CANCELLED: The ship that builds itself: How we used Emacs to develop a workshop for communities
Noorah Alhasan, Joseph Corneli, Leo Vivier (Noorah: she/her, Joseph: he/him, Leo: he/him)
Format: 10-min talk followed by live Q&A (https://emacsconf.org/current/community/room)
Status: Sorry, this talk has been cancelled
Description
After meeting at EmacsConf 2020, and since then, convening weekly as the Emacs Research Group, we gained a lot of experience working across disciplines. Building on our long-running small-group experience, we developed a strategy for engaging others in the kind of light creative work that we value because we want to share our patterns for building effective joyful action.
Our new day-long workshop brings people together around a topic of shared interest. We use a scenario-development and exploration process to help participants understand their common ground and discover new ways to work together. In this talk, we will give an overview of recent workshops we’ve run on themes linked to public space and future studies and how we utilize Emacs for our research.
Looking back at our recent pilots as a source of evidence, we’ll look at whether and how the methods we used helped people quickly identify core themes that they want to keep working on together. While we don’t expect everyone to meet weekly as we did, we do expect that some participants will leave energised. Underlying the workshop is the claim that the right combination of methods should help people find topics of priority that they want to get traction on, for example, breaking down a topic like "public space" into doable actions like cleaning up an abandoned lot. Does the evidence so far support this claim?
We also reflect on how technology — including the further evolution of Emacs — could help people be even more effective at identifying and addressing challenging problems. As a small example, note-taking in real-time with CRDT helps us practice ‘active listening’ in our meetings and gives us a detailed record of what happened so that we can return to for further reflection and analysis. As we think about the other affordances of Emacs, we get excited about how more advanced data analysis and more structured interaction patterns could aid in going back over our old thoughts and getting more out of the time we spend together. One potential application would be forming bridges between the different community groups, we work with.
Questions or comments? Please e-mail emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org