EmacsConf
EmacsConf
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https://emacsconf.org/
EmacsConf
ikiwiki
2024-01-10T13:05:59Z
EmacsConf 2023 Report
https://emacsconf.org/2023/report/
Copyright © 2024 Sacha Chua
2024-01-10T13:05:59Z
2024-01-03T13:44:50Z
<p>This file is automatically exported from <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/report.org">/2023/report.org</a>. You might prefer to navigate this as an Org file instead. To do so, <a href="https://emacsconf.org/edit/">clone the wiki repository</a>.</p>
<p><span class="date">Wednesday 10 January 2024 at 0:00 (UTC)</span></p>
<h1>Table of Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#overview">Overview</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#highlights">Highlights</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#technical-details">Technical details</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#process-improvements">Process improvements</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#finances">Finances</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#acknowledgements">Acknowledgements</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/#updates">Updates</a></li>
</ul>
<p><a id="overview"></a></p>
<h1>Overview</h1>
<p>EmacsConf 2023 was held on December 2 and 3 as an online conference. We had 41 talks across two tracks (general and development), with a total of 16 hours of presentations, 12 hours of Q&A via web conference, and lots of lively discussion across IRC and Etherpad. Throughout the conference, there were 100-250 people watching via the livestream, and more than 80 people joined the live Q&A web conferences. There were also satellite events in Switzerland and Slovenia where people watched together.</p>
<p>Thanks to volunteers who edited captions for pre-recorded videos, we were able to broadcast all 25 early submissions with open captions. This not only made talks more accessible while watching the livestreams, but it also made it easier to enjoy the talks in noisy environments or to catch up on talks. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li>"that is some hero subtitling on 'cccc' to 'C-c C-c'. thank you!"</li>
</ul>
<p>If you'd like to help edit captions or add chapter markers, we'd love to hear from you. Please see <a href="https://emacsconf.org/captioning">https://emacsconf.org/captioning</a> for details.</p>
<p>We posted pre-recorded videos and transcripts on talk pages shortly after they started streaming, and live talks and Q&A sessions within two weeks. Automatic captions are now available for the rest of the talks and Q&A sessions. We've also archived questions and comments from IRC and Etherpad onto the talk pages. You can find the talk pages at <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks">https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks</a> . The videos are also available on Toobnix (<a href="https://toobnix.org/c/emacsconf/videos">https://toobnix.org/c/emacsconf/videos</a>) and YouTube (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/@EmacsConf">https://www.youtube.com/@EmacsConf</a>).</p>
<p><a id="highlights"></a></p>
<h1>Highlights</h1>
<p>EmacsConf 2023 started with a full day of Org Mode talks on the general track, going from introducing people to Emacs through an Org-Mode-based <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/adventure" title="An Org-Mode based text adventure game for learning the basics of Emacs, inside Emacs, written in Emacs Lisp">text adventure game</a> all the way to <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/ref" title="Org-Mode workflow: informal reference tracking">managing bibliographic references</a> and <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/doc" title="Literate Documentation with Emacs and Org Mode">exporting build instructions for different systems</a>. There was a group of Hyperbole talks on <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/hyperamp" title="Top 10 ways Hyperbole amps up Emacs">new developments</a> and <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/koutline" title="Using Koutline for stream of thought journaling">outlining workflows</a> on the second day, and there were interesting experiments with using Emacs for fun and productivity. On the development track, speakers shared tips for working with Emacs Lisp and other languages. There was also a lot of interest in exploring emerging artificial intelligence tools. Here are some highlights:</p>
<p><strong>Collaboration:</strong> In <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/collab" title="Collaborative data processing and documenting using org-babel">Collaborative data processing and documenting using org-babel</a>, Jonathan Hartman and Lukas C. Bossert showed how to do reproducible research together in Emacs by using the CRDT package along with Org Mode's support for running many different languages in your notes. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li>"Great collaborative conversation and step-wise example creates a
different (and impactful) framing. Thank you!"</li>
<li>"Truly one of the most impressive talks of the day. Congrats! Very
inspiring"</li>
<li>"I like the way you highlight the point you are talking about in
real time."</li>
<li>"Just came here to say watching two users editing the same buffer
simultaneously is BLOWING MY MIND"</li>
<li>"that's really cool. One of the parts that's a bit hidden from the
user is seeing the format that the data is in inside the shell
script"</li>
<li>"such a slick presentation, I like the CRDT collaboration angle,
looks like an end-game UX"</li>
<li>"For those of you who remember the bad old days before "reproducible
research," that talk is even more impressive. Great job!"</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Fun:</strong> <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/solo" title="How I play TTRPGs in Emacs">How I play TTRPGs in Emacs</a> by Howard Abrams wowed people not only with the Org Mode workflow he shared but also the general vibe of the video. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li>"My favorite talk was Howard's, not because I do role playing games
(last was probably a few late night D&D sessions in the 70s), but
just seeing the sheer existential joy possible in using emacs to
scratch ones one itch, and then sharing the experience." <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@eludom/111674175511553798">@eludom</a></li>
<li>"Really cool project! - Also the enthusiasm for the topic is really
contagious!"</li>
<li>"the camera and lighting already has me sold"</li>
<li>"I can see this one is going to be a classic"</li>
<li>"Howard's stuff is always great. this particular thing is totally
unchained. :D"</li>
<li>"Every time Howard publishes a talk, I end up doing one more thing
in a new radical or literate way inside Emacs - currently looking
into how to go about literate snow shoveling for the winter ahead."</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Community:</strong> In <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/mentor" title="Mentoring VS-Coders as an Emacsian (or How to show not tell people about the wonders of Emacs)">Mentoring VS-Coders as an Emacsian (or How to show not tell people about the wonders of Emacs)</a>, Jeremy Friesen talked about his experiences staying curious, learning from people around him, and encouraging people to grow no matter what tools they currently use. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li>"The talks that impacted me the most were @takeonrules Jeremy Friesen's talks, ostensibly about writing with #Emacs and talking to others about Emacs. Substantively they got right to the heart of what makes Emacs so powerful as a platform, as a community, and as a model for how #FreeSoftware liberates us. His embodying the attitudes of self-sufficiency, mutual aid, empathy, open-mindedness, and authentic creativity showed us ourselves at our best." <a href="https://emacs.ch/@jameshowell/111671402961867425">@jameshowell</a>, quoted under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3</li>
<li>"such valuable work being described"</li>
<li>"I love the attitudes and worldview that infuses your blog posts and
your talks this weekend."</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Development:</strong> We also heard from core developers such as <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/devel" title="Emacs development updates">John Wiegley</a>, <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/core" title="Emacs core development: how it works">Stefan Kangas</a>, and <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/gc" title="emacs-gc-stats: Does garbage collection actually slow down Emacs?">Ihor Radchenko</a> on Emacs development updates, processes, and experiments. On the package side, <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emms" title="Emacs MultiMedia System (EMMS)">Yoni Rabkin</a> shared a glimpse of how Emacs package development works with a deep dive into EMMS, the Emacs Multimedia System. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li>"Thanks John for all the news on Emacs and informative answers."</li>
<li>"Thank you Stefan! That was all really cool! :D"</li>
<li>"Came for clear-cut magic bullet answers, left with nuanced
analysis - and that, surprise, Eli was overall right? Now what to do
with that viral gc init snippet that I've never taken time to
measure myself but keep anyway…"</li>
<li>"I very much liked Yoni Rabkin's calm,measured talk about EMMS. It
described not only the software but how the development team
worked." (<a href="https://emacs.ch/@franburstall/111675280003261648">@franburstall</a>)</li>
<li>"I just really enjoy seeing the folks that contribute to free
software. They are truly people to emulate. That goes double for
Yoni."</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Automation:</strong> From <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/overlays" title="Improving compiler diagnostics with overlays">using overlays to simplify complex compilation error messages</a> to <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/test" title="What I learned by writing test cases for GNU Hyperbole">writing tests</a> to <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsconf" title="EmacsConf.org: How we use Org Mode and TRAMP to organize and run a multi-track conference">organizing EmacsConf itself</a>, Emacs makes it easier to do stuff and have fun along the way. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li>(about overlays) "That was great, showing how relatively easy it is to extend Emacs
with features like that."</li>
<li>"Whatever you do, don't miss out @sachac's talk (this PM or
otherwise). I stumbled on it on @bandali's channel following a link to
Howard's, and it's a *masterclass* in wrangling things together to
automate workflows in Emacs/Elisp/Org. When people ask about VS Code,
this shows we are talking different mindsets and tools altogether."</li>
<li>"I'll be rewatching it multiple times too, that's how packed in useful
insights and tidbits it is. 'What do you mean Emacs/Org is a platform
and a way of life?' Well, here you go, great exemplar :)"</li>
<li>"The breadth of use cases and applications, and range of
Emacs/Elisp/Org capabilities reached for in this talk is fascinating."</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Future:</strong> GNU Emacs is almost 40 years old and still going strong. Marcus Birkenkrahe shared his experiences <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/teaching" title="Teaching computer and data science with literate programming tools">using Emacs to teach students data science</a>, and Jacob Boxerman talked about what it's like as <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/sharing" title="Sharing Emacs is Caring Emacs: Emacs education and why I embraced video">a student and as a video creator</a>. Emacs continues to be a great platform for experimenting with everything from <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/parallel" title="Parallel text replacement">parallel text replacement</a> all the way up to <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/llm" title="LLM clients in Emacs, functionality and standardization">artificial intelligence with large language models</a>. People said:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>"My personal highlights are not necessarily about specific
presentations, but about represented topics:</p>
<ol>
<li>Multiple talks on using Emacs/Org mode in university setting both on student and lecturer side. This gives a promise on more people being exposed to Emacs and more people using it in their professional toolchain.</li>
<li>The rise of LLM talks - Emacs being text editor is a natural interface to LLMs that do text-crunching.</li>
<li>"Parallel text replacement" talk showing us that even the most common text-based interfaces are not yet "figured-out". Even in Emacs."</li>
</ol>
<p><a href="https://emacs.ch/@yantar92/111671107089286310">@yantar92</a></p></li>
<li><p>"2nd favorite was Andrew Hyatt's LLM talk because it clearly showed
how relevant a programmable text processing environment (that
happens to have an editor) is to the brave new world of LLMs,
possibly being as he intimated, positioned to lead the way.</p>
<p>What's old is new. Emacs was born in an AI lab. The challenge of
computing as far back a Alan Turing was intelligence. This talk
shows not the past, but emacs' place in the future." <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@eludom/111674208478381966">@eludom</a></p></li>
<li>"I think Andrew is right that Emacs is uniquely positioned, being a
unified integrated interface with good universal abstractions
(buffers, text manipulation, etc), and across all uses cases and
notably one's Org data. Should be interesting…!"</li>
</ul>
<p>There were lots of other great talks. Check them out at <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks">https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks</a> . Overall, people said:</p>
<ul>
<li>"actually there part of the conference I admire most is is the fact
that that whole thing is obviously a labor of love by emacs geeks for
emacs geeks, using and showcasing as much free software as possible.
It creates community for those of us who are otherwise isolated in our
dark holes using a 45 year old text editor and wondering quizzically
why everything in our lives can't be reduced to text."
<a href="https://fosstodon.org/@eludom/111674156306960653">@eludom</a></li>
<li>"Indeed, seeing all the use cases across so many fields is one of the
big selling point of this coming together, loving it."</li>
<li>"This is my first year attending the conference, it was amazing! All
of the presenters and material were very impressive. And from a
technical perspective, the event was extremely smooth. It was easy to
find the agenda material online, and then use mpv to watch, and ask
questions on etherpad."</li>
<li>"this conference is crazy i am not sure i ever saw so much interesting
emacs ideas in one day"</li>
<li>"many good talks, and a sense of community around emacs, which is nice
to see"</li>
<li>"i also have a feeling that it's hard to communicate with others when
you start digging into a large system. your confusion diffuses. i felt
similar when jumping into web framework and legacy apps. that's also
why i liked emacsconf, watching others clarifies a lot of stuff.
(memories of johnw edebug flash talk)"</li>
<li>"the pacing, clarity, and depth of the talks today has been really
impressive, a presentation masterclass"</li>
</ul>
<p><a id="technical-details"></a></p>
<h1>Technical details</h1>
<p>EmacsConf is committed to software freedom. We used the following tools
for this year's conference:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://orgmode.org/">Org Mode</a>, <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/">Emacs</a>: organization and collaboration</li>
<li><a href="https://mpv.io">MPV</a>: video player</li>
<li><a href="https://bigbluebutton.org/">BigBlueButton</a>: web conference</li>
<li><a href="https://obsproject.com/">OBS Studio</a>: streaming</li>
<li><a href="https://tigervnc.org/">TigerVNC</a>: controlling the remote server</li>
<li><a href="https://icecast.org/">Icecast</a>: streaming WEBM</li>
<li><a href="https://libera.chat/">Internet Relay Chat via Libera.chat</a>, <a href="https://thelounge.chat/">The Lounge</a>, and <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/erc.html">ERC</a>: conversation</li>
<li><a href="https://www.mumble.info/">Mumble</a>: audio conferencing for coordination</li>
<li><a href="https://etherpad.org/">Etherpad</a>: questions and notes</li>
<li><a href="https://ikiwiki.info/">Ikiwiki</a>: website</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/psi-4ward/psitransfer">PsiTransfer</a>: uploads</li>
<li><a href="https://ffmpeg.org">FFmpeg</a>: video and audio processing</li>
<li><a href="https://www.audacityteam.org/">Audacity</a>: audio editing</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/openai/whisper">OpenAI Whisper</a>: captioning</li>
<li><a href="https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/">Aeneas</a>: forced alignment to get timestamps</li>
<li><a href="https://codeberg.org/sachac/subed">subed-mode</a>: captioning</li>
<li><a href="https://git-scm.com/">Git</a>: version control</li>
<li><a href="https://list.org/">Mailman</a>: mailing lists; service provided by the Free Software Foundation</li>
<li><a href="https://www.nginx.com/">Nginx</a>: web server; server provided by the Free Software Foundation</li>
<li><a href="https://www.ansible.com/">Ansible</a>: system configuration</li>
</ul>
<p>You can find out more about our infrastructure at
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/infra">https://emacsconf.org/infra</a> .</p>
<p><a id="process-improvements"></a></p>
<h1>Process improvements</h1>
<p>This year we tried out the following experiments:</p>
<ul>
<li>Early acceptance: It was great being able to accept proposals as
they came in, and sometimes people chimed in with ideas for making talks even
better. A few talks got comments within the 1-week period, which helped
refine the talk idea more. We probably don't need to make this a
2-week review period.</li>
<li>Two tracks from the beginning: Following on the success of EmacsConf
2022, we planned the schedule for two tracks and filled it right up.</li>
<li>We worked on reducing manual intervention.
<ul>
<li>We opened Q&A right away instead of waiting for the hosts to give the go-ahead.</li>
<li>We used Tampermonkey to automatically connect to BigBlueButton
from the streaming user.</li>
<li>Cron-based scheduling of talks kept us on time and made it easier
to manage multiple tracks.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>In addition to the iCalendar files for the conference and the
individual tracks, we also generated Org files in many different
timezones so that people could get the schedule in that format.
People said:
<ul>
<li>"Yes, having the schedule in my own timezone was super helpful."</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>subed made it easier to adjust timestamps and sync subtitles.</li>
<li>We've started trimming Q&A videos to when the host leaves the
conversation, just in case the speaker forgot that the rest of it
was also recorded. If the speaker is okay with it, we can post the
full Q&A session.</li>
<li>Using OBS virtual webcams was too taxing, so maybe we should keep things simple next year.</li>
</ul>
<p>Some notes to remember for next year:</p>
<ul>
<li>We should include cfp.org as an attachment instead of inline.</li>
<li>We need to ask for an increased limit for libera.chat so that
everyone can use chat.emacsconf.org to connect to it.</li>
<li>Google Chrome and other Chromium browsers had a hard time with the
web-based player. This needs more testing.</li>
<li>We can prepare a message for hosts to paste into the chat to help
people make the most of the Q&A (ex: adding an oops note for
editing).</li>
<li>Make sure timezones are on anything that has time (schedule page,
watch pages, etc.). It would be cool if we can translate the times
in the SVGs too.</li>
<li>It might be nice to use the intros and generate title sequences in
order to add them to the videos. It would also be nice to experiment
with other ffmpeg layouts so that we can view webcams and shared
screens at the same time.</li>
<li>There were widespread network issues (dropped packets, etc.) on
Sunday morning. We set up an additional stream to toobnix.org as a
backup.</li>
<li>The 480p alternate stream did okay this year, even when we were also
livestreaming via Toobnix. It might be worth the extra monitoring
and system load in order to livestream to YouTube as well.</li>
<li>It might be a good idea to consider a third track so that there's
even more space for talks and on-stream Q&A, although we may need
more volunteers in order to make that happen.</li>
<li>Maybe we can fiddle with the layout in BigBlueButton to make the
screen or the presenter's webcam easier to view without lots of
manual adjusting. Likewise, we can work on a better ffmpeg command
for the published recordings so that we can combine webcams with
shared screens.</li>
<li>People would love to be able to do more with the conference from
Emacs itself. I'm not sure how we can use the Etherpads or if CRDT
would scale to lots of people, but maybe it might be worth doing a
few small experiments?</li>
</ul>
<p><a id="finances"></a></p>
<h1>Finances</h1>
<p>Our hosting costs were USD 48.82 for the conference itself:</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Linode 64GB</td>
<td class="org-left">Icecast streaming</td>
<td class="org-left">50 hours</td>
<td class="org-left">USD 0.576/hour</td>
<td class="org-left">USD 28.80 + 13% tax</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Linode 32GB</td>
<td class="org-left">wiki</td>
<td class="org-left">50 hours</td>
<td class="org-left">USD 0.288/hour</td>
<td class="org-left">USD 14.40 + 13% tax</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>The year-round hosting is on two Linode Nanode 1GB instances that are
shared with other projects and are not included in this amount.</p>
<p>As of 2023-12-12, we have received USD 436.60 (after 10% for FSF
costs) in donations through the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/working-together/fund">Working Together</a> program of the Free
Software Foundation. We plan to use the donations to cover hosting
costs for this year's conference and next year's conference, and we
are also thinking about low-cost ways to improve the conference
experience.</p>
<p>If you'd like to donate, you can do so through the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/working-together/fund">Working Together</a>
page. Since the FSF is a 501(c)(3) charity, your donations are
tax-deductible in the US.</p>
<p><a id="acknowledgements"></a></p>
<h1>Acknowledgements</h1>
<p>We would like to thank the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Thank you to all the speakers, volunteers, and participants, and to all those other people in our lives who make it possible through time and support.</li>
<li>This year's conference hosts are Leo Vivier, Amin Bandali, and joining our team of hosts for the first time this year, FlowyCoder.</li>
<li>The streams were managed by Sacha Chua, check-ins by FlowyCoder and Amin, with miscellaneous running-around by Corwin Brust.</li>
<li>Thank you to our captioning volunteers: Daniel Molina, Bala Ramadurai, Bhavin Gandhi, Amine Zyad, Yoni Rabkin, Daniel Alejandro Tapia, Hannah Miller, Ken Huang, Jean-Christophe Helary, James Howell, Eduardo Ochs, and Andrew Dougherty.</li>
<li>Thanks to Jean-Christophe Helary, Corwin, Quiliro, Cairn, and Amin Bandali for helping with the early acceptance process.</li>
<li>Thanks to Leo Vivier for fiddling with the audio to get things nicely synced, normalized, and denoised.</li>
<li>Thanks to Leo and other people who kept the mailing lists free from spam.</li>
<li>Thanks to Akshay Gaikwad for design contributions.</li>
<li>Thanks to shoshin (Grant Shangreaux) for the music.</li>
<li>Thanks to Ry P for the server that we're using for OBS streaming and for processing videos.</li>
<li>Thanks to the Free Software Foundation for Emacs itself, the mailing lists, and the media.emacsconf.org server.</li>
<li>Thanks to the contributers to all of tools and services we used.</li>
<li>Thanks to everyone!</li>
</ul>
<p><a id="updates"></a></p>
<h1>Updates</h1>
<p>If you would like to get updates and announcements, you can sign up at
<a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss">https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss</a> .</p>
<p>Please keep an eye out for interesting things that might be fun to
present at next year's EmacsConf. We'd love to get talks at all levels
of experience and about lots of different kinds of interests. Speakers
wrote:</p>
<ul>
<li>"I always got the feeling of being heard and welcome in spite of the vast
distances and cultures separating us. This community always feels like it
is open to new members any time. With regards to the conference process
also, it was a microcosm of the bigger community and hence I got the same
feeling. You didn't have to be an expert or a person who's been using emacs
for a long time to talk about something useful for the community. Even the
struggles of a noob may be useful for someone else in the community."</li>
<li>"I can honestly say though that I had a great time putting my talk
together. I hope people will have a good time listening to it. Now
that the work is over, I can say it was worth it. so I recommend it
warmly"</li>
</ul>
<p>Hope to see you next year!</p>
EmacsConf 2023 progress report: 44 talks accepted, schedule being drafted
https://emacsconf.org/blog/2023-09-25-draft-schedule/
2023-09-26T01:06:37Z
2023-09-26T01:06:37Z
<p><span class="date">Monday 25 September 2023 at 0:00 (UTC)</span></p>
<p>The EmacsConf 2023 call for participation period has wrapped up,
hooray! We’ve accepted 44 talks and posted them at
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/">https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/</a>, with 1 more penciled in (woof -
Watch Over Our Folders). This is about ~12 hours of talks. If we were
to have 5 minutes buffer in between talks, it would be 15 hours and a
pretty cramped conference. I think we can pull off a two-track
conference again this year. Shall we give it a try? =) We can set up a
schedule for the different roles as we get closer to the conference.</p>
<p>I started drafting a schedule at
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/organizers-notebook/#draft-schedule">https://emacsconf.org/2023/organizers-notebook/#draft-schedule</a> .
Thoughts on the order/grouping of talks? If the schedule looks all
right, I can send this draft to all the speakers in case they have any
requests regarding time preferences, other talk Q&A sessions that they
want to attend live, etc.</p>
<p>Next steps:</p>
<ul>
<li>Schedule: We’ll e-mail the draft schedule to speakers so that they
can get a sense of where they are in the schedule, see if they
really want to make it to a conflicting session’s Q&A live
(they’ll have early access to the videos), etc.</li>
<li>Infrastructure:
<ul>
<li>Dust off and document infrastructure, processes</li>
<li>Sort out access to media.emacsconf.org so that we can get the upload service up and running</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Draft brief intros for talks, keeping in mind that we’re going to say them out loud</li>
<li>Speakers will work on videos, and we can help with nudges/coordination if needed</li>
</ul>
<p>Sacha</p>
EmacsConf 2023 CFP progress report (8 talks accepted so far, 1 to review, 6 todo)
https://emacsconf.org/blog/2023-08-14-cfp-progress/
2023-08-15T00:51:52Z
2023-08-15T00:50:44Z
<p><span class="date">Monday 14 August 2023 at 0:00 (UTC)</span></p>
<p>The end of the EmacsConf 2023 call for participation is one month away
(Sept 14; <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/cfp/">https://emacsconf.org/2023/cfp/</a>). Whee! So far, we’ve sent
early acceptances to the following talks and added them to the program
on the wiki (<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks">https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks</a>):</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col class="org-right">
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">Duration</td>
<td class="org-left">Title</td>
<td class="org-left">Speaker</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">10</td>
<td class="org-left">An Org-Mode based text adventure game for learning the basics of Emacs, inside Emacs, written in Emacs Lisp</td>
<td class="org-left">Chung-hong Chan</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">20</td>
<td class="org-left">Authoring and presenting university courses with Emacs and a full libre software stack</td>
<td class="org-left">James Howell</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">20</td>
<td class="org-left">Org-Mode workflow: informal reference tracking</td>
<td class="org-left">Christopher Howard</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">20</td>
<td class="org-left">GNU Emacs for electronics, note-taking, and as lightweight IDE</td>
<td class="org-left">Anand Tamariya</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">10</td>
<td class="org-left">A modern Emacs look-and-feel without pain</td>
<td class="org-left">Pedro A. Aranda</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">10</td>
<td class="org-left">Writing a language server in OCaml for Emacs, fun, and profit</td>
<td class="org-left">Austin Theriault</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">20</td>
<td class="org-left">LLM clients in Emacs, functionality and standardization</td>
<td class="org-left">Andrew Hyatt</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">10</td>
<td class="org-left">The many ways to browse Hacker News from Emacs</td>
<td class="org-left">Mickael Kerjean</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>There’s one talk that’s waiting for feedback on the emacsconf-submit
before we send the early acceptance in about a week:</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col class="org-right">
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">Duration</td>
<td class="org-left">Title</td>
<td class="org-left">Speaker</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-right">20</td>
<td class="org-left">one.el: the static site generator for Emacs Lisp Programmers</td>
<td class="org-left">Tony Aldon</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>There are several talk proposals that are in progress (need to
coordinate, don’t have speaker releases / full details / etc.):</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col class="org-left">
<col class="org-left">
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Title</td>
<td class="org-left">Speaker</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Emacs MultiMedia System (EMMS)</td>
<td class="org-left">Yoni Rabkin</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Emacs development updates</td>
<td class="org-left">John Wiegley</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Watch Over Our Folders</td>
<td class="org-left">Bastien Guerry</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Emacs community information sharing?</td>
<td class="org-left">Jake B</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">Emacs saves the Web</td>
<td class="org-left">Yuchen Pei</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="org-left">How to build an Emacs 2: Revenge of the Lem</td>
<td class="org-left">Fermin</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This time last year, we had 2 proposals, with most of the proposals
coming in at the end of the CFP. This was usually when we started
panicking about not having lots of proposals, but I think we can skip
stressing about it this year. Even with the program as it is
now, we’d already have a pretty fun EmacsConf. Can’t wait to see what
it’ll look like when more people get their proposals in!</p>
<p>Sacha</p>
Captions, dry run, workflow improvements
https://emacsconf.org/blog/2022-11-07/
2022-11-07T12:57:47Z
2022-11-07T12:57:47Z
<p><span class="date">Sunday 16 October 2022 at 0:00 (UTC)</span></p>
<p>Hi everyone!</p>
<p>Here's what's been happening backstage.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Speakers have been submitting their videos, hooray! I added a
schedule to the backstage page at
<a href="https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/">https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/</a> so that people can see
how the schedule's coming along. We expect more talks to come in the
next two weeks. Not panicking yet. =)</p></li>
<li><p>Thanks to all the people who've been working on captions so far!
Bhavin, Andrea, and Ramin did the captions for their talks, and Jai
captioned Bala's talk. Tom, Bhavin, and Hannah are currently working
on captions. There are three more talks backstage if anyone wants to
work on them.</p></li>
<li><p>I just posted some notes on how I reflow and edit subtitles in case
they're helpful:
<a href="https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/editing-captions.html">https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/editing-captions.html</a>
It's also linked from the backstage page under More info: editing
captions.</p></li>
<li><p>We added the Emacs development updates talk from John Wiegley and
updated the times of other talks based on messages from the
speakers.</p></li>
<li><p>We did a dry run of the OBS streaming setup with Leo, Amin, and
Corwin. I think we're on track to being able to broadcast two
streams this year.</p></li>
<li><p>IRC announcements, BBB redirection, and media file publishing can
now all automatically happen when the talk status changes,
simplifying our work during the conference. Video playback and Q&A
browser windows can happen automatically if streaming from
res.emacsconf.org. I want to get the publishing workflow all
smoothed out too, so that talks and transcripts can be more easily
published to the wiki pages during the conference.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Plans for this week:</p>
<ul>
<li>More videos and captions!</li>
<li>I plan to work on talk page publishing so that it happens smoothly during the conference</li>
<li>Leo's going to review the videos submitted so far and prepare intros for them</li>
<li>Might be a good idea to reach out to speakers for tech checks and bios</li>
</ul>
<p>EmacsConf is a little less than four weeks away. Stuff is happening!</p>
<p>Sacha</p>
Captions, tech checks, intros, OBS
https://emacsconf.org/blog/2022-10-30/
2022-10-30T23:44:40Z
2022-10-30T23:44:40Z
<p>Hello, everyone! Here's the weekly update on what's happening backstage
for EmacsConf 2022 in case you notice something that you want to help
out with. =)</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Help wanted - Captioning: There are three talks open for captioning
in <a href="https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/">https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/</a> , so feel free to
e-mail me if you'd like to reserve one. I've tweaked the captioning
process a little bit so that I can reflow the transcripts into
shorter subtitles before people edit the captions, so editing is
easier to do because you don't have to split along the way. (If
you're curious about the technical stuff, I switched to manually
splitting the text using emacsconf-reflow from emacsconf-el and then
the using aeneas for forced alignment, because I couldn't figure out
how to get torchaudio unstuck sometimes.)</p>
<p>If you don't have the username and password for the backstage area
and you would like to access it, please e-mail me and I'll send you
the details.</p></li>
<li><p>Help wanted - tech checks: For sessions with live Q&A, we'd like to
set up tech-checks with speakers to make sure that their setup works
well with BigBlueButton. A rough outline of the process is in the
tech-checking protocol heading at
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/organizers-notebook/#tech-checks">https://emacsconf.org/2022/organizers-notebook/#tech-checks</a> . If you
would like to help with tech-checks, please e-mail us with your
general availability (including timezones) and preferred public
contact information so that we can include you on the list at
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/prepare/#tech-check">https://emacsconf.org/2022/prepare/#tech-check</a> and in the e-mail to
speakers.</p></li>
<li><p>Help wanted - intro/intermission slides, OBS overlay, ??: It might
be interesting to design something to show right before and right
after a talk so that people can see the title, speaker name, talk
page URL, Q&A info, pad URL, pronouns, etc. Ideally we'd be able to
generate a whole bunch of these from the talk data, so maybe SVG or
a TikZ picture? If this is your jam, let us know.</p></li>
<li><p>OBS in the cloud: We've been able to figure out how to stream both
streams using OBS, VNC, and PulseAudio on Ry P.'s virtual server, so
it's even more likely that we're going to pull off two tracks this
year. Yay!</p></li>
<li><p>Tom Purl has joined as a captioning volunteer. Hi Tom!</p></li>
</ul>
<p>This week we hope to get lots of talks submitted, processed, and on
the way to being captioned. We're also planning to make the captioning
workflow even better, and to improve the OBS streaming workflow. Whee!</p>
<p>Sacha <a href="mailto:sacha@sachachua.com">sacha@sachachua.com</a></p>
Speakers confirmed, Etherpad, watch pages, shifts
https://emacsconf.org/blog/2022-10-16/
2022-11-07T12:57:47Z
2022-10-26T16:18:58Z
<p><span class="date">Sunday 16 October 2022 at 0:00 (UTC)</span></p>
<p>Hello, folks! Here's the weekly update on what's happening backstage
for EmacsConf 2022 in case you notice something that you want to help
out with. =)</p>
<ul>
<li><p>All the speakers have confirmed that they've gotten the acceptance
e-mails. Many speakers have confirmed that the schedule works for
them after I reshuffled a few talks for better availability. I've
posted the schedule at <a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/">https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/</a> . We'll
announce the schedule on the emacsconf-discuss mailing, Reddit, and
various places this week.</p></li>
<li><p>zaeph has been working on the ffmpeg incantations for preprocessing
the videos that will be submitted soon. bandali is working on
getting the FTP and web-based uploads sorted out so that speakers
can submit their videos.</p></li>
<li><p>I created some watch pages to support viewing different tracks:
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/">https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/</a> . The livestreams won't work yet
and it would be nice to figure out something that can dynamically
display info for recent/current/upcoming talks, but it's a start.</p></li>
<li><p>We set up a self-hosted Etherpad (ex:
<a href="https://pad.emacsconf.org/2022-journalism">https://pad.emacsconf.org/2022-journalism</a>) with an easy way to
redirect to using Wikimedia in case we run into scaling issues. I've
added it to our Ansible playbook
(git@git.emacsconf.org:pub/emacsconf-ansible) and I'm looking
forward to incorporating Ry P.'s improvements. Karl Voit gave
feedback on the first draft of the template.</p></li>
<li><p>vetrivln volunteered for some of the dev hosting shifts, Karl Voit
volunteered for some of the gen pad shifts, and FlowyCoder
volunteered for some of the gen check-in shifts. Thanks!</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Next week, we hope to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Announce the EmacsConf 2022 schedule in the usual places (got any wording/JS/CSS suggestions?)</li>
<li>Finalize the upload instructions so that speakers can start submitting their files</li>
<li>Put together volunteer training materials</li>
<li>Set up per-speaker BBB rooms and friendly URLs</li>
</ul>
<p>Sacha</p>
Backstage, captions, streaming, and more
https://emacsconf.org/blog/2022-10-23/
2022-10-23T18:19:23Z
2022-10-23T18:07:27Z
<p><span class="date">Sunday 23 October 2022 at 18:07 (UTC)</span></p>
<p>Hello, folks! Here's the weekly update on what's happening backstage
for EmacsConf 2022 in case you notice something that you want to help
out with. =)</p>
<ul>
<li>We've e-mailed the speakers instructions for uploading their files
through either a web browser or an FTP client, and three speakers
have already done so! Those talks are now available in the backstage
area (<a href="https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/">https://media.emacsconf.org/2022/backstage/</a>), along with the
first set of edited captions (thanks Jai Vetrivelan!). If you don't
have the username and password for the backstage area and you would
like to access it, please e-mail me and I'll send you the details.</li>
<li>We've created a BBB room for each speaker's live Q&A session. The
URLs are in conf.org in the private repository if you need them.</li>
<li>We've drafted some documentation for different volunteer roles. If
you'd like to volunteer as a captioner, check-in person (hmm,
reception?), Etherpad scribe, IRC monitor, or host, please check out
the appropriate link and let me know if I need to add anything to
the docs:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/caption">https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/caption</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/irc">https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/irc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/pad">https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/pad</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/checkin">https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/checkin</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/host">https://emacsconf.org/2022/volunteer/host</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Thanks to David O'Toole for signing up for some IRC shifts! If you
would like to volunteer for a shift, check out
<a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/organizers-notebook/#shifts">https://emacsconf.org/2022/organizers-notebook/#shifts</a> .</li>
<li>We've updated our streaming configuration for the General and
Development tracks, and have started testing them using mpv and the
watch pages. Videos aren't currently streaming, but you can check
out the layout of the watch pages at:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/gen/">https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/gen/</a></li>
<li><a href="https://live.emacsconf.org/2022/watch/gen/">https://live.emacsconf.org/2022/watch/gen/</a></li>
<li><a href="https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/dev/">https://emacsconf.org/2022/watch/dev/</a></li>
<li><a href="https://live.emacsconf.org/2022/watch/dev/">https://live.emacsconf.org/2022/watch/dev/</a>
These pages could probably be a lot prettier and easier to use. If you have some ideas
for improving them or if you'd like to work on the HTML/CSS/JS, we'd
love your help!</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>There are now Q&A waiting rooms with friendly URLs so that it's
easier for people to join the live Q&A when the host decides it's
okay to let everyone in. They're linked on the watch pages (along
with the pads) and they'll be linked from the talk pages once we're
ready to share them.</li>
<li>zaeph has been busy tweaking the ffmpeg workflow for reencoding and
normalizing videos. Thanks to Ry P. for sharing the
res.emacsconf.org server with us - we've been using it for all the
processing that our laptops can't handle.</li>
<li>We experimented with using the OpenAI Whisper speech-to-text toolkit
to create the auto-generated captions that captioning volunteers can
edit. Looks promising! If you'd like to compare the performance
between small, medium, and large models, you can look at the VTT
files for the sqlite talk in the backstage area. I've also added
support for tab-separated values (like Audacity label exports) and a
subed-convert command to subed.el, which might give us a more
concise format to work with. I'll work on getting word-level timing
data so that our captioning workflow can be even easier.</li>
</ul>
<p>Next week, we hope to:</p>
<ul>
<li>improve the prerec and captioning workflows</li>
<li>get more captions underway</li>
</ul>
<p>Lots of good stuff happening!</p>
<p>Sacha</p>