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[Panel] Improving the Emacs Community: Onboarding, Participation, and Growth

Participants

  • Amin Bandali [FSF volunteer]
  • Bart Bunting [Emacspeak user]
  • Bashbunni [YouTube blogger]
  • Jeff Trull [Emacs SF organizer]
  • Protesilaos (Prot) [Prose & Youtube blogger]
  • Qifan Wang (LdBeth) [Emacs China moderator]
  • Sacha Chua [EmacsConf organizer]
  • Tilmann Singer [Emacs Berlin organizer]

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2026-12-12. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Schedule for SaturdaySaturdaySat 9:00- 9:10 Saturday opening remarkssat-openSat 9:10- 9:30 The Emacs Planning Habits of a Questionably Effective Person: My 40-year journey of planning with Emacs, Org Mode, paper journals, etc.planningSat 9:50-10:10 Emacslisten: Controlling Emacs by voicelistenSat 10:30-11:00 Multi-dimensional information processing with Emacs and Emacspeak: a blind man's perspectiveemacspeakSat 11:10-11:30 ltx-talk: Accessible presentations with ox-beamerltx-talkSat 1:00- 1:20 Plots with ROOTs and SHAPEs: Resilient data visualization with Emacs, Org and gnuplotplotsSat 1:40- 2:00 Personal task management under stress (with Org mode)tasksSat 2:20- 2:30 How I solved Org Mode's biggest mobile and collaboration problemsmobileSat 2:50- 3:10 Hyperbole, My Dear WatsonhyperboleSat 3:30- 3:50 Hyperbole Koutliner: The Best Autonumbered, Hyperlinking Outliner for EmacskoutlinerSat 4:10- 4:30 Close the writing accountability gap with EmacswritingSat 4:50- 5:00 Saturday closing remarks / open sessionsat-closeSat 10:30-11:30 [Panel] Improving the Emacs Community: Onboarding, Participation, and GrowthcommunitySat 1:00- 1:15 Emacs as my portable user space across operating platformsportableSat 1:35- 1:55 Emacs everywhere: A fun romp through esoteric operating systemsosSat 2:15- 2:25 My Space Cadet Deck - an Android Stream Deck replacement with deep Emacs integrationcadetSat 2:45- 3:00 El Remoto: browse any GitHub repos without cloning themremotoSat 3:20- 3:40 æmacs: having a hoot with a guile emacsguileSat 4:00- 4:20 Plain text presentations in GNU Emacs with ffsffs9 AM EST10 AM EST11 AM EST12 PM EST1 PM EST2 PM EST3 PM EST4 PM EST5 PM EST

Format: 60-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2026/current/bbb-community.html
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-community
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Ready to stream

Times in different time zones:
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~10:30 AM - 11:30 AM EST (US/Eastern)
which is the same as:
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~9:30 AM - 10:30 AM CST (US/Central)
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~8:30 AM - 9:30 AM MST (US/Mountain)
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~7:30 AM - 8:30 AM PST (US/Pacific)
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~3:30 PM - 4:30 PM UTC
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~4:30 PM - 5:30 PM CET (Europe/Paris)
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~5:30 PM - 6:30 PM EET (Europe/Athens)
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~9:00 PM - 10:00 PM IST (Asia/Kolkata)
Saturday, Dec 12 2026, ~11:30 PM - 12:30 AM +08 (Asia/Singapore)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~12:30 AM - 1:30 AM JST (Asia/Tokyo)
Find out how to watch and participate

Description

The discussion idea was born from perpetual Sacha's interest in making Emacs community a better place.

GNU Emacs and the community around it has no shortage of history. However, different groups of Emacs users prefer using different media to communicate - between the traditional mailing lists to newer international platforms like YouTube, or country-specific forums. Here, we would like to bring Emacs users representing various sub-communities together, so that we can learn from each other and hopefully come up with new ideas.

Questions:

  1. What made you start using Emacs, and what kept you using it?

  2. What took you from using Emacs to actively contributing to the community - participating in forums, writing Elisp, organizing meetups, answering questions?

  3. How does Emacs show up for you in real life - colleagues, meetups, friends? How did those connections form?

  4. If you know other software communities, what's one thing Emacs could learn from them?

  5. What's one concrete thing you wish existed in the Emacs community a year from now?

Note that you can ask other questions not limited to the above during public Q&A session after the panel discussion

Related: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacsconf-org/2026-08/msg00006.html

Questions or comments? Please e-mail emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org

Back to the talks Previous by time: Multi-dimensional information processing with Emacs and Emacspeak: a blind man's perspective Next by time: ltx-talk: Accessible presentations with ox-beamer Track: Development - Watch