EmacsConf 2020 | Online Conference | November 28 and 29, 2020
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Talks | Poster | Planning | Guidelines for Conduct

EmacsConf is the conference about the joy of Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and memorizing key sequences.

EmacsConf 2020 was on November 28 (Sat) and November 29 (Sun), 2020 from 9am-5pm Toronto/EST time; equivalently, 6am-2pm PST, 2pm-10pm UTC, 3pm-11pm Zurich/CET.

It made sense to hold EmacsConf 2020 as a virtual (online) conference again this year, especially now, given the current state of the world with the ongoing global pandemic. We remain fully committed to freedom, and we will continue using our infrastructure and streaming setup consisting entirely of free software, much like the last EmacsConf.

Watching

You can now watch the videos of talks and Q&A sessions from the individual pages linked to in the list of talks. There's also a playlist. Low-resolution (480p) versions will be uploaded over the next few weeks. Please let us know of any issues!

Participating

For audience questions specifically, we experimented with using a collaboratively-editable Etherpad as the primary means of collecting audience questions. We also took questions from our IRC channel (#emacsconf on chat.freenode.net), with volunteers adding questions from that channel to the pad on behalf of folks who were not able to or prefer not to use the web-based questions pad. Here's the archived pad.

To follow up after the conference, please check the list of talks for the link to the individual talk page. We've added the questions and notes from the pad to each talk's page, and we'll ask the speakers to review the pages and add more information.

Come hang out with us in #emacsconf on chat.freenode.net. You can join the chat using your favourite IRC client, or by visiting chat.emacsconf.org in your web browser, a self-hosted instance of The Lounge free software web IRC client for EmacsConf.

Continuing the conversation

Here are a few posts and discussions about EmacsConf:

Next steps

You can:

See you soon!

Behind the scenes

This year, we were again able to make EmacsConf happen entirely with Free Software. For the live talks and/or Q&A sessions with speakers, we used the BigBlueButton instance graciously shared with us by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The whole conference was captured and streamed to the EmacsConf stream server running Icecast, using a GStreamer pipeline based on a script written by Ruben Rodriguez for streaming FSF events such as the LibrePlanet conference and FSF35. For the collaborative pad for gathering questions and show notes, we used an Etherpad on the Wikimedia Foundation instance hosted at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org. For the EmacsConf website, we used ikiwiki. During the conference, we used Emacs Lisp to plan the schedule, update the topics across our IRC channels, and send automated messages about upcoming talks to speakers and organizers, all inside Emacs. As we write more about our streaming setup, infrastructure, processes, and code, we'll update https://emacsconf.org/2020 and post links to emacsconf-discuss.

Thanks

  • Thanks to the Free Software Foundation, especially the tech team, for support and for sharing their BigBlueButton host
  • Volunteers:
    • bandali: Amin Bandali - main organization, communication, streaming, tech, hosting
    • bhavin192: Bhavin Gandhi - tech checks, subtitles
    • bremner: David Bremner - feedback
    • dto: David O'Toole - #emacsconf-accessible, tech checks
    • jcorneli: Joe Corneli - #emacsconf-accessible
    • mplsCorwin: Corwin Brust - feedback
    • publicvoit: Karl Voit - collaborative pad, tech checks
    • sachac: Sacha Chua - scheduling, automation, processes, subtitles/transcripts, documentation
    • seabass - #emacsconf-accessible
    • zaeph: Leo Vivier - tech checks, coordination, timekeeping
  • Thanks to ArneBab and sirvolta for FFmpeg tips
  • And thanks to everyone!