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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely don't believe cancelling was the right choice. There were 5 speaker slots left to be filled with a December deadline to fill those slots. Why not use the controversy to attract appropriately diverse speakers with interesting and relevant proposals?

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Sponsors pulled out because of the controversy, the contract for the venue had to be signed and the organizers weren't sure they could find more sponsors to fullfil the financial obligations. There weren't many options left but to cancel.

This is the bit that intrigues me. The organisation I work for were one of the primary sponsors for the event. We saw the controversy and simply assumed the BritRuby team could handle it. At no point did we threaten or even allude to the possibility of withdrawing our funding. To make matters worse, had we been aware that the event was at risk due to a lack of funds we could have considered stepping in and increasing our sponsorship. Unfortunately, the first we heard about the cancellation was via twitter.

I'd really like to know exactly which sponsors pulled out because of this. Between the first tweet and the announcement of cancellation there seemed to be only 9 tweets of criticism: https://gist.github.com/4108671 . Seems a bit rash.

That makes two of us.

Two known sponsors: Globaldev (the company I work for) & OnTheBeach.co.uk

Globaldev's take on the situation: https://twitter.com/globaldev/status/270452743733379072

OnTheBeach's take: https://twitter.com/SwitchJam/status/270261834991407104

e.g. albino penguin talking about nuances of rails middleware :)

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