Call for participation

What have you found exciting about Emacs lately? Have you figured out a good workflow? Used Emacs for something interesting? Come share what you've been learning at EmacsConf 2023 and meet other enthusiasts along the way! All backgrounds and all levels of experience are welcome. Emacs isn't just a text editor, it's a way of life!

Not sure what to talk about? We've shared a few ideas to help you get started.

EmacsConf 2023 will be a virtual conference on December 2 and 3, 2023 (Sat-Sun, 9AM-5PM UTC-5 / 2PM-10PM UTC). If you'd like to present at the conference, please submit your proposal by September 15, 2023 (Friday). You can also take a look at the talks so far to see how your talk can add to other ideas!

Talk formats

Ideally, talks will be prerecorded so that you can script and edit them as tightly as you want, and so that they can be captioned for accessibility. Here are the talk options:

  • 5-10 minute lightning talk: just the essentials! If you can squeeze your prerecorded talk into 5-10 minutes by focusing on the essentials (not by talking super quickly!), we might be able to repeat it during the conference in order to fill gaps.
  • 20-minute talk: short enough to keep people's attention, long enough to get into some details.

There will be time for questions and answers after your talk, so you don't need to include that in your talk timing. Just like in EmacsConf 2022, you can answer questions via a live BigBlueButton web conference, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), the Etherpad (a web-based collaborative document), the wiki, or e-mail (your choice). The stream will move on to the next talk at the scheduled time, but interested people can keep hanging out with you for a longer conversation.

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 events in other timezones.

We may have time for a few longer sessions. If you'd like to be considered for a longer time slot, please include an outline for the extra time in addition to your 20-minute proposal. Other session formats such as tutorials, workshops, and hangouts are welcome as well.

Submitting your proposal

Send us your idea as soon as you can, so that you can have more time to work on your talk. (Proposal deadline: September 15, 2023) This year, we'd like to experiment with accepting proposals throughout the CFP process. If there are similar proposals, we'll work with people so that the talks can cover different facets.

If you need help, you can e-mail us publicly at emacsconf-org@gnu.org or privately at emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org. You can also come and say hi to us on our IRC channel #emacsconf on irc.libera.chat using your favourite IRC client, or by visiting chat.emacsconf.org in your web browser.

Know someone who might have something to share?

All kinds of people use Emacs for all kinds of things. We'd love it if EmacsConf 2023 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.

Want to volunteer?

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 volunteer page. Volunteers get early access to talks and learn lots of things along the way. We'd really appreciate your help in making EmacsConf 2023 the best one so far!

Commitment to freedom

We remain fully committed to freedom. You'll be able to participate in EmacsConf using free/libre software, and we use free/libre software to organize and run the conference. You can find some notes about our setup and process at https://emacsconf.org/infra/.