WEBVTT
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[Raymond Puzio]: Hello, I'm Raymond Puzio.
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I first learned about Emacs and Lisp
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at an enrichment program
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for high school students.
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When I studied physics at the university,
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I used Emacs and Tex
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to write mathematical documents.
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Later on, I became active
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in Emacs and Lisp user groups where,
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among other things, I learned about
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Org mode for reproducible research.
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Nowadays, I am working on
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synthesizing Emacs and other programs
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into an end-to-end platform
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for scientific research and collaboration.
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[Joe Corneli]: I'm Joe Corneli.
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I also started using Emacs in high school
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in a course on C programming,
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and now I'm technically
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a computer scientist.
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My research background
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is in mathematics and online communities.
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[Noorah Alhasan]: Hi, I'm Noorah Alhasan.
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I'm a member of the ERG group
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and a PhD student at UT Austin
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studying climate policy.
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So for this talk, the four of us
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met at EmacsConf 2020 last year
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with a common interest
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in Emacs and research.
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we've met almost every week since then
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because we wanted to
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keep the conversation going.
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In this short talk,
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we share information
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about the methods we use.
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Here's the outline of our talk.
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First, we'll tell you
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about the technologies we use
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and show a short demo video
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from one of the meetings.
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We'll then focus on
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the time and content structuring methods
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we use in our live sessions.
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Finally, we'll talk about
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what came out of all this work.
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For example, we wrote a paper for the
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Pattern Languages of Programs conference,
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and we designed a workshop
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using the knowledge we created together.
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Very practically,
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this has improved the quality
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of our own collaboration
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and we have some lessons
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about how you can create
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a research community similar to ours.
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[Joe]: You'll have noticed that we all have
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different research backgrounds
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and we do think that transdisciplinarity
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is important for solving big problems.
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However, if you have people
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from different research backgrounds
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working together,
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they need some scaffolding,
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both in terms of tools and methods,
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to have good conversations.
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And of course, as Emacs users,
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we wanted to have Emacs
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at the center of that.
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Being in a meeting,
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taking real-time notes
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collaboratively with Emacs
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realizes a dream that some of us
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have been entertaining
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(and experimenting with)
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for a while. The package crdt.el
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by Qiantan Hong makes this easy.
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We take notes in our meetings
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using Org Mode.
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Since we've seen this before
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in talks on reproducible research,
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and since Leo is the maintainer of org-roam,
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it was a natural choice for us.
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It allows us to
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put our notes online using git
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and the static state generator Firn.
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And lastly, of course, we need
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a real-time meeting tool.
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For that purpose,
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we use BBB in our weekly sessions
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(in fact, we use the same server
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that's used by EmacsConf,
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thanks again to Leo).
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All of these tools are
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free/libre/open source.
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However, BBB does have
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some intensive hardware requirements.
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Next up, here's a
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short pre-recorded snippet
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from one of our recent meetings
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so you can get a sense of how they go.
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[Demo - Leo Vivier]: Are we okay
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pushing the demo to the end?
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That kind of presupposes
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a different structure
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that you would usually have
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in a presentation.
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Generally you have...
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You introduce the demo, you do the demo,
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and then you do the conclusions,
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or what was good about the demo.
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Does that make sense to everyone?
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[Ray]: Let's see.
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When you usually do that,
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that's because whatever you're demonstrating
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is the main point of your talk,
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so if this was a talk about action reviews,
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that would make sense, but isn't it not ERG?
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[Leo]: But it's because we are telling...
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For me, I think it's a compound element.
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Yes, we are demonstrating the power,
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but we are also demonstrating
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how we're working together by...
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Yes, we might have introduced CRDT before
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in the presentation itself,
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but if we need to be doing the power,
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and also showing tools like CRDT,
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obviously, we're not... probably not going
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to be talking about... oh by the way,
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here we are using CRDT
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and stuff like this.
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It feels like cramming a lot of stuff
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into this demo at the end.
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[Joe]: So I think demo to me
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is less about demoing one of the methods,
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because then people will get
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a bit hung up on that.
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I think the demo...
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You know, to be honest,
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here's another thing.
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What we could do--
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this would be very clever--
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we could make this the demo,
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what we're doing right now,
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writing this talk is the demo,
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and just go back into the video
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and just get out a two-minute section,
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so we say, look we tried to write this talk,
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we went around, had a discussion,
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we had these things and then we just take...
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We're going to pick two minutes
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out of this video
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and show you that
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as a demo of how we actually work
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and then we'll go back to the talk.
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I mean, it'd be very funny,
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and then we've already done the demo.
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It's just, like... uh yeah,
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then we're good to go.
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And it's got neural lines on the floor.
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It's like a perfect writer's room.
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It's a total amazing writer's room scenario,
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specifically because she's lying on her back
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on the floor. Anyway. I mean,
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I think this would be fine.
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[Leo]: I think I particularly like the idea
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of taking the snippet,
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the two minutes before the realization
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that we could be using this as the demo,
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and then seeing the... well my face light up
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because it feels like a good idea,
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and Joe gets excited about this.
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I think this could be a good demo,
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and I think this would be
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a very genuine demonstration
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of how we work here
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and how we get excited about
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some of our ideas sometimes.
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[Noorah]: In the demo,
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you saw a very improvised
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free-flowing conversation.
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In order to have this kind of conversation
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and still get things done,
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we need a pretty rigorous structure in place
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at the bigger scale of the meetings.
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This involves both
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a timetable for the meetings
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and some review and planning processes.
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[Joe]: Just to say a little bit more
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about the timetable, if you could go back,
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the meetings are generally following
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a structure as we have up on the screen
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of informal check-ins
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followed by any announcements,
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and then two topics, at most two topics,
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with a break in the middle.
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The whole thing takes about two hours,
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and we meet weekly.
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The consistency of these meetings
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is really important
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for how the group works.
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[Ray]: At at the end of every meeting,
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we ask and answer
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a series of questions
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adapted from the ‘After Action Review’
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developed by the United States Army
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in their training programs,
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and also used in some business contexts.
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The adaptation we use here
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came out of the Peeragogy project,
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which some of us have been involved with
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since 2012, and it's designed to be
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less hierarchical than the army's review.
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By writing down and sharing these reviews,
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we create a resource
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for further peer learning
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later down the line.
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[Joe]: So, specifically,
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every six weeks or so,
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we look at the transcripts
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from the previous action reviews
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using a four-layered framework
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that comes from future studies,
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and we use this to better understand
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the underlying themes
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that surface in the reviews
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and to develop the deeper motivations
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for ongoing work together.
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This helps us get a big-picture sense
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of where we're going,
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and we can keep that up to date
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at a slower pace
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than we do in the weekly meetings.
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This also helps us tie our work
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into a broader context
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and gives us some hope
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that over time we can contribute to
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solving big problems.
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[Ray]: Going back
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to solving larger problems.
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When we carry out the analysis,
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we don't just think about what happened
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at previous meetings,
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but we also take a longer view,
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thinking about things such as
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structuring a community of collaborators,
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or building platforms
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for scientific research.
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We want to think about how
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what we have been doing
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fits into broader historical patterns
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and trends.
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In the past, the pattern is a
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historical pattern;
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in the present, we contextualize
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what we learned about designed futures;
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towards the future, we use these patterns
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to augment our big-picture analysis
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with the next steps.
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This helps keep us on track.
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[Noorah]: Okay. So we have been working on
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several projects: a paper
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for the pattern conference
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mentioned earlier,
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a workshop, and a user study,
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and we'll say a little bit more
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about these.
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We co-authored a paper
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that touches on all of the topics
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we mentioned earlier
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and presented it at the leading conference
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on Design Patterns
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for programs and programming.
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One of the case studies in the paper
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sums up the way we work in ERG.
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The paper puts ERG in context
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with other peer learning communities,
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and we aim to describe
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our way of working
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in a way that others would find accessible
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and potentially useful.
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We are also developing
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an interactive workshop
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based on the ideas in the paper,
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which we piloted at the PLoP conference.
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Our intent with the workshop
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was to build a method
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for rapid problem solving,
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which could, at least in principle,
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expand beyond the workshop setting
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to distributed networks.
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The workshop involves made-up roles,
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like a kaiju communicator
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who helps understand problems
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as they arise.
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We also realize that it has given us
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a lot of wealth for thinking about
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the roles we take on in our weekly meetings.
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[Ray]: Free software may be lacking
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on ‘user’ aspects.
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People too often program
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to scratch their own itches,
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and assume others will do the same.
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To deal with this, we did several things.
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We looked at user experience
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and development together
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to see how the process went
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and where the gaps might be.
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We compared Emacs with other platforms,
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not just a technical level,
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but also at the user experience level.
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We had guest sessions,
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where we've started to gather user stories.
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Building on these conversations,
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we would like to do more research
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in all these topics,
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and eventually be able to
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say something like:
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‘If you are someone who does X,
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these are the packages
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that would work for you.’
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[Joe]: Putting these ideas into practice,
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our PLoP paper and the plans it contains
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become a /template/
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for some of the other things
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we want to work on
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as we go forward.
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If we imagine things in 2-3 years,
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what would it actually take
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to realize the vision from that paper?
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Thinking about the future:
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this is one of the main reasons why
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we want to share these ideas
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and invite other people
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into this way of working.
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There's no way we can actually achieve
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everything in our vision
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if we work all by ourselves.
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What we've been focusing on
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in Season Zero of the Emacs Research Group
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is methods that people can use
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to organize their own research groups.
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We decided to share this talk
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so that folks can learn from our community.
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Our goal has been to share
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how we've been doing things,
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and we hope this information
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is useful for you
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in your own communities and collaborations.
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Thank you.
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[captions by speakers and sachac]
