Call for Participation

EmacsConf 2022 will be a virtual conference on December 3 and 4, 2022 (Sat-Sun). If you'd like to present at the conference, please submit your proposal by September 30, 2022.

EmacsConf 2022 is about the joy of Emacs and Emacs Lisp. Come share your experiments and adventures with the Emacs text editor / operating system / way of life! We welcome speakers of all backgrounds and all levels of experience, including newcomers giving their first talk. What have you found exciting about Emacs lately? What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? What part of your workflow might inspire someone to get into Emacs or go deeper?

A great way to get started with writing a proposal is to start by exploring the programs from previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2015, 2013. You might also find some neat ideas on the ideas page. Feel free to add yours there too! If you're still not sure, come by our IRC channel #emacsconf on irc.libera.chat and say hi. You can join the chat using your favourite IRC client, or by visiting chat.emacsconf.org in your web browser.

All kinds of people use Emacs for all kinds of things. We'd love it if EmacsConf 2022 could highlight interesting perspectives and reflect the diversity of our community. If you know someone who might have a good idea for a talk, please reach out to them and encourage them to submit a proposal. Many people (especially from underrepresented groups such as women, people of colour, non-developers, etc.) might not consider themselves proficient enough to share their thoughts. If you let them know that you value their knowledge and experiences, and maybe even suggest something that you think others would like to hear about, they may realize that they do have something worth sharing and that we would love to hear from them.

Important dates

For EmacsConf 2022, we are planning for 9am to 5pm Toronto/EST (2pm-10pm UTC) on December 3 and 4. Depending on people's availability, it might be two half-days.

CFP opens July 17, 2022
CFP closes September 30, 2022
Speaker notifications October 15, 2022
Schedule published October 31, 2022
EmacsConf 2022! December 3 and 4, 2022

If you are not available during the conference itself but you have a neat idea that you'd like to share, please propose it anyway! You can always handle questions after the conference, and we might even be able to coordinate with other Emacs meetups for regional events (if you're an Emacs meetup organizer and would like to make this happen let's get in touch!).

Please note that although we will try our best to stick to the above dates in the coming months, given the current state of the world, we may have to move things around a bit in case of unforeseen events. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Talk formats

We'd like EmacsConf 2022 to inspire lots of different people to explore lots of different things in Emacs. We hope to put together a stream of quick ideas followed by lots of conversation over IRC and/or Q&A sessions, with occasional deep dives into topics that many people might find interesting or useful.

As you think about your talk, consider what you can share in:

  • Up to 10 minutes total: What is the core idea? What do you want people to do or remember? You can show just enough to get people interested and then point them to where they can learn more afterwards. You can answer questions over IRC, the pad, or the wiki, and there's no limit to how long that conversation can go.

  • Up to 20 minutes total: How would you flesh out some of the points from your 5-10 minute presentation? How can you show the pieces working together?

  • Up to 40 minutes total: What would benefit from a deep dive? How do you keep it engaging?

When writing your proposal, please write an outline of what you plan to talk about if you have 5-10 minutes. If you'd like to propose a longer talk, outline what you might include if you had more time to present (up to 40 minutes, including Q&A).

Here's an example for a potentially 40-minute talk:

  • 5-10 minutes: quick demo of the abc package working together with xyz package.
  • 20 minutes: same as above, with some customization options to accommodate a different workflow.
  • 40 minutes: all of the above, including modifying the behaviour of the package in order to add something new.

This flexibility would help us in devising the conference schedule so that as many people as possible could get a chance to present their ideas, while still allowing for featuring longer deep dive talks.

Other session formats such as tutorials, workshops, and hangouts are welcome as well, in case you would find those other formats preferable to a traditional talk format. If you're interested in these or other session types, please let us know publicly or privately. We'll be happy to work something out with you.

Preparing and submitting your proposal

We're aware that it can be challenging and intimidating to prepare and submit a proposal to a conference, and we want to help make it less so. Come say hi to us on our IRC channel #emacsconf on irc.libera.chat, and we'd be happy to try and answer any questions or concerns you may have about writing your proposal or submitting it. We'd also love to receive suggestions on how we can best help you and other prospective speakers interested in giving a talk at EmacsConf.

Once you're ready to submit your proposal, the submit page has the instructions on how to submit your talk. The submissions will then be reviewed by a selection committee (please let us know if you would like to help review submissions as part of this committee).

If your talk is approved, we'd love it if you could help us make sure the conference runs smoothly. After we email you with the time allotted for your talk, we'll ask you to

  • prepare a prerecording of your talk, or record it with our help if that'd be easier for you; and

  • schedule a short tech-check if you'd like to be able to answer questions in a live session.

Don't forget to subscribe to our main mailing list, emacsconf-discuss, for discussion and announcements about the EmacsConf conference.

If you'd like to propose something other than a talk, like restreaming the conference, you can also use this CFP to share your ideas with us.

We look forward to your ideas and submissions!

Getting involved

If you would like to help with the conference (planning the sessions, reviewing proposals, helping with infrastructure, making sessions more accessible, editing video transcripts, etc.), see our planning page and come say hi to us at #emacsconf on irc.libera.chat.

Importantly, as EmacsConf continues to grow and receive increasingly more talk/session proposal submissions each year, we have thought about adding multiple parallel tracks during the conference days to accommodate the large number of sessions. However, we're currently a very small team and we would need your help to do it! If you're interested in helping stream a parallel EmacsConf track and have a reliable internet connection with decent speed and bandwidth, please get in touch with us so we can help get you set up for streaming. We'd also likely need more volunteers still for each track, for example a host for that track to announce the next talk (this can also be done by the streamer if the streamer is interested and able to) and another volunteer to help check in speakers of upcoming live sessions.

If you are interested and able to help with any of the above, please reach out to us; we'd love to have your help!

In addition to the emacsconf-discuss list, feel free to subscribe to emacsconf-org as well, for discussions related to organizing the conference by the EmacsConf organizers and volunteers.

We'd really appreciate your help in making EmacsConf 2022 the best one so far!

Commitment to freedom

We remain fully committed to freedom, and we will continue using our infrastructure and streaming setup consisting entirely of free software, much like previous EmacsConf conferences. Articles and documentation about the EmacsConf infrastructure are still underway, and will be announced on the emacsconf-discuss list when available. If you are curious about the EmacsConf infrastructure or are interested in working on it, please join our #emacsconf-infra channel on irc.libera.chat and say hi!