You can find some rough notes at infra.

Ikiwiki

The EmacsConf site is actually a wiki, editable by anyone on the planet. The pages are written in markdown, and converted to HTML using the ikiwiki wiki compiler.

You are welcome and encouraged to help improve the site. Please see the instructions on how to edit the wiki.

BigBlueButton

We use BigBlueButton for the web conference.

Etherpad

We use Etherpad for collaborative notes.

IRC via libera.chat and TheLounge

We have #emacsconf and associated channels on the libera.chat network.

We use TheLounge to provide a simple web chat interface.

OBS

VNC

Icecast

Streaming

PsiTransfer

Captioning

OpenAI Whisper

Aeneas

subed-mode

Org Mode and Emacs

Archive

Oddmuse

The EmacsConf site during 2019 was built on the awesome Oddmuse wiki software, available under GPLv3+.

As nice as Oddmuse is, we found the lack of proper nested pages rather limiting for our use-case, and have since switched to using ikiwiki for this wiki.

Feel free to check out our oddmuse page for more information about our old Oddmuse setup, including the latest Oddmuse config file we used, along with other related files.

Discourse

For EmacsConf 2015 we started self-hosting a Discourse instance at discourse.emacsconf.org. But as years went by, it became something of a maintenance burden, as the current organizers were interested in maintaining production Ruby software, and the previous volunteers having moved on to other adventures in life. Also, the VPS that hosted our Discourse instance and was kept running all of these years could potentially go offline at any time.

For EmacsConf 2019 onward, as an effort to simplify our infrastructure and minimize the number systems we have to manage (so we could better focus on the main pieces of software needed for running a conference using only free software), I decided to retire our Discourse instance. A traditional mailing list plus our IRC channel have since taken Discourse's place as the means of communication for EmacsConf organizers, volunteers, and participants; covering most if not all the use-cases we had for the forum.

• Mailing list: emacsconf-discuss on gnu.org
• IRC channel: #emacsconf on chat.freenode.net

To preserve old Discourse discussions, I created a read-only archive of the forums using HTTrack like so:

httrack http://discourse.emacsconf.org -O discourse.emacsconf.org \
        -x -o -M10000000 -N100 -I0 --user-agent "Googlebot"
grep -rl index-2 discourse.emacsconf.org | xargs sed -i 's/index-2/index/g'
mv discourse.emacsconf.org/index{-2,}.html

The read-only archive of the old Discourse forum is accessible at the old address, discourse.emacsconf.org.