June 2017, GitHub announced ElectronConf2017 devoted to one of the most controversial pieces of tech today. People love Electron because it makes it easy to develop cross-platform apps, and hate it because it does this by giving each app a full browser instance to do it. Personally, I'd be glad for experts in Electron to speak on how to build quality Electron apps (for example: VS Code) because if people are going to build using Electron as a user I'd like to see it done well.
The talks at ElectronConf2017, the first conference entirely devoted to Electron, used a blind review process for talks which due to the gender representation skew in tech led to an all male line up of speakers. This drew the ire of people on twitter. After many scathing tweets which got the attention of then VP of Social Impact Nicole Sanchez the conference was not only postponed, but publicly postponed before the presenters were told.
Fast forward to today: ElectronConf2017 was effectively cancelled due to outrage because certain people were unhappy with the lineup of speakers.
Why is this important?
Firstly, because speakers were robbed of the chance to present because people didn't like their gender. But from a broader perspective, like it or not Electron is here to stay. We have no way of knowing what improvements could have been made to the Electron framework as an outcome of that conference. There may have been an opportunity for the community to talk about improvements to auto-updating Electron apps, sandboxing the browser backend to reduce the disk and memory footprint, and who knows what other improvements to be made.
Because of the outrage of angry individuals, people were denied the opportunity the speak, and technology that is a huge part of the developer landscape has been impacted.
Will there be an ElectronConf 2018? Probably not.