#+title: EmacsConf 2021
#+subtitle: Online Conference
#+date: November 27 and 28, 2021
#+options: author:nil
- DRAFT: 2021-08-02:
- Reduced extended talk to 40 minutes
- Getting people to submit outlines of shorter talks if they want
to propose longer ones ;)
# Copyright (C) 2021 Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, David Bremner
[[https://emacsconf.org/2021/][EmacsConf 2021]] will be a virtual conference on *November 27 and 28,
2021 (Sat-Sun)*. If you'd like to present at the conference, please
[[https://emacsconf.org/2021/cfp/][submit your proposal]] by *September 30, 2021*.
EmacsConf 2021 is about the joy of [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/][Emacs]] and Emacs Lisp. Come share
your experiments and adventures with the Emacs text editor / way of
life! We welcome speakers of *all backgrounds* and *all levels of
experience*, including newcomers giving their first talk. What have
you found exciting about Emacs lately? What do you wish someone had
told you when you were starting out or learning more? What part of
your workflow might inspire someone to get into Emacs or go deeper?
A great way to get started with writing a proposal is to start by
exploring the programs from previous years: [[https://emacsconf.org/2020/schedule/][2020]], [[https://emacsconf.org/2019/schedule/][2019]], [[https://emacsconf.org/2015/schedule/][2015]], [[https://emacsconf.org/2013/#program][2013]].
You might also find some neat ideas on the [[https://emacsconf.org/2021/ideas/][ideas]] page. Feel free to
add yours there too! If you're still not sure, come by our IRC
channel =#emacsconf= on =irc.libera.chat= and say hi. You can join
the chat using [[ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/emacsconf][your favourite IRC client]], or by pointing your web
browser to [[https://chat.emacsconf.org][chat.emacsconf.org]] which runs our self-hosted instance of
[[https://thelounge.chat][The Lounge]] free software web IRC client.
All kinds of people use Emacs for all kinds of things. We would love
it if EmacsConf 2021 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, and
non-developers) might not consider themselves expert enough to share
their thoughts. If you let them know that you value their knowledge
and maybe even suggest something that you think others would like to
hear more about, they may realize that they have something worth
sharing and that we would love to hear from them.
* Important dates
We're planning for 9am to 5pm Toronto/EST (2pm-10pm UTC). Depending
on people's availability, it might be two half-days.
| CFP opens | August 2, 2021 |
| CFP closes | September 30, 2021 |
| Speaker notifications | October 15, 2021 |
| Schedule published | October 31, 2021 |
| EmacsConf 2021! | November 27 and 28, 2021 |
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 regional events.
Please note that although we will try our best to stick to the above
dates in the coming months, given the current state of the world, we
may have to move things around a bit in case of unforeseen events.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
* Talk formats
We'd like EmacsConf 2021 to inspire lots of different people to
explore lots of different things in Emacs. We hope to put together a
stream of quick ideas followed by lots of conversation over IRC or a
Q&A session, with occasional deep dives into something that many
people might find interesting or useful.
As you think about your talk, consider what you can share in:
- *Up to 10 minutes total:* What's the core idea? What do you want people
to do or remember? You can show just enough to get people
interested and then point them to where they can learn more
afterwards. You can answer questions over IRC, the pad, or the wiki,
and there's no limit to how long that conversation can go.
- *Up to 20 minutes total:* How would you flesh out some of the points from
your 5-10 minute presentation? How can you show the pieces working
together?
- *Up to 40 minutes total:* What would benefit from a deep dive? How do you
keep it engaging?
When you write your proposal, outline what you plan to talk about if
you have 5-10 minutes. If you would like to propose a longer talk,
outline what you might include for a 5-10 min talk, a 20-minute talk,
and optionally a 40-minute talk.
Example for a 40-minute talk:
- 5-10 minutes: quick demo of the abc package working together with xyz package
- 20 minutes: + some customization options to accommodate a different workflow
- 40 minutes: + modifying the behavior of the package in order to add something new
Other session formats such as tutorials, workshops, and hangouts are
welcome as well, especially considering all that is going on around
the world, in case you would find those other formats preferable to a
traditional talk format. If you are interested in these or other
session types, please get in touch with us publicly or privately. We
will be happy to work something out with you.
* Submitting your proposal
Once you're ready to submit your proposal, the [[https://emacsconf.org/2021/submit/][submit]] page has the
instructions on how to submit your talk.
We use an anonymized submission process to reduce bias and encourage
contribution. Identifying information will be removed from
submissions by a conference organizer who will not participate in talk
selection. The anonymized submissions will then be reviewed by a
selection committee.
If your talk is approved, we'd love it if you could help us make sure
the conference runs smoothly. After we e-mail you with the time
alloted for your talk, we'll ask you to:
- prepare a prerecording of your talk, or record it with our help if
that's easier for you
- schedule a short tech-check if you'd like to answer questions in a
live session.
* Getting involved
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 [[https://emacsconf.org/2021/planning/][planning]] page
and come say hi to us at =#emacsconf= on =irc.libera.chat=.
Subscribe to our mailing list, [[https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss][emacsconf-discuss]], for discussions and
announcements about the EmacsConf conference.
We look forward to your ideas and submissions!
* Commitment to freedom
We remain fully committed to freedom, and we will continue
using our infrastructure and streaming setup consisting entirely of
[[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html][free software]], much like previous EmacsConf conferences.
* COMMENT Copyright & License
Copyright (C) 2020, 2021 Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, David Bremner
The EmacsConf 2021 Call for Proposals is part of the EmacsConf wiki,
and is dual-licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License; and the GNU
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.
A copy of these two licenses is available on the EmacsConf wiki, in
the [[https://emacsconf.org/COPYING.CC-BY-SA][COPYING.CC-BY-SA]] and [[https://emacsconf.org/COPYING.GPL][COPYING.GPL]] files.
* COMMENT How to export this file
As of the time of writing this document (Org mode version 9.3.7), the
Org links library (=ol.el=) does not yet recognize =ircs= link types,
and will throw an error if you try to export a file containing them,
such as this file.
To work around that, you can use something along the lines of the
Emacs Lisp code below, by either adding it to your init file, or by
putting the point in the code block and hitting =C-c C-v e= (that is,
hold Ctrl, then hit c followed by v, then release Ctrl, and hit e) to
evaluate the code, working around the issue only for the current
session.
#+begin_src emacs-lisp :results silent
(org-link-set-parameters
"ircs"
:export
(lambda (link description format)
"Export an ircs link.
See `org-link-parameters' for details about LINK, DESCRIPTION and
FORMAT."
(let ((desc (or description link)))
(pcase format
(`html (format "<a href=\"ircs:%s\">%s</a>" link desc))
(`md (format "[%s](ircs:%s)" desc link))
(_ nil)))))
#+end_src