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[[!meta title="Meeting notes"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2021 Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, David O'Toole, Corwin Brust, Leo Vivier, Daniel Gopar"]]
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* Actions :noexport:
[[elisp:(progn (org-export-to-file 'md "meetings.md") (magit-stage-file "2021/meetings.org") (magit-stage-file "2021/meetings.md"))]]
* Ongoing projects
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: ongoing-projects
:END:
- Tech
- Figuring out a better streaming workflow (speakers & OBS)
- CDN with Nate Sales: mplsCorwin, bandali
- maybe also FTP upload for speakers
- Stand-by for now
- Separate from Fosshost
- Documenting our infrastructure
- bandali and gopar's podcast: bandali, gopar
- Coming up with a list of guests
- Leo Vivier (zaeph, org-roam)
- Qiantan Hong (crdt)
- Protesilaos Stavrou
- John Wiegley
- Lars Ingebrigtsen
- Adam Porter (alphapapa) - package maintainers group?
- Jonas Bernoulli (tarsius)
- FSF people? Zoe? Greg? rwp?
- Drew Adams (@oracle.com, probably)
- Bastien Guerry
- Karl Voit
- Andrea Corallo
- Jethro Kuan (org-roam; alongside Leo Vivier)
- zaeph’s projects
- org-roam
- Mediation project between MELPA and org-mode’s core: zaeph
- Community
- Modernise the notes for our EmacsConf meetings
- Find a moment to talk with mplsCorwin about FH funding
- EmacsConf 2021
- Subtitles/transcripts: sachac, bhavin192
- Calendar, connecting with meetups: sachac, zaeph
- Guidebook for streaming: bandali, sachac, zaeph
- Set of methods for clipping, publishing, etc.
- Coming up with a way to coordinate meetings with *all* the organisers of the EmacsConf (rather than the core subset)
- Coming up with a calendar for the next edition
- Decide whether the live-version of the EmacsConf 2020 can be axed by [2021-06-12 Sat]
- Coming up with different tracks (TODO for [2021-08-21 Sat] )
- Meta track (for EmacsVerse stuff)
- Community
- Org
- org-roam
- Multimedia & Fun
- Gaming
- Music
- Dev
- Emacs core
- Other emacs stuff
- Research
- Beginner’s track (dto & mplsCorwin?)
- We could also use sachac’s list of categories for Emacs news as input
- Live tasks during the conference
- zaeph:
- Doing volume checks when pre-recorded talks go live to do live normalisation
- Maybe bandali could look into easyeffects’s autogain?
- EmacsConf 2022 and onwards
This entry is mostly for points we cannot address for EmacsConf 2021 (for lack of time), but that we’d still like to track for the future.
- Improving the review process
- Involving the public (i.e. doing it publicly)
- Involving more communities
- Creating a new format for discussions/interviews
- e.g., talking with vimmers (the audacity, I know!)
- Think about funding
- Figuring out the financing of our infras
- bandali is taking care of a lot of our spendings right now; maybe we could dampen this amongst orgas?
- We all lament the fact that we can’t field longer 40-min talks anymore; maybe we could think about options?
- Multiple streams
- Different tracks on different days
- Split org from Emacs?
- Splitting is also a good incentive for both sides of the split to up their game (or to fill the void)
- Having a separate day for beginner- and developer-oriented talks?
- A week-long conference?
- It might be hard to jump from 2-day to full-week.
- It’s hard to have people available across the entire period.
- We should make it easier for other people to edit the conf.org for publishing the schedule; for 2021, sachac and zaeph were able to do it, but we should make it more our functions more robust.
- Add edit-in-place functionality to ikiwiki
- An alternative would be to enable push-via-https, but bandali isn’t enthused by it.
- EmacsVerse
- Vet Mailman and exim instance for usergroups: bandali
- Figure out the interactions between (potential) emacsverse.org and emacs.org
- It’s about control domains and sources of truth
- Misc
- Writing about Emacs: zaeph
- mplsCorwin's livestreaming project, working on trimming
- Diversity outreach: gopar, sachac, zaeph, mplsCorwin
* EmacsConf 2021: Long-running TODOs
* November 13, 2021
- TODOs/agenda: (two weeks to conference!)
- Sacha: Publish detailed schedule
- Get in touch with speakers regarding schedule, check-in
- Start working on list of speakers expected for live Q&A or live presentation
- Figure out MPV setup for open captions
- Figure out day-of publishing
- Will try to post prerecs on wiki pages and YouTube during talk; ToobNix?
* November 6, 2021
- Check-ins
- zaeph is dealing with TZ change
- TODOs:
- Everyone:
- [X] Get working on contribute.md by Tue-Wed
- Non-exhaustive list of tasks to mention (relevant for this year):
1. Editing captions or writing new ones
2. Helping with tech-checks
3. Looking at the schedule, and if there’s something they particularly like, they could run get ready for a prolonged Q&A session
- bandali:
- [X] ASAP: Give SSH access to sachac on ftp-upload@emacsconf.org
- Ping corwin to get another distro installed on vm02 (possibly Trisquel or Alpine)
- [X] Look into making TLS/SSL optional
- sachac: Right now, the configuration for the ftp server forces it.
- bandali is looking into FTP for resume, no worries about being able to see filenames (not allowed to download files)
- probably no risk from other people maliciously "resuming" other people's files
- ideas for the future:
- can have speaker accounts for FTP (... maybe if Amin gets the hang of automating e-mails =) )
- region servers to upload to, maybe as part of CDN project
- TODO enable continuation for FTP
- Fosshost: Drop an application for another storage-server for the prerecs
- zaeph:
- [X] ASAP: Email designated volunteers
- Create BBB accounts for new tech-checkers
- Publicise contribute.md on r/emacs when it’s published
- Make a pinned comment on the program announcement asking for volunteers, linking to contribute.md, and maybe keeping it up to date by editing it to reflect current needs
- corwin:
- Record a 6-second video ad
- Go through the script together
- sachac: Status update: 9 prerecs received
- 7 talks captioned
- Emacs News Highlights
- NonGNU ELPA Update
- telega.el and the Emacs community on Telegram
- Creating technical API documentation and presentations using org-babel, restclient, and org-treeslide (thanks bhavin!)
- The use of Org mode syntax outside of GNU/Emacs - checked with speaker
- How Emacs made me appreciate software freedom
- Moldable Emacs, a step towards sustainable software - checked with speaker
- 2 more talks waiting for captions from bhavin:
- Using Org-Mode For Recording Continuous Professional Development
- Emacs with Nyxt: extend your editor with the power of a Lisp browser
- Compressed with q=56 script from last year, uploaded to front:/var/www/media.emacsconf.org/2021/protected , see private wiki for password
- Things to consider:
- Broadcast with open captions or direct people who need closed
captions to the wiki page? Spam #emacsconf-accessible with
caption text?
- Sample: https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/news/
- Compression okay? Do we need to dial it back?
- Plan for handling compression for the talks coming in this weekend; can we run it on the VM?
- Audio normalization?
- Low-res version?
- More proof-reading welcome
- Start thinking about workflow for publishing talks, maybe even concurrently with the stream
- No reason not to make them public right away, so if we want them to be available on something else in addition to emacsconf.org and Youtube (Toobnix?), we can plan ahead
- TODO bandali also, icecast fallback override possibility so that bandali might be
able to use ffmpeg to broadcast directly to icecast while handling
continuity? Does anyone want to experiment with that?
- does anyone want to write an ICS to Org thing that can handle
schedule updates, maybe taking advantage of icalendar?
- pronouns/website/sponsor info can probably be an e-mail to speakers
- e-mail to send on the deadline (tomorrow)
- reminder to send it
- let's use a carrot approach, not stick (10 talks have already been submitted, yay, and most of them have been captioned!); we're actually okay with dealing with prerecs or live on the day of the event
- nudge script submission esp. close to the deadline to help with captions
- publishing the schedule with the times, ICS; maybe Nov 14?
- probably can do even with the uncertainty
- 10 minutes hard to do live (or record); 15 min next time?
- maybe postpone letting people plan for live presentation until a little bit later
- future: shorter CFP, longer prep period
#+begin_example
Hello, ____!
,* TODO [#A] Send pre-recording to EmacsConf
Lots of speakers have already submitted their talks for EmacsConf
2021, and we've even be able to caption them. Yay! Here are some of
the presentations that have already come in:
- Emacs News Highlights
- NonGNU ELPA Update
- telega.el and the Emacs community on Telegram
- Creating technical API documentation and presentations using org-babel, restclient, and org-treeslide
- The use of Org mode syntax outside of GNU/Emacs
- How Emacs made me appreciate software freedom
- Moldable Emacs, a step towards sustainable software
We're looking forward to getting your presentation. If you send it in
as soon as you can, we can add it to the queue for captioning. We'd
like to stream as many talks with captions to make things more
accessible, and the text makes it easier to search too. Also, sending
the prerecorded video will make the conference day less stressful for
everyone. =) If you need extra time to get your prerecorded video, no
worries, we'll figure it out somehow. Please try to do it as soon as
you can!
,* TODO Send page information (name pronunciation, pronouns, homepage, contact, sponsor links)
We'd also like to add some standard information to the talk
information page to make it easier for people to talk about your talk,
find more information, contact you, or support you.
Name pronunciation:
Pronouns:
Homepage:
Preferred contact info:
Links for sponsoring/supporting (if any):
For example, Sacha's is:
Name pronunciation: SA-sha CHEW-ah
Pronouns: she/her
Homepage: https://sachachua.com
Preferred contact info: sacha@sachachua.com
Links for sponsoring/supporting (if any):
,* TODO Plan tech check if you're doing live Q&A
Also, if you are planning to do live Q&A and you've already done the
tech check at test.bigbluebutton.org, we can set up a tech check call
with an organizer or volunteer. Sometimes there are technical issues
with sharing desktops or hearing audio, so it's good to get it sorted
out as soon as possible. Please check _____ for some options for a
live tech check and reach out to someone who's available when you are.
We hope to get more volunteers for tech checks, so if you can't find
someone whose availability matches yours, please e-mail us at _____
and we'll try to find something that works.
,* Also, sneak preview of talks =)
As a thank-you for working on a talk for EmacsConf, here's a sneak
preview of the talks that have been submitted so far. Please don't
share it widely. If you want to refer to other people's talks in
yours, it's a good time to check out related talks!
(TODO - info not in here)
Thank you so much!
Amin
#+end_example
---
TODO Sneak preview e-mail for people who have already submitted
---
- Also do we want to give speakers early access to each other's talks?
- OK, ask them not to share yet
- ffmpeg installed on FTP upload
- TODO bandali to check compressed video and see if we want to change the settings
- TODO: Sacha - Make Etherpad template for speakers? Actually, e-mail might be easier to copy and paste from
- Name pronunciation
- Pronouns
- Links
- Homepage, socials
- Sponsor
- TODO: Sacha - send bandali Bcc list for nudge e-mails
- How many people did we do live tech checks last year?
- zaeph will not be very available.
- TODO maybe seabass? zaeph will e-mail.
- publicize contribute page to the mailing list? and stress the need for tech checkers
- TODO sachac: add current captioning results
- Future: bake it into the submission process (when will be a good time over the next 1-2 months)
- If we don't have enough people to do the tech checks, Leo will step up and maybe do some kind of office hours thing
- Process:
1. E-mail the volunteers
2. Update the table on the page
3. If anyone wants to get started now, you can e-mail us
- BBB slide presentation feature broken, may be related to LetsEncrypt, can't leave messages on the screen; probably won't need it for EmacsConf
- DECISION Yes, broadcast open captions; published videos can be CC
- TODO zaeph will come up with the MPV settings for displaying open captions
- EmacsConf: friendly and relaxed =)
- Summary
- #A zaeph: Set up tech check information, e-mail volunteers
- #A zaeph: Finish draft of e-mail for tomorrow or the day after
- zaeph: Figure out mpv settings
- bandali: Check video settings, see if we need to tweak compression/audio
- sachac: Keep captioning
* October 30, 2021 meeting
- Check-ins
- sachac:
- Using Emacs itself to record her talk, and has even managed to get a spectrum analyser right into it!
- [[https://github.com/sachac/subed-waveform][sachac/subed-waveform: Minor mode for displaying the waveform for the current subtitle in an Emacs subed-mode buffer]]
- bandali:
- Busy with the emails and around GNU in general
- Almost finished with a paper building on parts of his MA dissertation
- Last week’s presentation went well despite some minor hiccups
- It was a *long* session, so a 5-min break can be glossed over
- zaeph:
- All is well! A lot of swimming and fun experimentations!
- corwin:
- Pretty rested!
- Lots of stuff brewing with Fosshost
- FTP:
- sachac: Where can I find the recordings?
- If we get talks early, we might get started on the subtitling
- bandali: Tried to setup the 2nd upload server
- Couldn’t get it to work; the same configuration on front0 for testing was working, but not onl
- The FSF sysadmins gave us access to a session/server which we might use as replacement
- sachac: Where can we keep the talks on front0?
- Reasoning:
- Last year, one of the issue that th epeople who had missed a talk wished they could have watched it
- Whilst the prerec is playing on the stream, we could put in a public directory to be able to watch it
- It’d be amazing if we could get the recordings ASAP this year, since most of them will be prerecs
- People need to be uploading files to the very server that we will be storing them on.
- Discussion:
- bandali: The main VMs that we have (live0 and front0) are fairly small, 20-25GB each. What we’ve been doing for the past couple EmacsConf has been to upload to a server provided Computer Science of the University of Waterloo
- Options:
- Fosshost
- corwin: Disk-space comes super-cheap to Fosshost, which means that it might be a good option.
- Could become our primary source (vs. CS Club which we use currently)
- CS Club (University of Waterloo); we might not have it eternally
- At the moment, it is our primary source
- We can still use it as a mirror
- audio-video.gnu.org (FSF)
- yang’s 2 mirrors in Europe
- Other options that we might consider for other editions:
- Justification:
- corwin: The footprint of EmacsConf will always grow as long as we maintain older publications for posterity, even if the grow is fairly linear.
- Linode block storage
- 1$/month for 10 GB
- corwin’s favourite provider
- Meta:
- Having 3 ISP is better than having 2
- From a growth perspective, it’s good to have some cash outlay to help people understand that we have a need for money
- This also appeared with the android-app
- Other considerations
- Using emacsconf.org for redirections
- bandali: Someone set up two mirrors for us in Europe; it’d be nice to have mirror-resolve/-rotator that we could put in front to do the redirecting
- sachac: That would put more sysad work on bandali, though
- How do we handle the private→public publishing of the recording?
1. Upload all the files to the public server
2. chmod o-r on all the talks
3. When a talk goes live: chmod o+r
- Handling redirections à la CDN
- bandali:
- We might want to add A records pointing to all the servers that we’re using as mirrors (in a round-robin fashion)
- GNU might have solutions
- Asking new domains to the FSF sysadmins, especially on .emacs.org
- Have we considered having a .gnu.org domain linking to emacs.org?
- conf.emacs.org could be very nice for visibility.
- corwin: Could we do the same with orgmode.org?
- Imagine if the org-mode website had a featured talk from the EmacsConf!
- corwin: Once the relationship exists between emacs.org and orgmode.org, a lot of bridges can be built between the communities with mutual benefits
- Alternate streams & Rebroadcasts
- APAC:
- sachac: As the prerecs come in, we can touch base with dragestil re: APAC event
- Other streamers:
- sachac: These next few weeks are also the best time to onboard alternate streamers
- corwin: Our must important work right now is bringing more talents/newcommers, and get them to the level where they feel technically-competent and empowered to help us further.
- How to get new organisers involved as well they could be with the project?
- Doing tech-checks is a pretty good and easy to get started with volunteers.
- sachac: When we activate the other volunteers, what should we be asking them to consider? *Ordered by priority*, and which we should mention on the ~contribute.md~:
1. Editing captions or writing new ones
2. Helping with tech-checks
3. Looking at the schedule, and if there’s something they particularly like, they could run get ready for a prolonged Q&A session
- sachac: We might have a ~contribute.md~ page similar to the prepare.md page
- We should link from /2021 to /2021/contribute.md.
- Also, other people who could come across it rather than just our current volunteers.
- corwin: ~contribute.md~ is the invitation, and the ~prepare.md~ is the directions to the party.
- How do we publicise this contribue.md?
- zaeph: Could we publicise contribute.md on r/emacs
- corwin: Yes! It’s a great piece of promotion to do.
- bandali: It might make sense to mention contribute.md to speakers
- Our next email to speakers should link to contribute.md
- Tech-checks
- Getting organisers on board with tech-checks
- Which new volunteers could be bring along on this project?
- acdw (AM)
- dragestil (APAC)
- bhavin192 (APAC)
- seabass (EU)
- zleap (EU)
- ullbeking (?)
- zaeph (EU)
- corwin (AM)
- ???
- bandali (AM)
- Putting the finishing touches on the checklist
#+begin_quote
- Would you please share your pronouns?
- Can you tell us how to pronounce your name?
- Can you speak and be heard? Is there echo?
- Can you hear the organizer (me)?
- Can you share your screen? Is the screen readable?
- If you plan to show your keystrokes, is that display visible?
- If you want to share your webcam (optional), can you enable it? Is it visible? Will there likely be distractions in the background?
- Can you view the collaborative pad? Will you be comfortable reviewing questions on your own (perhaps by keeping it open beside your shared window), or will you need a volunteer to relay questions to you?
- Can you share contact information (ex: phone number) so that we can get in touch with you in case of technical issues or scheduling changes?
- Do you need help finding your way around IRC so that you can check into `#emacsconf-org`? What is your IRC nickname?
#+end_quote
- What to mention in our closing remarks
- Acknowledging volunteers
- Inviting other volunteers
- Alternate streams / Multiple tracks
* October 23, 2021 meeting
- TODO
- bandali:
- Look into creating a Mastodon account
- Options: qoto.org, mastodon.sdf.org
- Keep working on the FTP deployment and setting up the VM
- zaeph:
- Pin post to r/emacs for the program
- Everyone:
- Add our social media to emacsconf.org/contact
- Think about the phrasing of some of our personal questions for the tech-checks
* October 16, 2021 meeting
- TODO from last time
- zaeph:
- Send email to the 12 people in the org block on day-1-afternoon
- Take charge of the TODOs (changing to WAITING_FOR_CONFIRMS)
- <2021-10-13 Wed>: Pin post to r/emacs
- bandali (& potentially seabass):
- Draft the email for submitting the schedule and send it out to -submit
- Publish the schedule
- SOFT DEADLINE: <2021-10-13 Wed>
- Setup FTP server
- Find a minimal web-based ftp server
- Might be a great use for vm01, actually!
- Agenda
- /Glitter/ for EmacsConf
- Thinking about organisation principles like the bus-factor: how do we address it in a way that is not merely putting people on a pedestal?
- Check-ins
- corwin
- Had a pretty rough work-week. :(
- sachac
- Taking care of kiddo!
- bandali
- Has already managed to <Backspace> in BBB. :o)
- zaeph
- Passed the first round of technical interviews
- Considerations for EmacsConf 2021 and future editions
- sachac might not always be able to take care of the conf-days check-in
- Coming up with a date for the publishing the schedule
- bandali: Has a draft, and would like to send it to us by tomorrow
- We don’t seem to have any blocker right now when it comes to publishing the schedule, except perhaps for the posters.
- We have
- We’ve elected to publish the schedule on [2021-10-20 Wed].
- Do we want to to only publish the program, or do we want to publish the program & the schedule at the same time?
- corwin: More publications is usually good if we have unique and exciting things to share in each one
- ‘Here’s all the talks we’ve accepted so far’
- sachac: Publishing the program early might get people curious about the topics, potentially leading to great questions
- Glitter for EmacsConf
- We have three posters to review this year: one by zleap, one LaTeX-based, and one from alphapapa
- We don’t know what are the permissions on those posters, though.
- sachac: We could make social-media-friendly posters for publicising the conf.
- Where to publicise the conf?
- bandali: We could and should create a Mastodon
- zaeph: I can take care of r/emacs sticky-posts.
- We have Twitter: official account, and potentially sachac’s
- We can also [[https://nitter.net/emacsconf][EmacsConf (@emacsconf) | nitter]]
- Where to let things happen organically
- corwin can take care of Facebook; sachac has made the Emacs page public again
- lobste.rs… but we might let people do it themselves (or maybe ask zaeph’s contacts)
- HackerNews… But considering how unlucky bandali and zaeph are in getting visibility, we might as well let people take care of it (potentially with more karma)
- Since our program is fairly advanced (i.e. we don’t have a ‘What is an Emac?’ talk or anything along those lines), publicising on some broad-audience platforms might create expectations that won’t be met
- Main platforms for us:
- r/emacs
- Usergroups
- Emacs News
- IRC
- HackerNews
- Subsidiary platforms
- lobste.rs
- Twitter
- Facebook
- On the legitimacy of adding our socials to emacsconf.org/contact
- We’re a little on the fence with publicising a Facebook page on this page, but we can probably label it accordingly (‘This page contains non-free JS’)
- We could also link to alternative platforms which are more respectful of people.
- …Or, we could say ‘go on this platform, and search for this page’ whilst raising awareness about non-free JS
- corwin: ‘The real reason why we’d want to put the links to social on the page is that people are aware of the energy that exist around the stuff that we’re doing. Demonstrating that energy is a way to get people excited about Emacs.
- When to do tech-checks: after/before the soft-deadline for pre-recs
- sachac: We don’t have to wait for the soft deadline
- sachac: ‘[Speakers]
- We can redirect people to [[https://test.bigbluebutton.org/][BigBlueButton - Open Source Web Conferencing]] to test their system.
- Questions for the tech-checks (not published yet)
#+begin_quote
- $questions_about_pronouns
- We can track them in conf.org.
- Can you tell us how to pronounce your name?
# Questions after that point are copied from last year.
- Can you speak and be heard? Is there echo?
- Can you hear the organizer?
- Can you share your screen? Is the screen readable?
- If you plan to show your keystrokes, is that display visible?
- If you want to share your webcam (optional), can you enable it? Is it visible? Will there likely be distractions in the background?
- Can you view the collaborative pad? Will you be comfortable reviewing questions on your own (perhaps by keeping it open beside your shared window), or will you need a volunteer to relay questions to you?
- Can you share contact information (ex: phone number) so that we can get in touch with you in case of technical issues or scheduling changes?
- Do you need help finding your way around IRC so that you can check into `#emacsconf-org`? What is your IRC nickname?
#+end_quote
- Public debrief for EmacsConf 2021: yay or nay?
- We already did this informally at the end of day-2 of EmacsConf 2020
- We also started this process of debrieffing and having weekly meetings to review our process last year, but we did it privately.
- corwin: ‘The debrief on what happened in 2021’ should be done with a fair amount of gap with ‘What should be done in 2022?’
- Is there a bit of a burnout going on with the weekly meetings?
- corwin: We’ve been meeting every week for a year
- …But it’s a lesson learnt, not a ‘oops’.
- Switching to a monthly meeting during the down-time (Dec-May) might alleviate this.
- FTP server
- bandali: Been digging into various FTP servers implementations, and has been chatting with the FSF team; what they use is vsftpd; checked their local configuration, but bandali doesn’t know enough about it to deploy it right now.
- In short: did the learning, and will work towards setting up.
- Process for editing the talks
- Changing the schedule should be done via conf.org
- Talk descriptions can be manually edited by the speakers via ikiwiki.
- Generating XML programme
- seabass: Tried to implement this in ~schedule.org~; had got stuck with evaluating in the org-babel format
- sachac: you can define a new block without the results none arguments
- seabass can send a draft to the list
- sachac: Not neccessary to use many Emacs packages; ~(require 's)~ and ~(require 'cl-lib)~
- Follow-up email to speakers
- When to send it
- We should probably delay sending the program until we’ve sent this follow-up, since we’ll need speakers to review their apges
- We can probably give them a week to do so
- Tentative calendar:
[2021-10-20 Wed] Send follow-up
[2021-10-27 Wed] Edits to talk pages should be finished
[2021-10-30 Sat] Publishing the program
- Content
- Announce tech-checks
- Ask people to try BBB via [[https://test.bigbluebutton.org/][BBB test page]]
- sachac: ‘If you would like to do live, please check your setup, and then email us to let us know that if tha passed, or if you need additional help; therefore, we should help from people who should go live, and if we don’t hear from the people who said they would do a live talk, we should follow-up with them’
- Ask speakers to review their talk page and edit them manually (with ikiwiki, info at [[https://emacsconf.org/edit/][EmacsConf - Editing the EmacsConf wiki]], directing people to #emacsconf (not -org) for peer-help) if they want to edit their talk-page before the conference
- ‘We’d like to publish the program as soon as possible, and your talk-pages will be featured on it, so please take care of this by $date’
- ‘We’re thinking of publishing by $date, so it’d be great if you could review it by then (no pressure!)’
* October 9, 2021 meeting
- TODO
- bandali:
- Send the follow-ups
- Special care for 40: Ask for doing their talk on Sunday rather than Saturday
- zaeph:
- Take care of the replies from the follow-ups bandali
- Remove sticky from r/emacs
- sachac:
- Going to wait for bandali to finish submitting the de-anonymised versions to front0
- Check-ins:
- bandali:
- Doing pretty okay, and catching up on sleep
- Trying to get on top of things
- corwin:
- Doing good; been busy
- sachac:
- Doing okay! Taking care of kiddo.
- zaeph:
- Still prepping for interviews; made it through the first step.
- TODO for the session
- DONE When do we publish the schedule?
- Do we need to wait for the org-research block to reply? We’ve only bumped them slightly, so it’s probably not necessary.
- …No.
- Clarifying the streaming setup
- bandali is considering doing the streaming on his own again this year.
- The setup from 2020 was a little /crude/, which is why we’re revising the OBS model we had in 2019.
- The plan is to do like what was done in 2019, since bandali’s setup is now more powerful and shouldn’t have the same problems as last time.
- bandali: We can keep our use of OBS fairly minimal, and consider it as /glitter on top/
- We should specify what would constitute that /glitter/
- Maybe we could get alphapapa to help us on this?
- We could get one of the newer orgas working on this, since there is no playbook to be learnt on that one. :)
- We’re going to stick to Linode; bump it up right before the event, and bump it down right after
- Task force for the /glitter/ (in order of interest/availability)
- alphapapa
- zleap
- seabass
- corwin
- zaeph
- Could we be using the other FH server (vm01) for other stuff?
- We could have found a use for it, but it squeezed between our fingers; or we could have returned it to FH
- Based on the original request that we’d filed for FH, we were supposed to use it to process the talks.
- Maybe we could deploy it in time for this year?
- Capacity update for bbb
- 42/200 GB taken
- Might be filled by ≈<2022-04-09 Sat>
* October 2, 2021 meeting
- TODO
- bandali:
- Decomission the private repo from last year
- Reaching out to jwiegley for new Emacs update
- Get in touch with corwin for the streaming setup
- Scheduling with sachac
- Questions raised by sachac after studying the anonymised talks
- Do we want to publish it?
- If we publish it, how precise do we want it to be?
- Do we want to think about dropping talks?
- Time exceptions
- Those are the ones we’ve either bumped down
- Do we post this draft schedule, or do we say that all the people who help us with the scheduling?
- bandali does have an informal list of people involved
- bandali (but he’ll excuse himself since he anonymised
- zaeph
- dbremner
- sachac
- seabass
- acw (Chase)
- corwin
- We’ll probably need to think about which responsibilities we hand over to new orgas, since some of them might be tough (like asking candidates to reduce the size/scope of their talks, or shepherding some of the talks which we don’t think are ready yet)
- Talk-specific considerations for exceptions
- 21: Resolved
- We might want to ask the candidate to record two versions, since the topic is very interesting, but it’s going to be quite tough to fit in the whole 40-min presentation that the candidate intended to
- Since the candidate mentions that there were two-parts, it might make more sense to trim one of the parts
- We could also offer 30-min, but that’d need to reduce the duration of 04 (M-x forever)
- We’ve resolved it by cutting the opening remarks on that day
- 40:
- 34 & 13:
- We need to get the candidates talking
- That’s not a blocker for accepting them, but we still
- 01:
- Maybe we could get the candidate to mention the reMarkable tablet, since it’s more aligned with our FLOSS goals?
- We’re not enthused with
- 02:
- Maybe make it clearer that this is the son
- Potential talks we’re still waiting to hear from
- jwiegley’s dev update
- Broadcasting with subtitles?
- [[https://wiki.c3subtitles.de/en:styleguide][Guide for subtitling talks]]
- We will push for big talks to have subtitles
- We can speakers to provide scripts if they’ve used one; otherwise, we can use whichever technique fits best (YouTube captioning; hand-editing them)
- bandali has fired up emacsconf-private-2021 for sharing conf.org
- We’ll keep pre-recs info on it, for example.
- Report on anonymising the proposals
- bandali: It wasn’t *too* bad; removing the names, the GH links was easy, but it’s definitely not a process
- sachac: Maybe something we can automatise next year! *maniacal laugh*
- Content for the follow-up email:
- Talk is accepted
- Specify which time duration we are accepting (can be automatised?)
- Double-checking availability
- Pre-rec deadline: [2021-10-31 Sun] or [2021-11-07 Sun] latest
- Gentle incentive to submit early so that we can get them captioned
- Please start your talk with your name so that we can now how to pronounce it!
- ‘If you happen to have a script for your talk, please submit it as well!’
- After you’ve finished your pre-rec, feel free to record a longer one that we can direct people to
- Tell people that there will be a page for them on emacsconf.org
- We should ask them for their pronouns which we will include on that page
- …But let’s not aim for sending them the actual URL to the page, since they might be subject to change
- Content that we’ve consider for the follow-up email
- Nudge to write blog-posts about
- Extra stuff to do on tech-checks
- Re-asking how to pronounce their names
- How to introduce people
- Let zaeph do it
- Come up with Englishised IPA for the names of everyone (which zaeph would take care of)
- Actually, it could be zaeph’s entire role
- For EmacsConf’s 2022:
- We might want to track talks according to IDs
- Submission could be sub-01-$title.org
Notes from Paul:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
There is a free software camp coming up that could be useful to signpost people from there to emacs conf to learn about e-macs
https://camp.fsci.in/
p;us the free software foundation europe
Youth Hacking For Freedom
If you like coding, tinkering, and having fun with software and if you are up for a challenge, we have something exciting for you: "Youth Hacking 4 Freedom" (YH4F), the FSFE's hacking competition for young people from Europe!
https://yh4f.org/
Which again could be somewhere to promote emacs / emacs conf
#+END_QUOTE
* September 25, 2021 meeting
- TODO
- bandali & corwin:
- Figure out the streaming setup
- Who should be streaming?
- Experiment with tooling?
- Jitsi?
- RTMP webcamps via BBB?
- corwin:
- Come up with a list of topics for the next EmacsConf 2021
- Based on sachac’s blog
- sachac: ‘There's some elisp in my emacs-news/index.org that has a list of the categories I usually use’
- Think about interesting topics to have in a talkshow format for the next EmacsConf
- Also make a list of highly-political topics and what could be problematic about them
- zaeph:
- Think about personal talks and meta-talks for EmacsConf 2021
- Everyone
- Think about adapting the format based on the number of talks we’ll be fielding
- Come up with a protocol / condition tree
- Check-in
- zaeph:
- Didn’t do as well in the last checkpoint with his mock-interviews; but hopeful for the next one in 8 days!
- Did a quick presentation of what he’s been doing to prepare for his interviews
- bandali:
- Doing pretty okay! Busy week at work again with some not-too-interesting busyworkprevious names of JAMI
- Also been working on ERC patches
- seabass:
- Was here 3 weeks ago, and he’s back with us now!
- Has been working on: [[https://github.com/spdx/spdx-spec][spdx/spdx-spec: The SPDX specification in MarkDown and HTML formats.]]
- Suggested reconsidering the work that has been done last spring on getting text/org accepted as a valid mimetype
- We egged seabass on to make a short user-story talk, especially since he got involved in all this with the last EmacsConf
- corwin:
- Probably going to join us later
- sachac:
- Busy with kiddo today; might not be able to make it
- News
- zaeph: Became co-maint for crdt.el with qhong
- Office hour
- bandali had one on Tuesday
- …Nobody did show up, though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Wasn’t expecting much, but got time to answer emails
- bandali wil have the last one for this year next Tuesday
- Technical aspects of the streaming setup for the conference
- bandali and corwin haven’t been able to meet to discuss
- bandali thought about this, and would rather do the streaming himself (sticking with what worked)
- rtmp server w/ jitsi might be finnicky, and we don’t probably don’t want to risk
- If the server doing the mirroring goes down, we might not be able to
- Should we change our policy with regards to backup streaming services (YouTube, peertube?)
- It’s technically possibly for us to bounce streams and use the servers of non-free platforms to do most of the leg-work, but we don’t think it’s enough to change our policy
- Should we ask FH to provide more facility for the live streaming?
- Doing more with FH:
- sachac: Should we ask FH to handle the hosting of our conferences rather than the platforms we currently use?
- Currently, we use linode for streaming and uwaterloo (via bandali) for initial video upload
- List of tracks or topics for EmacsConf 2021
- Considering our timing with the CFP closure, it’s not necessary for us to think about it right now
- Figuring out what do to during down-times
- Panels
- zaeph is slightly more confident in the format after having thought about it
- We’re quite excited about this, but there are
- sachac: We’re okay for 10am-pm at 75% load
- Intervention with emacs-devel?
- How to deal with private info for emergency contact
- We’ve figured a good workflow that will allow us all to access the files and keep it encrypted
- Closing the CFP
- Should we send an email to warn people?
- It might be a good idea to officially announce the closing of the CFP, but focussing on the thanking. It might also give some extra energy to those who were waiting to submit to hurry up.
* September 18, 2021 meeting
- Carry-over from last time:
- Next actions from last time
- zaeph:
- DONE Look into polling for views to turn into a cron
- bandali took care of it!
- Send email to Jeremy Friesen, and maybe schedule a meeting
- Also Cc: emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org
- Try to find a date that North-American folks can attend too
- CXLD Draft the email for publicising office hour
- DONE Make a PR for adding EmacsConf to [[https://confs.tech/?online=online#][Tech conferences in 2021 and 2022 | Confs.tech]]
- PR here: [[https://github.com/tech-conferences/confs.tech][tech-conferences/confs.tech: List of tech conferences: JavaScript / Design - CSS - UX / Ruby - iOS - Android - PHP - Data - Devops and more.]]
- Done by seabass: thanks!
- Everyone:
- CXLD <2021-09-01 Wed>: Review zaeph’s email proposal for publicising the office hour
- Come up with an exhaustive list of topics/tracks for the next edition
- Find the first TODO this document under [[#ongoing-projects][file:~/emacsconf.org::#ongoing-projects]]
- TODO
- Review the ongoing projects because some projects ought to be updated
- Review the schedule for office hours
- Would sachac want some help with the scheduling?
- Could we maybe document a little more how sachac does it so that other orgas could help (or someone new to recruit)?
- Reviewing office hours
- Do we give up for this year and focus on the next one?
- Check-in
- bandali
- Had to deal with [[https://planet.gnu.org/][Planet GNU]] going down, which took a couple of days but was a lot of stress
- Has also been working on ERC, since emacs-28 is going to be cut soon
- zaeph
- Still working on his interview
- sachac
- Managed to make it!
- corwin
- Managed to make it!
- On the office hours
- Discussion
- zaeph: Has problems keeping up with the commitment, and is feeling locked with regards to publicising them without due funnelling down
- bandali has been participating to some of corwin’s office hours and has been having fun with it, even though it was mostly people from #emacs@libera.chat
- sachac: We already have a healthy number of submissions, so it might not be necessary?
- bandali: It might still be worth it to publicise the office hours on r/emacs, but to present them more as a conversation between friends
- zaeph: This feel closer to workshops, though (i.e., not just 1-on-1)
- zaeph: So, do we consider the office hours format worth reforming, or should we explore workshops for next year?
- Proposals
- We could have weekly/bi-weekly workshops with one of us managing the room so that people could come talk to us about anything, and we’d nudge people towards writing proposals or contacting us for help (since they will know us a little more)
- Should we cancel the office hours
- Should we make a meta-presentation about office hours during EmacsConf 2021
- Why we were thinking they could be useful
- How we did the few of them?
- What plans do we have for the future (e.g. workshop)?
- Handling the end of the CFP
- Extending the CFP by 1 week? <2021-10-07 Thu>
- Not necessarily a good idea because it ends up rushing us
- corwin: We should check stats from last year, and see how many submissions we get in the last week of the CFP (as it is currently shceduled)
- sachac: It’s also fine if it’s a one-day conference
- Come up with an exhaustive list of topics/tracks for the next edition
- Hosting and handling responsibilities according to the number of talks we need to manage
- EmacsConf 2022
- We should pro
* September 4, 2021 meeting
- Next actions from last time
- zaeph:
- Look into polling for views to turn into a cron
- Send email to Jeremy Friesen, and maybe schedule a meeting
- Also Cc: emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org
- Try to find a date that North-American folks can attend too
- Draft the email for publicising office hour
- DONE Make a PR for adding EmacsConf to [[https://confs.tech/?online=online#][Tech conferences in 2021 and 2022 | Confs.tech]]
- PR here: [[https://github.com/tech-conferences/confs.tech][tech-conferences/confs.tech: List of tech conferences: JavaScript / Design - CSS - UX / Ruby - iOS - Android - PHP - Data - Devops and more.]]
- Done by seabass: thanks!
- Everyone:
- <2021-09-01 Wed>: Review zaeph’s email proposal for publicising the office hour
- Come up with an exhaustive list of topics/tracks for the next edition
- Find the first TODO this document under [[#ongoing-projects][file:~/emacsconf.org::#ongoing-projects]]
- TODO
- Review the ongoing projects because some projects ought to be updated
- Review the schedule for office hours
- Would sachac want some help with the scheduling?
- Could we maybe documenta little more how sachac does it so that other orgas could help (or someone new to recruit)?
* August 28, 2021 meeting
- Check-in
- bandali
- Had a lovely time at the cottage
- sacha
- Doing good, as usual and ever!
- zaeph
- Doing /swimmingly/ well (or, as sachac is pointing out, /mostly/ well considering the ear cloggage)
- corwin
- Sleepy, but joined us eventually! :)
- seabass
- We’ve decided to invite seabass to our closed-door session since he’s shown an interest in helping us with the organisation
- Polling number of visits to the CFP page
- zaeph will take care of this
#+begin_src bash
cat /var/log/nginx/access.log{,.1} | awk '/0[56]\/Aug\/2021/ {print $1}' | sort | wc -l # total visits
cat /var/log/nginx/access.log{,.1} | awk '/0[56]\/Aug\/2021/ {print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l # unique visitors
#+end_src
- zaeph joining the r/emacs moderation team
- zaeph summarised the situation that has happened in r/emacs with regards to alleged over-moderation, especially on dissension with social justice topics
- We might want to have a discussion on the validity of platforming such discussion; some people like to discuss those topics and use them to deploy their pedagogy; opposite to that, we might think that not platforming those discussions would be for the best.
- Regardless of what r/emacs elects to do in the future, we should consider it as an experimentation for what EmacsConf could do with regards to platforming controversial topics
- We especially encountered the topic when we had RMS’s talk in EmacsConf 2020
- sachac:
#+begin_quote
Last time, we were leaning towards moderating questions for potentially challenging talks
Hard to evaluate "arguing in bad faith"
Since the greatest conflicts are from opposing values, deeply held
#+end_quote
- Using off-topic tag to maybe not platform them immediately, or tag them accordingly?
- sachac:
#+begin_quote
It might be hard to get the behavior in, but maybe we can get some friendlies to model it.
And the tag can be added later
So by whoever's helping with the pad
And encouraging contact info for followup might also be doable with modeling
#+end_quote
- Finding people to help us with
- zaeph found [[https://takeonrules.com/about/resume/][Jeremy Friesen]] who might be an interesting person to reach out to help us with gender diversity, considering their experience in inclusion of women in corporate software development circles.
- sachac: Diversity extra challenging this year due to disproportionate effect of COVID-related changes on women and minorities
- zaeph will reach out and see what can be done
- Office hours
- corwin is having a stellar time with, but zaeph mostly has people showing up to listen in
- It’s a little bit against the spirit of the office hour
- We might still ask those people to bring over people we’re trying to help with this outreach program
- Publicising
- emacsconf-discuss & emacs-tangents@gnu.org
- r/emacs (and with zaeph as a mod, no need to bug anyone for pinning topics anymore! :) )
- Twitter account (via our account or via the FSF’s; see below)
- Asking the FSF to include it in their monthly newsletter, or just tweet it out
- [[https://confs.tech/?online=online#][Tech conferences in 2021 and 2022 | Confs.tech]]
- ----------------------------------------
- Fediverse presence
- seabass could put together a proposal for getting a Mastodon community
- It might not be a crucial thing to do now
- corwin’s feedback on his session
- The first sessions where mostly corwin sitting alone in the room.
- alphapapa joined and had a long, enthusiastic discussion.
- We need to have another look at the schedule for the ofice hours, especially now that bandali is back from his break
- Podcast update
- bandali has to get in touch with gopar to see if they’re willing and able to take them up again
- bandali wants to get back to it, since a few episodes have already
- Review process for the proposals
- Follow-up from last session: Should we find a time for processing the first batch of proposals that we already have?
- We’ve received 7 proposals so far
- seabass mentioned getting beginners involved in the review process, but zaeph voiced concern about how hard that crowd would be to find, and that it would take quite a bit of energy out of orgas to organise and structure this
- How could we best reach out to this crowd if you’re not much of an Emacs user to begin with?
- Approaching another Lisp community could be a good idea
- zaeph did a collective /mea culpa/ with regards to the 2nd improvement meeting that we were supposed to have
- There were two big topics that would have warranted more scrutiny for us
- Even though we were not able to implement some of the recommendations or to have some of the discussions that we wanted to have for EmacsConf 2021, we’ll still be able to cover those topics with as much time and focus as we want for EmacsConf 2022. In the meantime, however, and provided that we’ve got the people to do it, we can still look into pragmatic solution that wouldn’t require too much time and which would maximise the number of people from different communities coming to help us.
- seabass: You don’t need to be 100% unbiassed to get good viersity; what about going through the regular review process with 90% of the scheduled time, and taking the last 10% randomly.
- We had a long discussion about the benefits of open-door policies with regards to conferences, especially with seabass and corwin
- We need to think about satellite sessions
- Possible locations
- Australia?
- From last year
- Boston
- ERG resuming
- zaeph talked about what the session will be about: catching up
* August 14, 2021 meeting
- Important next actions from last time for today [2021-07-29 Thu 20:30] (UTC):
- CFP
- All done last week!
- Office hours
- Find other timeslots where we’d be available for office hours (tentative for now; no commitment, just feeling the water)
- Check-in
- bandali
- Doing good! Atg a rainy time at the camping, but had a good time overall
- corwin (no longer mplsCorwin thanks to the Freenode exodus!)
- Has been putting a lot of work with FOSSHost
- Managed to get some work done on dungeon-mode
- Put some work on orgvm to update org via the web-browser (on corwin’s SourceHut)
- [[https://git.sr.ht/~mplscorwin/orgvm][~mplscorwin/orgvm - sourcehut git]] (do you want this published on the wiki, corwin?)
- This particular exploration was informed by corwin’s discovery of comic-chat which made him explore the NodeJS implementation
- sachac
- Managed to join us!
- Quick thoughts on involving the public in the review process for the proposals
- sachac: Maybe put anonymized proposals on a wiki page, unless there's anything that's kinda iffy?
- CFP
- Numbers for the CFP (via the nginx logs)
- Total visits: 100k
- Unique visitors 12k
- Pretty large numbers altogether!
- We should probably run this regularly (bi-weekly) to quantify /when/ people are participating
- Nudging people in directions that we want (sachac)
- In a couple of weeks?
- Office hours
- Figuring out a schedule with every orgas (or users?) who want to get involved)
- Right now, we need to find a second slot that would be friendly to East Asia and Oceania
- Availabilities
- bandali will be away from <2021-08-21 Sat> to <2021-08-24 Tue>
- zaeph is available all summer
- Even if nobody shows up to the early office hours, there’s no rush: they’ll be running until the end of the CFP, and orgas can work on the office hours or on EmacsConf during them. :)
- Alternative method for helping people: assisting during the recording
- Orgas could attend the recording of the presentations and ask questions to the presenter (which may or may not be included
- TODO Next actions
- Everyone
- Come up with an exhaustive list of topics/tracks for the next edition
- Find the first TODO this document under [[#ongoing-projects][file:~/emacsconf.org::#ongoing-projects]]
- corwin
- Tue and Fri night (CST) TBC
- Long running next actions:
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Prepare the announcement email for the Improvement Meeting™
- Wiki updates for references to freenode
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* July 24, 2021 meeting
- Check-in
- zaeph:
- A whole lot of swimming, and a whole lot of happiness as a result. :)
- Feeling overworked after the return from the break, and has had trouble readjusting to the life of the freelancer
- sachac:
- Still taking care of the kiddo, and introducing math into their play
- bandali:
- Enjoying some time outside after having spent *months* inside
- Started picking up sports again
- Started watching documentaries on YouTube about people building cabins, and got some ideas as a result. :)
- Debrief the first improvement meeting
- The meeting went really well!
- Lack of publicity might have prevented some people to join us.
- We do have facility with many Emacs communities to make the posts more visible, but it’s not sure if we even needed to do so
- We went a little overboard with the discussion about reviewing submissions at the end, but it was very interesting, so we’re too bummed about it.
- The turnout wasn’t anything super large, but it was pretty good for what we had set out to do; we had productive discussions, and people were able to feed us questions relatively smoothly.
- Questions
- Do we need another meeting?
- As happy as we’d be to have another one, it doesn’t feel like this is particularly warranted. Thanks to jcorneli’s notes, we have good notes on the improvement meeting.
- Plan the next CFP
- Methods
- What are the elements that we need to take into account for the CFP?
- With the outreach program, making sure that we provide a private incubator for the ideas of people who might be shy
- The raison-d’être of the office hours
- Allowing people to submit proposals even though they might not be able to make it for the next *main* EmacsConf
- This could either be handled via pre-recordings or a separate track for timezones which are not working well with the times we’ve picked (e.g. APAC)
- Therefore, we might add people to describe their availability in the CFP
- We want to involve people in the review process
- Asking for volunteers
- Around the time when we publish the CFP, we should also make a call for volunteers to help us with all aspects of the CFP and of the conference itself
- We’re probably going to need more organisers based on the fact that EmacsConf 2020 was a success, but also because we will definitely need extra pairs of hands if we are to have another track for the next EmacsConf
- How to publicise the proposals
- Separate mailing list?
- Some people might hesitate
- How should we review submissions?
- Based on the improvement meeting, we’d be interesting in having a public or semi-public mode of review (the details still need to be ironed out, either in a closed meeting or in a public improvement meeting if we consider this to be necessary)
- Keeping the proposals private is fine (it’s what we did the previous years); what we might want to encourage people to publish their proposal on their own platforms (or on any community platform like Reddit)
- Adding a blurb to the CFP: ‘If you want to share your proposal publicly for people to review, tick this box: [ ]’
- We might not get a lot of people ticking this box, though, since people are a little cagey when it comes to sharing WIP proposals that can be refused
- If we were to open all the proposals, we would most definitely have to anonymise the data
- On the other hand, if we invite people to put it on their platform, they lose the anonymity (but, at the same time, if they already have a platform, they’re already willing to share)
- This is a dense problem,
- How should we modify the CFP
- We should ask people what their availability will be, notably to get their timezone
- We should further nudge people to think that they have something to share
- We will also be sharing this message with the office hours
- We can include a section for people to suggest modifications to the CFP process as a follow-up to the improvement meeting
- ‘Even though the CFP is out, not everything is set in stone, and we can have other improvement meetings’
- Since the period between when the CFP opens and when it closes won’t bbe more strenuous on the orgas as the debrief period after EmacsConf 2020, we can afford to have office hours, or to turn some of those office hours into public meeting according to needs and demands
- Calendar
- Last year the CFP started on Aug 24
- Tentative calendar
| [2021-08-02 Mon] | CFP opens |
| [2021-09-30 Thu] | CFP closes |
| [2021-10-15 Fri] | Speaker notifications |
| [2021-10-31 Sun] | Schedule published |
| [2021-11-27 Sat]--[2021-11-28 Sun] (TBC) | EmacsConf 2021 |
- Updating the website for EmacsConf 2021
- We can modify the wiki in place and just prepend ‘[DRAFT]’ to every page (to prevent those pesky redditors from blowing off the surprise :o) )
- bandali’s plan to publish a streaming guide
- Rather than obsessing about it in the weeks leading tot eh EmacsConf, we should keep it operational so that sachac and zaeph can have the essential stuff
- We can also sublimate a lot of the energy that would go into this guide into a presentation for the actual EmacsConf
- sachac could also present the stuff that she’s been doing on her side
- zaeph could also talk about the organisation of the debriefs and the organisation of EmacsConf 2021
- bandali has been *dying* to do such a guide since EmacsConf 2019 (even before online conferences were cool #pandemic)
- We could record lightning talks to be played during down-time (if any), or at the end of the conference; they’re just nice extra bonuses, and the meat of the content will be in written form published afterwards
- For now, we can leave at that, and revisit the topic later on
- Office hours
- Periods of unavailability
| zaeph | [2021-07-31 Sat]--[2021-08-07 Sat] |
| bandali | [2021-08-21 Sat]--[2021-08-28 Sat] |
| bandali | early Aug |
- Parameters that we need to keep in mind for choosing times for the office hours
- We need to leave the 2h slot we have weekly for preparing the conf: NO CONFLICT
- We need to have slots which are friendly to most timezones: TIMESLOTS AROUND THE DAY
- We need to have slots which are respectful of the orgas time: NOT TOO MANY
- We need to have recurring slots so that people can plan for them: REGULAR
- As long as the CFP is open, we might not need to meet 2h on a weekly basis, so we could use one of them for office hours
- Playing it by the ear:
- If people are not showing up or too many of them are, we might as well adapt the schedule; right now, it’s safe to use one of the 2h we have for our Saturday meetings for office hours
- Figuring out good time slots
- bandali & zaeph can invest time in their evenings to cover a lot of timezones
- However, it would be easier for someone in PDT to cover the whole of Asia
- Important next actions for next operational meeting on [2021-07-29 Thu 20:30] (UTC):
- CFP
- Update files on the wiki:
- 2021/cfp.md
- 2021/submit.md
- Anything that has to do with announcing EmacsConf 2021
- Update sidebars
- Prepare announcement:
- Elements to mention
- Asking for volunteers
- CFP
- EmacsConf 2021
- Office hours schedule & link to the room (to be created)
- Office hours
- Find other timeslots where we’d be available for office hours (tentative for now; no commitment, just feeling the water)
- Long running next actions:
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Prepare the announcement email for the Improvement Meeting™
- Wiki updates for references to freenode
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* June 26, 2021 meeting
- Check-in:
- bandali:
- The previous weeks flew by, esp. with the freenode/libera troubles and the migration
- It was an interesting time nonetheless
- Wrote a script for irc.gnu.org to drop the connection, but only /after/ sending them IRC messages to let them know what’s been going on (via xinetd)
- Also supports SSL (via stunnel4)
- Also thinking of documenting the process elsewhere (in a blogpost, perhaps?)
- Lamenting the fact that he still hasn’t had the time to release the guide/blogpost on the tech-stack for EmacsConf
- Finally gotta give himself a kick to get it written
- Could be a presentation for the next EmacsConf in a potential Meta track
- sachac:
- Busy with kiddo
- Doing okay! Still working on stenography
- zaeph:
- Lots of stuff: cool holiday, swimming again, 2nd shot of Pfizer
- Fixing the cert-renewal for bbb
- We seemed to have had a problem with the renewal of the Let’s Encrypt certificate
- We hope that we’ve fixed it,a dn we’ll check again in 2 months when the cert is due to expire.
- Preparing the public meeting
- Goals for today:
- Settle on a tech stack (BBB + streaming)
- Write quick report on what we’ve been doing since the last EmacsConf
- Prepare announcement for office hours (and contextual framing wrt diversity)
- Anticipate questions (esp. wrt diversity)
- How to publicise the event in the week leading up to it
- Reddit announcement
- Hacker News announcement
- Sacha’s blog
- Categories announced in the email
- diversity and outreach,
- accessibility,
- technology and infrastructure, and
- feedback/discussion on other aspects of the conference.
- Tech-aspects
- Managing people/questions
- Is it safe to publish the link to the main room (being streamed)?
- It’s already published; but we could still use it as a staging room
- Do we need a staging room for letting people into the main room?
- Probably not necessary
- Selecting questions
- How should we take written questions?
- IRC?
- Etherpad?
- Both?
- Answer:
- We should probably favour questions asked in BBB (either by text-chat or audio), but bandali can probably also field questions from #emacsconf@libera.chat (for a non-JS way to participate)
- Should we refrain from showing the pad on the stream to avoid fielding sensitive questions without due preparation on our end?
- Answer
- Since we’re not expecting too many people, we’re just going to wing it with BBB-chat constantly on the screen, and we can always hide it if need be
- Streaming at live0 as usual
- We should update live.emacsconf.org to reflect the changes for the current meeting
- How do we deal with contingencies?
- zaeph will prepare protocols for handling either too many people participating into the events, or the chat going too fast, etc.
- Addressing difficult questions
- On diversity (gender, ethnicies, etc.)
- ‘These are not new problems, and it’s not restricted to Emacs either. We think Emacs is a pretty diverse community, but we think that the office hours are going to be a good way to reach out to people. We are striving to improve the current situation, and we are open to suggestions; which is exactly why we are having this meeting today.’
- On doing diversity ‘by the numbers’
- ‘We’re all about inclusivity here; I personally don’t feel it’d be a good idea to exclude people based on their gender or their ethnies just to fit an arbitrary number. We’re trying to fix the problem byt attracting /more/ people rather than /excluding/ some.’
- ‘Improving the /status quo/ is /exactly/ what we’re striving to do here and with the office hours, so, by all means, do come talk with us if you’ve got input on this
- On RMS
- ‘He’s been a central figure in Emacs and FLOSS: we value his views within those bounds, and are willing to hear him out on those topics.
- On FH
- ‘We don’t run FH; we don’t pay them, nor receive any money from them; if you have questions about Freenode and Fosshost, please look at the recent news and direct further questions to the people in charge.’
- On signing CLA for contributing to Emacs
- bandali can take care of this one, and zaeph can assist
- None of us here is an Emacs maintainer, so take what we’ll say with a grain of salt
- Pros
- Entire codebase remains FSF-copyrighted, which means it’s also FSF-enforcable
- Cons
- Make contributions to Emacs a little more difficult
- TINYCHANGE is fine for small stuff
- For larger changes, or for contributing longer term, the amount of time that the assignment takes is negligeable, or can be looked over the entire duration (2m at most)
- On leenode
- bandali can take care of it (chronology, why we did it)
- On funny technical questions
- We can provide somewhat serious answers
- It’s an always-improving process; we’re all in this together, and if you think you can do this, or want to do this, you’re in the right place to discuss it!
- Assigning rôles
- Host
- Overall animation
- Offloading questions to others
- Presenting the report
- Question fielder
- Conduct-guidelines reminder
- Timekeeper
- Streamer: bandali
- Will look after the stream
- Staging room for letting people in
- Chronology for starting the meeting
- bandali starts the BBB room
- sachac, zaeph (and other willing orgas) join the room
- bandali starts the stream
- bandali welcoming everyone shortly (so as to focus on the stream ASAP)
- zaeph explain what the meeting is about
- sachac(/zaeph) explain how to interact with us
- We don’t need to be particularly long; we’re not going to have too many people, and we can expect people to play nice
- We’re going to favour BBB for the questiosn (botht he text-chat and audio), and if questions arise
- zaeph present what we’ve been up to (up to 15’; however long is appropriate)
- If there’s a whole lot of people coming to the meeting, we dont’ need to cut on the report, and we can just have another meeting another time in July.
- Should include a mention to the office hours that we’re going to be doing, as well as mentioning the parts which are up for discussion
- Next actions for the meeting
- bandali
- Update live.emacsconf.org
- Test all the modules of the streaming setup (OBS, BBB, live0, 480p stream, etc.)
- Ping zaeph in case of problems
- sachac
- Could sachac take care of the 480p stream like she did last time
- zaeph
- Write the report for EmacsConf/EmacsVerse
- Submit it to bandali and sachac by Wednesday for review
- Next meeting
- [2021-07-03 Sat 13:30] (UTC) for tech-check
- 9:30am EDT for bandali and sachac
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- The Meeting™
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- From ERG:
- We might want to send a report with what we’ve done with regards to the comments that were made at the end of the previous edition
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Prepare the announcement email for the Improvement Meeting™
- Wiki updates for references to freenode
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* June 5, 2021 meeting
- Next actions from last time
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- The Meeting™
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- From ERG:
- We might want to send a report with what we’ve done with regards to the comments that were made at the end of the previous edition
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Prepare the announcement email for the Improvement Meeting™
- Wiki updates for references to freenode
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* May 29, 2021 meeting
- Check-in
- bandali
- Pretty alright week; busy at work, mostly because of the irc stuff
- sachac
- With kiddo; doing good, and still working on stenography
- zaeph
- In holiday!
- IRC, freenode & FSF
- The FSF had a meeting to decide whether to stay on freenode; people were mostly in favour to moving to Libera
- It’s a shame that some channels had to be left behind, especially since there is a sentimental value associated to those channels
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- The Meeting™
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- From ERG:
- We might want to send a report with what we’ve done with regards to the comments that were made at the end of the previous edition
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Prepare the announcement email for the Improvement Meeting™
- Wiki updates for references to freenode
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* May 22, 2021 meeting
- Next actions from last time
- Think about the wording of the email we’d want to send on [2021-06-05 Sat]
- We’ve all been able to think/write about it
- UG calendar:
- Figure out an updating workflow for the ICS feed
- Check-in:
- bandali
- Busy week because of freenode
- sachac
- Busy with kid, but around!
- Got her vaccine
- zaeph
- Busy week
- ~emacs-init-time~ measuring contest
| zaeph | 19.250432 seconds |
| bandali | 0.288222 seconds |
| sachac | "Init? What's that? ;)" |
- Freenode Exodus™
- We’ve migrated to LiberaChat, as have many FLOSS communities
- Some communities have elected to move to Matrix, though, which is a bit of a problem for fragmentation
- e.g. #sway
- We need to announce our migration to the people on the mailing list and on the wiki
- We should post regularly about it @freenode
- Emacs APAC
- Migrated to FH’s BBB
- Still in need of a mailing-list
- SitRep on mailman?
- bandali: Mailan is up and running, but needed to audit some parts of it
- There might be delivery issues that needs to be figured out with FH
- bandali filed a ticket with them, but apparently, they can’t do much on their side
- For a while, the IPv6 routing on the server was down, and bandali only realised it a few weeks later
- If it coincided with the time they tried to sent the email, it might have been the problem
- As a result, we need to check what we can do about it
- Name confirmed with bandali: emacs-apac
- EmacsConf Public-Planning Meeting (or The Meeting™)
- We’ve taken some time yesterday/today to write
- Posting a wiki page with thoughts might be nice
- Format
- We could just list the topics, but have in our minds our plans, so that if/when they come up, we can actually contribute to that wiki
- (Also, it’s less work for us!)
- It would allow to /valorise/ the contributions of the community
- sachac: We could also seed the topics by asking friendlies to file suggestions in that document
- Anonymity
- People can make anonymous or named contributions
- We’ll probably use Etherpad, so we can mention to people that, in order to be anonymous, they just have to use a pseudonym (or anon) when they write their thoughts
- Platform
- Etherpad is what we used for the 2020 edition, but it requires JS
- crdt.el could be a good solution, but it does not support encryption yet
- Emails could be a nice fallback solution
- Next actions:
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- The Meeting™
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- From ERG:
- We might want to send a report with what we’ve done with regards to the comments that were made at the end of the previous edition
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Wiki updates for references to freenode
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* May 15, 2021 meeting
- Next actions from last time
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- bandali:
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Done!
- Wipe the private-repo
- Will be done shorty; although we might want to keep it around for working on WIP stuff
- Check-ins:
- zaeph:
- Got his vaccine!
- bandali:
- Will get his vaccine in a couple of weeks
- sachac:
- Taking care of kiddo today.
- mplsCorwin:
- It’s been a while!
- Voluntereed for Worg maintenance.
- bandali & zaeph: BBB update report
- bandali successfully managed to update our BBB instance on bbb (the server)
- The update was supposed to only include security stuff; somehow, something still managed to break
- Debian and Ubuntu usually are pretty strict about security updates not breaking anything; if manual intervention is required, they print a popup
- The explanation here might be that it’s coming from a 3rd-party provider, which probably has less polish
- The FSF’s BBB instance is running on two servers which are managed via ansible
- However, we had a problem with the echo server dying on us, and we only noticed when Emacs-SF needed to go live
- The fix was to reset nginx, since something had been updated
- Fix for the future:
- When we update the server, we need to check if everything is still working
- If we set up auto-updates on a cron, we might want to have it fire on Sundays so that an orgas can check if everything still works
- Recordings from the FSF’s BBB
- zaeph downloaded the old recordings from the FSF’s server
- They’re stored on his server
- Emacs-SF [2021-05-13 Thu]: Getting recording from FSF’s BBB
- Recording is not available on the [[https://testgreenlight.fsf.org/leo-hh9-v49][room]]
- bandali is going to check
- Podcast
- bandali started working on the website
- We can push the discussion to next week
- EmacsConf Improvement Meeting
- Sending an email on [2021-06-05 Sat] (3 weeks from now) to share conclusions from our debriefs
- This would provide some guidance for the discussion, and give people a month of prep if they want to participate
- The announcement is nice and important, but we should provide details on the bulletpoints that we’d be talking about (with like 2-3 lines to give food-for-thought to the people)
- bandali is
- Demantling the private repo
- bandali was thinking of wiping/shreding all the git history, and only keep the simple files going forward (i.e. without VCS)
- Typically, we don’t need to track most of the changes in those files.
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- UG calendar:
- Help sachac figure out an updating workflow for the ICS feed
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- EmacsConf Improvement Meeting
- Think about potential topics of improvements (diversity, accessibility, tech, outreach, etc.)
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- Think about the wording of the email we’d want to send on [2021-06-05 Sat]
- 2-3 lines per axes of work
- From ERG:
- We might want to send a report with what we’ve done with regards to the comments that were made at the end of the previous edition
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- bandali:
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* May 8, 2021 meeting
- Next actions from last session
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- EmacsConf Improvement Meeting
- Think about potential topics of improvements (diversity, accessibility, tech, outreach, etc.)
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming setup
- People-based
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Next session: [2021-05-03 Mon]
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Next session: [2021-05-05 Wed]
- Modernise our notes (org-roam? org-agenda?)
- Isolate different meetings
- bandali:
- Set up the vm01 server
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers
- Podcast:
- Think about announcing the podcast
- Check-in:
- bandali:
- Feeling good!
- zaeph:
- Feeling good!
- sachac:
- Feeling good!
- bandali: On our infrastructure
- Notes were taken in our private repo
- front0
- If we get more money, we might want to move stuff over to other servers because we’re making heavy usage of front0
- Mail servers
- bandali updated the exim version with security fixes
- live0
- Used as the primary icecast stream server
- We’re running out of space
- bandali might be fetching some of the videos and move them locally or to another server (e.g. FH’s) to make some room
- ‘It makes sense to remove the previous one
- bbb
- As bandali was ssh’ing into the bbb servers, there were lots of update available
- bandali is going to update the server now, and set up a routine for security updates
- On publishing our infra
- Maybe we could make some of the info on our infra public (like the capabilities of the servers, or where we are hosting what)
- zaeph gushed about the lispy stuff that he had been writing this week
- Podcast: Do we need to chat about it today?
- It might be interesting to discuss when to announce the podcast
- We’re waiting on the greenlight from gopar since some stuff remains to be done
- bandali: The website also needs to be set up
- On the BBB server, the well-named ‘bbb’
- We did get our update from 4GB to 8GB (yay!)
- Someone from FH (not mplsCorwin) did it, although it was also nudged by mplsCorwin; in short, thanks everyone!
- On Emacs NYC
- sachac attended
- They’re interested in testing our BBB platform
- zaeph will take care of this (alongside ATX and M-x Research)
- They’re also interested in special interest groups, particularly:
- Org+gtd
- Beginner-oriented UG
- bandali also mentioned emsig for Emacs multimedia stuff
- We might want to focus on this interest-based UG in the summer, especially as geo-based UG revert to in-person meetings
- Another path of work could be to figure out how to stream the in-person meetings
- bandali: ‘Maybe we could think of online-events as EmacsConf events with themes, like gaming, GTD, music, multimedia’
- This could be a discussion to have during the public meeting we’ll be having soon
- EmacsConf Public-Planning meeting (formerly known as the ‘Emacs Improvement Meeting’)
- zaeph is going on holiday for most of June, and it might be hard to squeeze it in early-June or in the 2nd half of April
- As a result, let’s aim to have it in the first week of July; but we need to bear in mind that a lot of people might be on holiday)
- That would also entail having 6 different actions to do in July:
- Have the improvement meeting
- Make adjustments according to the meeting
- Have a 2nd meeting where we share our adjustments
- Make a 2nd round of adjustments
- Prepare for the CFP
- Announce the CFP (by July 19)
- We should probably start this discussion asynchronously on our mailing lists so that people may prepare for the meetings
- It would show that we care about people preparing for this meeting
- Tentative calendar:
| Send email announcing the public event | [2021-06-05 Sat] |
| Public event | [2021-07-03 Sat] |
| Potential 2nd public event | [2021-07-10 Sat] |
| CFP + Announcement for office hours | [2021-07-19 Mon] |
- Observations:
- We announce the event a month ahead
- We have a week after the first public event to implement changes
- The 2nd public event will only be warranted if we need to make fundamental changes to our approach
- We have a week after the 2nd public event and before the CFP to make final adjustments
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- UG calendar:
- Help sachac figure out an updating workflow for the ICS feed
- bbb:
- BBB experimentations:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Gauge how much the number of present users affect the resources
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- EmacsConf Improvement Meeting
- Think about potential topics of improvements (diversity, accessibility, tech, outreach, etc.)
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- Think about the wording of the email we’d want to send on [2021-06-05 Sat]
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming
- We might want to discuss the podcast during the next session
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Do the same with M-x Research
- Modernise our notes (org-roam? org-agenda?)
- Isolate different meetings
- bandali:
- Check if there is anything important on live0 that would need archiving (besides the raw EmacsConf2020 ಠ_ಠ)
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers (very quick)
- Wipe the private-repo
* May 1, 2021 meeting
- Check-in:
- bandali:
- Since the peak 2 weeks ago, things have been getting better
- Has been able to go back to GNU Savannah, and was happy about it
- sachac:
- Doing chores in the background
- ‘learning steno, infiltrating steno community (interestingly, it's majority-female), wrote plover-websocket-el for controlling steno software from Emacs :)’
- zaeph:
- Is excited about sachac’s work on steno!
- Did build emacs’s main(/master)
- Building Emacs’s main(/master) & native compilations
- Useful commands for cleaning the repository (in case of compilation problems with byte-/native-compiled files
#+begin_src sh
git clean -xdf
make distclean
#+end_src
- Retrieving recordings from the FSF
- Low-priority, but it’d be nice if we could do it before the end of May.
- bandali got a link from the FSF team.
- The link that we got allows us.
- sachac: ‘The webm links follow a consistent pattern based on the meetingId’
- Next actions from last time
- People-based:
- sachac:
- Check if you have access to the bbb server: Done!
- Diversity (& potentially Accessibility) meeting:
- Think about people to invite to the meeting.
- Check if they’re available for [2021-05-15 Sat]
- Assess whether we need to have two days to cover more people.
- This might require some outreach prior to the diversity meeting
- ----------------------------------------
- It might be best for us to thing of this diversity meeting as something to organise (like the EmacsConf)
- We’d be calling it for that meeting, but we would not be the *centre* of it; we’d merely be presenting our conclusions from last year, and the outreach program that we had in mind
- Do we want to put forward something and bias the discussion? It would not necessarily be /imposing/ anything (it’s our conference, after all)
- If we are to present, it should be fairly short (5-10’) to keep it as a /discussion/
- ‘We’re not going to auto-magically solve every-problem; but we want to give our ideas to people, and make sure that people agree/disagree with what we’ve done
- How to deal with controversial figures
- The ‘RMS question’
- ‘We collectively had this thought or idea that we could have these people as long as, first of all, their presentations and discussions are centred around Emacs (and not something completely off-topic); and we also have a set of guidelines for conduct and such that, if any problem was to arise, we could point to that.’
- Bottom-line: We’ve already implemented safe-checks for this
- If someone is a horrible person that has done horrible thing, we wouldn’t be excited about having them along; but as far as we are concerned
- We tried to rôle-play possible answers that could be given to our reactions with RMS, and we can see that it’ll take a lot of preparation
- Putting people on the spot with questions like the one zaeph had at the end of his first presentation (with regards to the impact of his ethnicity/gender on his developer experience): What could we do?
- We don’t want the speakers to be dismissive of it because it shows either a lack of importance or…?
- We said during the debrief that it’d be something to approach in the speaker-prep
- As a temporary measure, /delaying/ is perfectly reasonable response
- Answering later helps keeping things calm
- [IMPORTANT] Conclusions on dealing with controversial figures or loaded questions
- Teaching speakers to /defer/ is probably the best thing we can do
- We can also implement a safe-word (or safe-action) for speakers to communicate unease
- ‘Hey $orga, what do you think about this?’
- It’s a signal for orgas to interpret; they could be using this sentence in non-stressful situations, but it’ll be up to our discretion to see what to do.
- On our ends (the orgas), we can prepare a little more for loaded questions (especially questions of social-justice) so as to assist the speakers and take the onus for addressing the question with the persons asking the questions
- Orgas can also add nudges in the Etherpad (if we use it again this year)
- On a related note, with regards to fielding questions to speakers (instead of having them read the questions on their end)
- We’re not sure if we want to do it all the time; but if we’re comfortable with it, we may
- We could try it to make it more conversational with the speakers
- We could set up a team of orgas with one orga introducing the person (potentially the pre-checker), another orga to ask the question, and yet another orga to prepare the questions on the Etherpad (adding hedges for loaded questions)
- With regard to pronouncing the names properly
- We can ask them during the speaker-prep (ahead of the conference)
- We can ask them during the pre-check
- During the pre-checks, orgas should ask speakers for their names, how to pronounce them, and the pronouns that they use.
- We need to fully internalise the asking/giving of pronouns at every step of the way for the conference (tech-checks, pre-checks, beginning of conf for orgas, etc.)
- We can do this as a nudge for people, as in, we’re not ‘forcing’ people to give their pronouns, but we are encouraging them (so, optional)
- We should also standardise the pronunciation of names (via IPA or via English vocalisation) as a low priority
- ----------------------------------------
- After doing a 5-10’ presentation of all those points, do we want to ask people questions, or are we just happy to let the discussion be free?
- We want to appear as open as possible; as such, we might want to make it clear that the plan that we have is based on the previous editions of EmacsConf, but that we are quite willing to adapt it based on the participants’s inputs
- We don’t need to mention that we should remain civil, unless there’s a particularly egregious offender
- Questions we could ask:
- ‘What’s working elsewhere? Do you have examples of conferences doing well with regards to these issues?’
- Let’s come up with more questions for next time
- ----------------------------------------
- Should this discussion be a subset of a general EmacsConf improvement meeting
- If we are to engulf the diversity meeting into another one, we should nevertheless mention that diversity & accessibility should be essential talk-points
- We don’t have to limit ourselves to just this one meeting
- We could also announce the outreach program, and start with the office hours not too long after the meeting
- Do we want to make this meeting public?
- We don’t necessarily stream it; we could just do it in a BBB room
- This way, we can ask participants if they’re okay with us publishing their recording
- Podcast
- bandali & gopar had little time to work on the podcast; we’ll talk more about it next week
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- EmacsConf improvement meeting
- Think about potential topics of improvements (diversity, accessibility, tech, outreach, etc.)
- Look for questions to submit to the panel/public with regards to diversity, accessibility, or any topic we see fit
- Misc:
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming setup
- People-based
- zaeph:
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Next session: [2021-05-03 Mon]
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Next session: [2021-05-05 Wed]
- Modernise our notes (org-roam? org-agenda?)
- Isolate different meetings
- bandali:
- Set up the vm01 server
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers
- Podcast:
- Think about announcing the podcast
* April 24, 2021 meeting
- Tentative agenda
- Diversity outreach
- We might want to get the conversation properly started wrt the CFP that we’d like to publish earlier this year (late-July)
- How to get all the people in EmacsConf along for important discussions (e.g. diversity)?
- Coming up with a tentative calendar for the next EmacsConf as a first step towards properly working on the next edition
- Check-in:
- bandali:
- This week was less busy, yay!
- sachac:
- Family business as usual. :)
- zaeph:
- Busy week with the job application
- Objectives for today
- Keeping it short so that we can go enjoy the sun
- Setting up a bigger session next time, possibly for the diversity talk
- Next actions from last time:
- People-based
- zaeph:
- Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- → Still not up
- bandali did talk with the person in charge at the FSF
- The files of the recording are available; we just need to relate UID to rooms
- Emacs APAC invitation
- Done; it went well.
- Things to prepare for next week:
- Diversity discussion
- Calendar
- We want the CFP to happen in July (so, earlier than last year)
- Reasoning:
- Last year, we weren’t sure if there was going to be an EmacsConf
- An earlier CFP opens up the opportunity for a more thorough outreach program (office hours, events, EUG (Emacs UserGroup), etc.)
- Do we want to change the date of the event itself?
- Late November has been the period we used for the last two sessions
- It didn’t clash with any other conference in that area
- seagl happened two weeks before this year’s edition
- It doesn’t clash with people’s holiday
- Retroplaning:
- Rethinking the CFP
- In our post-conference debrief, we discussed making some changes to the CFP
- Both anonymized submissions and accepting everything provided good defences against bias, although anonymizing took a bit of effort from bandali; we should definitely continue doing that.
- That submission process asked for demographic info and got lots of pushback.
- Modifying the CFP to include a nudge to encourage people worked better.
- We also wanted to explore the topicalisation of the presentations:
- Gaming
- organisation
- Meta talk on community and the EmacsConf itself
- Diversity Meeting: What do we want to talk about?
- CFP process; vetting the method that we’ve used last year
- Outreach program to nudge people into participating
- The goal is not to be obnoxious about it; just gentle nudges. :)
- Places where those nudges could be provided
- office hours
- livestreams
- EUG meetups
- other events
- Any other ideas?
- Topic in the EmacsConf
- During the post-conf debrief, we mentioned that we’d be interesting in having a select amount of topics/tracks to structure the conference, but also to nudge people from those areas to participate.
- bandali: ‘If we manage to break talks into separate tracks, notably with streaming volunteers
- Bound to whether we can get volunteers to take care of streaming
- We probably need to take this into account before the conference itself so that we can mobilise volunteers and train them for streaming (as well as vetting their streaming setup)
- GLT21
- sachac was interested to know if they had any streaming methods we could use as inspiration.
- We don’t think they’re using a .webm endpoint, but probably HLS and/or RTMP
- Anonymised submissions
- Do we need to discuss this in terms of diversity?
- Last year, we didn’t refuse any talk, so this was not a factor in the lack of representation
- This year, we might get more submissions, so it might be wise to do it again (because it could become a factor).
- Returning to working on technical aspects
- We will have 2-3 months after the CFP has been released to work on the technical side properly; but it’d be nice if we could work on this earlier so that bandali does not stress too much about it.
- It’d be especially interesting to work with a gstreamer pipeline that lets us switch betwen prerecorded and live
- May is probably going to be a chill month.
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- Diversity (& potentially Accessibility) meeting:
- Think about people to invite to the meeting.
- Check if they’re available for [2021-05-15 Sat]
- Assess whether we need to have two days to cover more people.
- bbb:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- People-based:
- zaeph:
- Checking how bbb structure the recordings server-side so that we may retrieve those on the FSF’s instance
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Next session: [2021-05-03 Mon]
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Next session: [2021-05-05 Wed]
- Look into GLT21 to see if they have specifications/doc for their streaming setup
- sachac:
- Check if you have access to the bbb server
- bandali:
- Set up the vm01 server
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers
- Podcast:
- Think about announcing the podcast
* April 17, 2021 meeting
- Tentative agenda
- Diversity outreach
- We might want to get the conversation properly started wrt the CFP that we’d like to publish earlier this year (late-July)
- How to get all the people in EmacsConf along for important discussions (e.g. diversity)?
- Coming up with an agenda for the next EmacsConf
- Check-in
- bandali
- Things have been a little tough recently. :(
- Work has been busy; less so than a couple of weeks ago, but still busy
- zaeph
- Lots of interesting projects going on the side, but no time for much things on
- mplsCorwin
- Arrived near the end of the meeting
- Next actions from last week
- bandali:
- FH servers:
- Ask FH for more RAM on the BBB server
- Set up the vm01 server
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers
- Podcast:
- Think about announcing the podcast
- sachac:
- Not here today
- zaeph:
- Was quite busy; didn’t have time to do much
- Performance review for bbb
- Stress-test with Emacs-SF where we peaked at 33 concurrent viewers/participants
- Conclusions:
- CPU load:
- Load increases linearly with the number of video streams (screen-share or webcams) connected
- 6 video streams were enough to saturate the CPUs (90%)
- The number of people connected via audio barely influences load
- The high usage might be due to the RAM being full
- RAM usage:
- Increases with number of users connected (audio or video)
- In different scenarios (on top of the average usage of 2GB)
| Processing recording | 0.5 GB |
| Conferencing (2 people) + Processing previous recording | 1 GB |
| Conferencing (33 people) | 1.5 GB |
- Next things to address on this question:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- If 8 GB does not work out, we’re happy to only ask 6 GB
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- bandali’s investigation into Mailman
- Problem with FH email; probably an IPv6 problem?
- Will need more investigation, especially if we are to give an email to Emacs APAC (or other usergroups that desire it)
- mplsCorwin: Talk with Nate Sales
- We want to talk with Nate Sales about CDN stuff
- mplsCorwin will be asking Nate Sales to come again on [2021-05-01 Sat]
- Also to be used for FTP uploads
- mplsCorwin update on FH
- mplsCorwin is mentioning that we might get another server to handle
- Depending on the location
- Next actions
- Project-based:
- bbb:
- See if increasing the RAM results in less CPU usage
- Working with the swap
- Decreasing the swapiness of the kernel might help
- Test RW speed (elsewhere than ~/tmp/~)
- Check if we can change the ffmpeg prioritisation for BBB (so as to get recordings out sooner, or to manage them ourselves)
- Does bbb spawn a ffmpeg process that we can investigate?
- People-based
- zaeph:
- Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- → Still not up
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Next session: [2021-05-03 Mon]
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Next session: [2021-05-05 Wed]
- sachac:
- Check if you have access to the bbb server
- bandali:
- Set up the vm01 server
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers
- Podcast:
- Think about announcing the podcast
* April 10, 2021 meeting
- Next actions (from last session):
- bandali:
- Check how much server space we have with FH (200 GB?)
- We now have two servers on FH
Specs:
#+begin_quote
bbb:
- 6 cpu cores
- 200gb disk (20 used, 167 free)
- 4gb ram (3.56gb of 3.91 used / >90%)
- TODO We might want to request a RAM increase to 6GB or 8GB?
- bandali is taking care of that
- request upgrade to 8gb
- ubuntu 16.04
- ssh bbb@bbb.emacsverse.org
vm01:
- 6 cpu cores
- 300gb disk
- 2gb ram
- request upgrade to 4gb?
- booted in an arch live usb
- We might want to install the system properly?
#+end_quote
- Request more RAM for the server (4 GB only right now?)
- Get access to FH’s server to zaeph and sacha (optional, sachac: probably not needed now)
- Now live!
- Figure out how to change the domain name with the FH BBB instance
- Done!
- Check if the server power have available on FH now is enough for our bidding
- We could also use the beefy servers to which bandali has access to process
- zaeph:
- Update [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Usergroups][EmacsWiki : Usergroups]] with new dates
- Don’t need to; it’s been automatised by sachac
- Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- Work on the crowdfunding based on the recommendations provided by the team
- Check-in
- bandali
- Doing good, and even managed to take a couple of days off work
- zaeph
- Good; took a break as well
- sachac
- *thumbs up* (but childcare doesn’t have holidays)
- FH servers
- On which server should we do the reencoding?
- Since bbb is used infrequently, we can just use this one for now and pause/cpulimit when needed
- crdt.el problems with disconnections
- zaeph:
- Making disconnects more visible
- sachac/bandali: Changing the bg color?
- Debrief after tarsius came along to the previous meeting
- zaeph: tarsius is a lot more fun that I thought he would be!
- bandali: A lot of us have only interacted by emails; it’s so different to meet them in person (or virtually
- sachac: Definitely something good to see wrt to bandali & gopar’s podcast!
- Reviewing the ongoing projects
#+begin_src org
- Tech
- Figuring out a better streaming workflow (speakers & OBS)
# Since mplsCorwin is the most knowledgeable on this topic, we’d better wait for him to be around; but the project is still very much actual
- Review whether we need FH’s BBB instance: mplsCorwin & bandali
# zaeph: Since we’ve started migrating all our meetups/workshops over the FH’s instance, it’s fair to say that this is no longer an ongoing project
- CDN with Nate Sales: mplsCorwin, bandali
# On stand-by until late-April
- Documenting our infrastructure
# bandali: Not urgent by any means, but still something that he’d like to get to, especially to address the bus factor
- Creating a list of server with the requirements: bandali, zaeph
# Removed because we’ve already taken care of 90% of the work on this one; and added a TODO for bandali
- bandali and gopar’s podcast: bandali, gopar
- Coming up with a list of guests
# Added some names
- Leo Vivier (zaeph, org-roam)
- Qiantan Hong (crdt)
- Protesilaos Stavrou
- John Wiegley
- Lars Ingebrigtsen
- Adam Porter (alphapapa) - package maintainers group?
- Jonas Bernoulli (tarsius)
- FSF people? Zoe? Greg? rwp?
- Drew Adams (@oracle.com, probably)
- Bastien Guerry
# Removed intro/outro stuff
- EmacsConf
- Subtitles/transcripts: sachac, bhavin192
- Calendar, connecting with meetups: sachac, zaeph
# Added zaeph
- Streaming infrastructure for meetups?: bandali, sachac, zaeph
# Added zaeph
- Set of methods for clipping, publishing, etc.
- Writing about Emacs: zaeph
- mplsCorwin's livestreaming project, working on trimming
- Diversity outreach: gopar, sachac, zaeph, mplsCorwin
# It can probably wait for May; keeping in mind the CFP that we’d like to start in late-July; added mplsCorwin
- Finding a parallel monthly day for EmacsConf prep meetings
# bandali: Not strictly necessary to do it regularly; but if anything important needs to be discussed, we might want to find a better way to rally everyone: emails?
- Write-up for streaming with FLOSS
- Mediation project between MELPA and org-mode’s core: zaeph
# Promoted to its own category (just like bandali & gopar’s project)
#+end_src
- Discussion on IRC clients
- bandali: When you’ve gotten used to ERC inside Emacs, it’s hard
- bandali: ERC does not support SASL natively (but it does support other TSL connection methods)
- Discussion on mobile org-mode clients
- [[https://micro.puddingbowl.org/2010/02/03/165139.html][org-mode In Your Pocket Is a GNU-Shaped Devil :: dot unplanned]]
- Podcast
- No news this week
- bandali: Interested in announcing the podcast soon
- During the announcement, we should mention that we’d be interested in having community suggestions/productions for the intro/outro songs
- Maybe check with shoshin again?
- Nick origin stories
- zaeph’s
- bandali’s
- Next actions
- bandali:
- FH servers:
- Ask FH for more RAM on the BBB server
- Set up the vm01 server
- Listing the specs for the non-FH servers
- Podcast:
- Think about announcing the podcast
- Check if BBB (i.e. the app) is releasing ram on bbb (i.e. the instance on the server)
- sachac:
- Check if you have access to the bbb server
- zaeph:
- Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- The FSF might be getting around to it soonish
- Email Emacs NYC (and Cc sachac and bandali) to ask them if they’d be interested in hosting their sessions on our BBB instance (on FH)
- Next session: [2021-05-03 Mon]
- Organisers to content:
- admin@emacsnyc.org (goes to both Eric & Zach)
- Do the same with Emacs ATX?
- Next session: [2021-05-05 Wed]
* April 3, 2021 meeting
- Next actions (from last session):
- bandali:
- Check how much server space we have with FH (200 GB?)
- Request more RAM for the server (4 GB only right now?)
- Get access to FH’s server to zaeph and sacha (optional, sachac: probably not needed now)
- Figure out how to change the domain name with the FH BBB instance
- Check if the server power have available on FH now is enough for our bidding
- We could also use the beefy servers to which bandali has access to process
- zaeph:
- Update [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Usergroups][EmacsWiki : Usergroups]] with new dates
- Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- zaeph & sacha:
- Simplify the guide for usergroup-organizers-notebook
- TODO #A: Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- All:
- Find more potential guests for the podcast
- Adam?
- FSF people? Zoe? Greg? rwp?
- mplsCorwin:
- News from Nate Sales (vela)? (Maybe in two weeks, [2021-03-27 Sat] or [2021-04-03 Sat])
- Late April is probably likely
- Check-in
- bandali
- Busy week; wrapping up packaging tasks
- Feeling better, generally.
- Bummed by the situation with the FSF.
- sachac
- *thumbs up*
- zaeph
- Enjoyed some overdue holiday time.
- tarsius
- For his work, there are two meetings per week
- On meetings
- ‘I find one meeting per week is enough’
- mplsCorwin
- Out for the week
- FSF checkpoint (esp. considering what we discussed last week)
- We’re still on hold for retrieving the old recordings from the instance
- We might want to wait a couple of weeks for this to be operational
- Actions from last week
- organizer-notebook
- sachac and zaeph have decided to let the Emacs-SF organise themselves with regards to publishing
- Nate
- Probably late this month, or early next month
- EmacsSF debrief
- Plenty of interesting talks
- Mike & Jeff took over for processing the recordings
- Podcast
- bandali pitched the podcast to tarsius
- No updates with regards to the episodes themselves
- Update on the intro music: it’s been found!
- Package-maintainer usergroups/workshops
- sachac: There seems to be some desire for more advanced Elisp talk
- zaeph: Intuitively, there seems to be a *lot* of interest for this
- On the benefits of in-person meetings
- tarsius is really excited about in-person meetings
- He especially liked that he was travelling for those meetups
- Right now, we’re benefiting from a lot of in-person meetings having switched to virtual due to the crisis
- We’re using them as experimental grounds
- Should virtual meetings in the future be like the geographically based meetups, or be more specific?
- tarsius thinks there’s value to both kind of meetups; he enjoys the social aspect, the unexpected topics, but also sometimes the in-depth stuff
- Crowdfunding for zaeph
- sachac
- Adding a reward tier on GH Sponsor for coaching
- ‘It tends to be good to focus your deliverables on the things that are mostly in your control, at least for the first try :)’
- tarsius
- ‘Regardless of leading with MELPA/core mediation, it’s important to have a few people who help with that process’
- We need to tackle the negativity which comes with core devs
- It might help to have me who’d neither be the package maintainer nor the user
- ‘Adding stuff to Emacs is all good, but not everything has to be added into Emacs’
- ‘A lot of things that would be valuable is removing things from Emacs’
- ‘Things have been improving though’ wrt the core of Emacs and the policy of merging stuff
- ‘I don’t think we should have 4-5 email clients if we install Emacs; it’d be nice if we just isntalled the one that we want to use’
- Definitely a nudge for a wizard installer for Emacs where you’d choose which one to use?
- bandali
- If zaeph needs help with the Emacs/GNU side of things, i.e. with the CLA, bandali would be happy to help
- Chat with tarsius
- Merging magit & transient into Emacs
- tarsius is not against merging magit into emacs, but isn’t particularly excited about it either
- With the non-GNU ELPA, it might no longer be necessary
- However, merging transient seems to be a much better idea
- tarsius is quite busy right now, though, so this will have to wait
- ‘It doesn’t seem like that much work, though’
- Some painpoints, like the manual: what is it going to become?
- Getting tarsius on board with some EmacsVerse/EmacsConf stuff
- For now, tarsius just wants to show up until he can justify the time investment
- Funding for EmacsConf and/or ERG
- tarsius: fundraiser as a group
- zaeph: tarsius has been doing his fundraiser by himself, but we should do a fundraiser as a group to garner more attention and also channel some ‘Assemble!’ moment
- Next actions:
- bandali
- Redirect emacsbbb.fosshost.org to bbb.
- zaeph
- Work on the crowdfunding based on the recommendations provided by the team
* March 27, 2021 meeting
- Updates
- LibrePlanet: WorkAdventure fork, did not find volunteers to caption
- EmacsSF: switched to new server; I wonder if we can set up a redirect for them so they could go to bbb.emacsverse.org/emacs-sf or something like that? =)
- Emacs/org-mode tutoring
- zaeph’s kickstarter
- Check-in
- bandali
- Finally done with the bulk of his work!
- Looking forward to taking a break
- zaeph
- Quite busy
- sachac
- *thumbs up*
- Added a couple of edited subtitles for EmacsConf
- Putting video streaming / live captioning experiments on hold because I'm not sure my laptop can handle it
- Might be a good idea to ask for prerecorded videos if we have any possibly controversial speakers?
- Podcast
- bandali has found a bank of free music to use for the podcast
- Emacs/org-mode tutoring
- Lots of exciting stuff and experiments; and it’s nice to be paid for that!
- zaeph’s kickstarter
- Going well!
- RMS and FSF
- Next actions (carried over from last week):
- bandali:
- Check how much server space we have with FH (200 GB?)
- Request more RAM for the server (4 GB only right now?)
- Get access to FH’s server to zaeph and sacha (optional, sachac: probably not needed now)
- Figure out how to change the domain name with the FH BBB instance
- Check if the server power have available on FH now is enough for our bidding
- We could also use the beefy servers to which bandali has access to process
- zaeph:
- Update [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Usergroups][EmacsWiki : Usergroups]] with new dates
- Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- zaeph & sacha:
- Simplify the guide for usergroup-organizers-notebook
- TODO #A: Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- All:
- Find more potential guests for the podcast
- FSF people? Zoe? Greg? rwp?
- mplsCorwin:
- News from Nate Sales (vela)? (Maybe in two weeks, [2021-03-27 Sat] or [2021-04-03 Sat])
* March 13, 2021 meeting
- Usergroups calendar
- TODO: Update [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Usergroups][EmacsWiki : Usergroups]] with new dates
- TODO: Smoothing out the process for publishing the agenda
- Pretty done! Also scheduling Twitter etc is handled with run-at-time now.
- CNAME for the FH BBB instance
- Will require at the very least an nginx update
- Problems with logging in into the server
- We’re not receiving emails from their own server; SMTP negotiation isn’t working properly
- In the mean-time, bandali suggested using his FSF email in the meantime
- TODO: bandali & mplsCorwin working it out with the FH team
- Emacs-SF & publishing the presentations
- Mike & Jeff (the organizers of Emacs-SF)
- Mike is excited about the whole process and might be a worthy addition to the EmacsConf team for next year
- usergroup-organizers-notebook
- TODO: Simplify the guide
- ToC?
- Tracking who is speaking (e.g. during question-time)
- Since Mike is taking over splitting up videos, we can let him figure out what workflow he likes
- Problem with Firefox and spliced video being identified as corrupted
- Troubleshooting
- Checking logs in various players
- Submitting a bug-report upstream to FF?
- YouTube might be able to handle it?
- Maybe we could fiddle with BBB encoding options
- We’ll be figuring out the workflow in the coming weeks
- zaeph: Emacs/org-mode
- dto might be interested in checking in with this?
- We could send him the recordings and improve the workflow
- BBB considerations
- TODO #A: Download all the recording sessions for EmacsConf & ERG
- We could upload them to FH’s server
- Moving to FH’s BBB
- Soft deadline linked to CNAME redirection
- No problem whasoever
- We could use the instance for other related endeavours (as we would use an empty classroom in a school)
- No session next week
- LibrePlanet will be on, and we’ve only taken 1 week of break since the EmacsConf
- Probably no ERG session as well
- Next EmascsConf and BBB
- We’re hoping to make better use of BBB for the next edition
- LibrePlanet is looking into OBS-to-BBB streaming, and based on their experience, we might be able to optimise our own streaming workflow
- The only thing we’d need to adjust to control the OBS socket via Emacs!
- Could FH provide us with server power to run expensive processes
- Mike will provbide his server for Emacs-SF
- Rigbht now, we have:
- VPS primarily for computation; a commodity for post-processing pipeline
- BBB instance (2nd VPS with only BBB on it
- CDN service (PacketFrame); mirroring service
- Hosting space (200 GB) for each instance
- Since a usual 2h recording for a usergroup or an EmacsConf/ERG session is about 500 MB, that leaves us plenty of room (2000 videos)
- Specs:
- Decent CPU?
- BBB instance
- 16 GB of ram
- Since mplsCorwin had told us to ask FH if we needed more facility, they could probably accommodate us
- We could get the VPS talking together to post-process the BBB recording
- For now, the two instances are probably going to be enough; we can consider requesting an update later
- Podcast
- Aiming for releasing the first episode in mid-April
- The first two episodes are more-or-less set in stone
- Regarding guests
- bandali & gopar might need to figure a time to get zaeph on board to talk about
- 2nd week of April might be best wrt the timing of the crowdfunding campaign
- That would be the 3rd episode
- shoshin for the podcast intro
- bandali pinged them, but no news
- Ping them again?
- Otherwise, we might call for people to contribute free music that we could use
- Finding a release day
- bandali wanted something between Mon-Wed
- We don’t need to come up with a solid day right now
* March 5, 2021 meeting
- Agenda
- BBB
- Follow-up from Emacs-SF session on <2021-03-05 Fri>
- Do we need to give moderators rights to orgas?
- Podcast
- Update on intro song
- Ping shoshin, and define a loose schedule
- bandali will go listen to things
- Creating a list of people to invite to the show
- Leo Vivier (zaeph, org-roam)
- Qiantan Hong (crdt)
- Protesilaos Stavrou
- John Wiegley
- Lars Ingebrigtsen
- Adam Porter (alphapapa) - package maintainers group?
- Jonas Bernoulli (tarsius)
- FSF people? Zoe? Greg? rwp?
- Drew Adams (@oracle.com, probably)
- Bastien Guerry
- gopar sent things to re-record
- Usergroups
- zaeph: Report on M-x Research
- Paths of collaboration between M-x Research and ERG
- zaeph: Report on Emacs-SF
- FOSSHost BBB worked out well for them
- discussed federation of communities
- ag
- people are interested in publishing stuff
- make it easier to get clips out?
- highlight clips webm
- handle text/timing information (ex: oops at 7:05, or clip from 2:00 to 10:00)
- zaeph: TODO: Work with orgas for Emacs-SF
- They're the next public meetup and are hyped about the idea, so zaeph will coordinate re: being okay with making the presentation public and clipping it out to publish for them
- Keep track of start/end time and any oops times
- zaeph: Report on Emacs Paris
- zaeph’s crowdfunding
- packages and core
- Updates:
- bandali: talk accepted for LibrePlanet 2021, congrats! Jami and how it empowers users.
- Please ask them how they're streaming captions so that we can borrow the ideas for EmacsConf (they were looking for volunteers at https://groups.google.com/g/ploversteno/c/TWEx31PasrE). Also, if they edit subtitles, subed.el might be useful for them.
- sachac: more Emacs tweaking
- figure out workflow for splitting things out of meetup recordings
- mplsCorwin: still kind of out of it, get well soon!
- New domain: literatecloud. FOSSHost building new partnerships. 00:06:03-00:09:15 more secret part. Try to nudge towards LibreJS?
* February 27, 2021 meeting
- Agenda
- Check-in
- Follow-ups from last week
- Podcast update
- bandali said he might have a version of the podcast that we could review
- bandali is almost done with editing the first episode
- Some re-recording might be warranted for the start and the end
- He’s aiming for a preview version by [2021-02-28 Sun]
- The editing workflow has been figured out, and gopar might be able to handle the editing for episode 2
- Release plan
- Order
- 1: EmacsConf
- 2: Maxima with Fermin
- 3: ERC
- Tentative agenda
- [2021-02-28 Sun] 1st episode for us to review (no pressure!)
- Tentative schedule
- Tue or Wed if we’re not worried about the intro music
- We do not have an intro song yet
- In January, bandali talked with shoshin in the #emsig channel for commissioning an intro, but shoshin didn’t have much time to work on this because of work
- TODO Maybe we could try pinging him again?
- Could we put out a call for people to submit their intro?
- Reddit
- No news segment for the two first one
- We still don’t have an intro song
- TODO Find an intro song
- Future topics
- bandali & gopar: They could invite zaeph to talk about the crowdfunding or any related projects
- So far, no proper agenda for the guests, but something that we might figure out in the coming weeks
- TODO Try to come up with a list of people to get on the show
- EmacsConf’s FLOSS streaming facility
- bandali updates
- In March, bandali might have more time on his hands, and he might have time to prepare his presentation for LibrePlanet
- (date of the talk: [2021-03-20 Sat], deadline for submitting the slides: [2021-03-08 Mon])
- Nice progress on Jami, and Amin might be done within 2 weeks
- bandali is planning to have some time to invest into writing the guide on streaming with FLOSS
- Some progress has been made, but it’s been mostly ad-hoc with the people who asked
- Tentative date for a rough draft: [2021-03-27 Sat]
- Tentative date for a release: mid-April (but again, no pressure! ಠ_ಠ)
- Negative feedback on the quality of one of the recordings
- [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o1qwAjleGk][EmacsConf 2020 - 12 - One Big-ass Org File or multiple tiny ones? - Leo Vivier - YouTube]]
- The stream resolution is 720p with an external monitor to avoid rescaling the video
- One of the bottlenecks with the previous EmacsConf was the rescaling
- Setup: Laptop 720p + Streaming to 1080p
- This year, it looked nicer
- bandali does not think he’s got enough computing power to handle 1080p
- 2 days of 1080p streaming might be too much for bandali’s unit (understandably)
- Questions
- Do we agree that the quality was sub-par, for this talk or for others as well?
- bandali: Probably ‘yes’, and we knew it going into it; this is one of the reasons why we encouraged pre-recordings
- The pre-recordings had good quality (streamed at 720p, but published at the native resolution, which was up to 2k)
- It was very readable, and there wasn’t a time when bandali couldn’t read what was on the screen
- The shared video with BBB sometimes was subpar
- The problem
- Ways to solve the problem
- Composing the window maximally with OBS
- mplsCorwin: Using OBS and asking the speakers to stream to a URL that we’d provide to them; it’s EZPZ.
- Corwin has had real success with OBS, so that all his kids can have OBS running, and Corwin can bounce them via nginx
- TODO Let’s figure out an OBS-based workflow for webcam/screen feeds
- Having multiple tracks for speakers
- Offline talks
- Pre-recs
- Live talks
- Easy
- BBB
- Intermediate
- OBS & streaming to address
- FH’s BBB sitrep
- zaeph: No news from EmacsSF, so I’ll assume it’s next week; which also means that we’ve got no data
- At least
- CDN for the videos
- We got an offer for EU-based hosting (France & Germany)
- yang@freenode
- This would help us address the slow DL for EU viewers
- bandali is investigating FLOSS CDN options
- mplsCorwin: Definitely an offer we should take them up on
- Can we deploy a FLOSS CDN to handle those different servers?
- FH has a partnership with PacketFrame
- FLOSS CDN app, developed by Nate Sales; Corwin did some work with them on an org-inspired, lambda-based workflow; PoC underway
- CDN for video content is a bit of a weird usecase
- Optimisation is definitely done within routing-layer: ‘IP address, and network addresses which are specifically create subnets for delivery; beyond that, it’s just the usual caching thing’
- Could we get Nate Sales on board to help us with this topic?
- Let’s try to do it on the [2021-03-13 Sat], or any time during the following week
- mplsCorwin is sending them a note and will keep us in touch
- zaeph: EmacsBerlin update
- They might be interested in a BBB instance
- Michael Albinus (maint of TRAMP) is interested in working with me on advanced optimisation (for org-roam and org-mode)
- Mailing list
- bandali will ping bhavin192 for which email they want
- He didn’t have the time to do it yet; the TZ aren’t nice.
- Any other news?
- ERG update
- Today, weare meeting with Mark Dawson from ~M-x Research~
- zaeph’s crowfunding
- sitrep
- Discussion
- On funding for the dev of Emacs’s core
- RMS might have made a comment that financing Emacs should be done with FLOSS tools (e.g. non-free JS)
- [[https://en.liberapay.com/][Liberapay]] might be a solution
- mplsCorwin: ‘The fact that we have multiple string-manipulation librairies is a sign of sickness in the community’
- Related to Perl and CPAN
- FSF sponsorship
- zaeph: No update
* February 20, 2021 meeting
- Discuss distribution of meetings / podcasts
- For grabbing BBB’s recordings
- With Firefox
- [[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/][Video DownloadHelper – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)]]
- Download the two feeds (one for presentation, and one for all the webcams)
- Updates
- gopar: been busy
- bandali: busy at work too
- sachac: experimenting with captions (can do mic+browser audio now), gstreamer->OBS
- Podcast with bandali and gopar
- Last week, they’ve interviewed Fermin on his experience with Maxima
- Name
- EmacsNow (how did we not think of this before?)
- bandali got the idea BSDNow
- Maybe prepending the name with ~M-x~?
- bandali wanted something very short and
- He also wanted to use a theme for the podcast’s website which would be based on Emacs
- As a stretch-goal, we could merge a `emacs-now` command into core to open the podcast
- If elfeed (or any other RSS, maybe GNUS?) could be merged into Emacs, the command could bring you to the feed for the podcast
- Everyone seems to agree that EmacsNow is a good, short name, and that we should go with it
- Format?
- This one was a lengthy podcast: more than 1h30, but it was very interesting
- gopar and Fermin bonded over chess, which was fun!
- bandali and gopar would be interested in extending the podcast to other topics beyond Emacs
- Would that be a good idea?
- M-x Research
- ERG is not the only group working on research within Emacs: there is also `M-x Research`
- ERG’s last meeting: Intervieww with Peeragogy
- It went well, and I’m too tired to re-write what I’ve said during the meeting (sorry!)
- Need volunteers to publish to certain popular platforms (i.e. itunes)
- bandali and gopar have some experience with it, and mplsCorwin was willing to help as well
- Leo: FSF sponsorship
- Table it for now; Leo hasn’t had time to work on it this week.
- Leo: Kickstarter for org-mode core mediation
- Mentioned the project of mediating the org-mode MELPA ecosystem and the core of Emacs
- bandali thinks it’s interesting to think about the whole packagers within Emacs (including MELPA)
- Before, it used to be just ELPA; but then, MELPA came along, but because of its raison d’être, it was never implemented into the core of Emacs
- Non-GNU ELPA doesn’t require CLA; the mediation project might be a nice way to bridge the gap between those communities
- Might help with discoverability
- Surveying the field (and the people) to see which package would
- Ecosystem of org-mode packages
- Questions from bandali
- How would this project work within the new doctrine for org-mode (i.e. fragmentation of maintenance in a federated way)?
- Folding org-mode development back into the Emacs repository?
- ‘Emacs’s core is where packages go to die’ (Leo; please don’t quote him on this in unauthorised spaces)
- Could we get bzg involved in the discussion?
- Not right now; Leo needs to finish his contract before he starts diverting himself towards greener fields.
- Financial aspect
- Leo thinks it’d be *very* complicated to reach th number that Jonas (tarsius) reached with magit; however, it would be possible to get a project going with only a fraction of that
#+begin_quote
17k EUR for 6 month of work
2100 EUR/monthly (compared to the 1500 EUR / 1800 USD I was making as a professor)
25% goes to social security in France, up to 10% goes to taxes
I’m aiming to release this on March 15 or on April 1st (depending on how many people I need to reach out to)
There would be also a stretch-goal of doing this for a eyar if I get 34k
#+end_quote
- EmacsSF & BBB
- Could we test-run FH’s BBB instance rather than the FSF’s?
- In theory, it’s doable, and it’s why it was given to us for
- We’re going to test-drive it, and we’ll report how it went (zaeph & maybe sachac?)
- Next time
- bandali might have a version of the podcast that we could review
- One of the episodes
- 1: EmacsConf: how it went generally (not the actual title)
- 2: ERG
- 3: Maxima with Fermin
- The order is still unclear, but the three episodes are recorded
- bandali is planning to have some time to ivnest into writing the guide on streaming with FLOSS (but *no pressure*!! ಠ_ಠ)
- Tentative agenda
- zaeph: Kickstarter for MELPA/core org-mode
- Especially to get sachac’s opinion
- Podcast update
- FH review based on EmacsSF
- Mailing list
- bandali will ping bhavin192 for which email they want
* February 13, 2021 meeting
- Homework from previous meeting:
- For everyone:
- Think about ways to organize and flesh out the [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDiversity][Emacs Diversity]] page.
- How do we give it better structure?
- Leo: Work on the FSF thing (for [2021-02-15 Mon])
- Sacha: Figure out toggling mute from Emacs and add it to my modeline, since my computer LED doesn't work =)
- Sacha: Edit more subtitles
- Future points
- bandali & mplsCorwin: Gauge whether we can/need to use FH’s BBB.
- …For our own meetings/workshops?
- …For the next EmacsConf?
- Maybe we should figure out a streaming server that can accept RTMP, so meetups on Jitsi can stream
- mplsCorwin showed OBS multicast plugin
- bandali is looking into RTMP ingest
- Updates:
- bandali: busy at work
- mplsCorwin: work
- sachac: more subed tweaks (can now cut video based on subtitles, hide non-text stuff with overlays =) ); EmacsSF meetup, ERC automation with run-at-time, Twitter is being annoying about adding incorrect cards)
- zaeph: meetup guests, package maintenance, fundraising
- Interest in live captions, Sacha is looking into it
- Hmm, maybe hooked into crdt so that people can volunteer, and then the moderator can send the caption out to the streaming service
- Need to figure out how to get the subtitles out (OBS can send captions to Twitch, I think, so it's probably possible to do something similar... Icecast?)
- Sacha’s tweets for meetups
- Making the format nicer? It’s difficult to know which timezones to include in the tweets: which ones should we keep?
- Suggestions welcome!
- Adapting based on the language of the event (Paris → GMT+2, maybe neighbouring countries, etc.)
- BBB: FSF vs. FH?
- Let’s postpone the decision for now; that’ll give us time to check with people (i.e. in the workshops) if they want to make use of it.
- Use FH hosted infrastructure for "federation" (e.g. offering to other groups)
- Use FSF for email, use FSF for EmacsConf BBB
- ERG: Report on meeting with Qiantan (crdt.el’s maint)
- Lots of good news, and Qiantan
- bandali: ‘Once most of the important issues have been taken care of, he should probably contact Emacs dev’
- EmacsSF report
- They’re interested in our effort to federate the different workshops.
- They’re having another session in 3 weeks ([2021-02-26 Fri])
- Main topic: Follow-up on the completion systems
- They’re interested in getting access to a BBB instance
- We’ll use the opportunity to stress-test FH’s instance
- We’ll also have a Jitsi room ready as a backup
- ERG: Meeting people from Peeragogy today
- Bridging the gap between curious academics who are working on collaborative e-Research.
- Amin’s follow-up on Mailman
- Almost ready to go for emacsconf/emacsverse mailman lists
- TODOs:
- Non-list emails
- Listhelper for anti-spam
- Corwin’s idea: Vanity email addresses @emacsverse.org?
Next actions:
- Discuss distribution of meetings / podcasts
- Need volunteers to publish to certain popular platforms (i.e. itunes)
- Leo: FSF sponsorship
* February 6, 2021 meeting
- Checking in with everyone
- bandali: Crunch at work with the latest release of Debian, Icecat release
- zaeph: possible actual department for free software at his current work
- mplsCorwin: vacation, extra week, yay PTO! Looking more into literate programming. (Grant Rettke recently shared how he uses untangling to make it easier for people to edit the resulting source code files)
- sachac:
- Emacs calendar can now handle recurring events
- Now done with a Python script instead of an old Ruby script
- Some people are starting to use it!
- Especially for the meetups.
- Started figuring out Twitch streaming
- updated obs-websocket at https://github.com/sachac/obs-websocket-el, can easily switch scenes, start/stop recording, put a message up in a buffer, capture timestamped notes/markers into a WebVTT file
- Sacha is curious about gstreamer; maybe if Amin got around to writing his gstreamer script, Sacha could get around to using it for Twitch?
- Sacha is also working on a system for using Twitch’s API to send subtitles/descriptions
- used mozart-dice-game NPM to generate a whole bunch of piano minuet MIDIs, yay generated music; used selectric-mode to add typing sounds
- looked into OBS SendCaptions, but might not be able to easily get it to work under Linux; might consider other ways to send live captions and markers
- Started sketching out EmacsDiversity page
- Next up: test my hydra for editing subtitles,
- Points
- Diversity
- Iterating over [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDiversity][EmacsWiki : Emacs Diversity]] (you might be thinking about EmacsChannelDemographics)
- Podcast update?
- shoshin update on the intro music?
- Answer this question: ‘What kinds of talks do we generally want?’
- Working off our configs; explaining parts of our config (mplsCorwin)
- Inspiration, integrated workflow demos
- Really cool programming demo
- Really cool nonprogramming demo
- The goal would be to get people to read other people’s code; something vaguely archeological: ‘if I could do this, even though it wasn’t great code, it did the job!’
- A lot of people respond to those ‘programming but not’ / surface-programming approaches to code.
- ERG reports on what we’re working on (zaeph)
- Meta-workshops on how they’re organised/run, what goes into it (zaeph)
- Writing modes / releasing modes
- How do we go from some intricate code inside a personal config to a package releasable to the public?
- Hacking on Emacs C core (bandali)
- Some of the more involved modification of Emacs will need to be done in the C core.
- Maybe we could consider inviting Stéfan Monnier?
- Native compilation, maybe dynamic modules?
- Amin: Check how much time it would take to deploy Mailman for the workshops.
- Are we trading low up-front effort (asking maintainers to create a mailing list) for high ongoing effort (keeping our own mailing list system going)?
- Amin talked to someone else who can help set this up, maybe even this weekend. Main domain? Maybe emacsverse?
- Stack: Trisql, Exim, Mailman
- Could it work with FOSSHost?
- Since it’s geared to the end-users, and based on our relationship with them (via mplsCorwin), we might be able to ask them to host the server.
- FOSSHost did set up a BBB for us; we should gauge whether we want/need to use it.
- Hmm... mplsCorwin, would FOSSHost like to talk to the other Emacs meetups to see if they want to join up? I think it was EmacsNYC or EmacsATX that has been experimenting with self-hosting Jitsi, and EmacsBerlin self-hosts Jitsi. Could be later on.
- Domain discussion
- emacsverse
- Mailing lists and co. would go on their
- All in all:
- We’re very close to having Mailman ready for the meetups/workshops.
- FH & BBB: What *scope* do we want?
- ‘Do we want Emacs NYC to get their own server, or do we want to manage a single, federated instance with user-account, self-management, etc.?’
- We’d be in charge of most of the management of that instance, and we wouldn’t be piggy-backing on the FSF’s instance.
- We'll figure out our own stuff first, maybe, and then we can get the other folks in
- Improving the diversity page: [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDiversity][EmacsWiki : Emacs Diversity]]
- Right now, the page only contains an alphabetised list of names
rganising the names on that page in a more relevant fashion?
- Two sides of the question:
- "I feel a little isolated. I don't know other Emacs users, and it seems you have to be a real computer geek in order to use Emacs. Are there people like me?"
- ‘What are some different ways you can use Emacs, and what kinds of people use Emacs?
- People might be unwilling to identify as marginalised groups: how do we resolve this?
- Diversity of usage: What is Emacs being used for?
- Diversity of people: By whom is Emacs being used?
- Homework:
- For everyone:
- Think about ways to organize and flesh out the [[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDiversity][Emacs Diversity]] page.
- How do we give it better structure?
- Leo: Work on the FSF thing (for [2021-02-15 Mon])
- Sacha: Figure out toggling mute from Emacs and add it to my modeline, since my computer LED doesn't work =)
- Sacha: Edit more subtitles
- Future points
- bandali & mplsCorwin: Gauge whether we can/need to use FH’s BBB.
- …For our own meetings/workshops?
- …For the next EmacsConf?
- Maybe we should figure out a streaming server that can accept RTMP, so meetups on Jitsi can stream
* January 28, 2021 meeting
- Agenda
- Diversity: dto not around at the moment, gopar also interested
- Guidelines for conduct renamed
- Transcripts for day 1 done and uploaded to YouTube, will add them to the wiki pages; tweaked transcript display and got some feedback, could use more tweaking; next: day 2
- Yay CRDT
- Sending a ‘get well soon’ email to David (dto)
- emacsconf mailing lists?
- Diversity
- Working with questions
- Do we need to change anything about the CFP this year?
- 2019: asked for demographic information
- 2020: anonymized by bandali before consideration, added paragraph to CFP about encouraging people to reach out
- 2021: Ideas/projects
- Are people feeling not up to snuff?
- Do people not know about it? (I've heard from a number of people who didn't know about EmacsConf until close to the event or after)
- Longer CFP process, more reaching out to different places
- L: We had discussed starting in July to have a little more lee-way to review the papers, and give more time to people to actually find out about it.
- Do underrepresented people not have enough discretionary time due to systemic issues?
- Are people worried about being roasted if they make mistakes? (Might be a good opportunity for a FAQ with reassurances)
- Add a note about workshops/coaching
- Workshops (on top could feature mock presentations
- Do we need to change the guidelines for conduct? (might be in tandem with the previous question)
- Kind Communication Guidelines
- Do we need to rethink the organisation team to have more diversity?
- Do we need to rethink Q&A?
- It was nice having speakers read the pad if they wanted to; maybe make it clear that they don't have to answer all the questions and that they can answer in any order
- Tech check: Coaching speakers on what to do, how to handle questions they don’t want to answer at the moment
- Maybe if people felt they had more time for Q&A, they would feel more comfortable with taking a reflective pause or postponing it to a conversation afterwards
- reach out to communities to see who might be interested in this issue
- e-mail? chat?
- How can we make EmacsConf more accessible to people?
- Live captions would be pretty interesting; a little hard to do. See if anyone wants to volunteer?
- Can join in BBB and stream to a separate stream?
- BBB live captions cover bottom part of screen
- Maybe if there's a keynote?
- Stenography is cool, but hard to get into. Plover?
- We can mention the subtitles we've been working on.
- #emacs-accessible? Do we need to make this more prominent?
- Can we get more people giving feedback on the transcript format and UI on the wiki?
- Should we ask people to e-mail us about their accessibility needs before the conference?
- Can we get speakers submitting prerecs earlier so we can subtitle, and then release them simultaneously?
- Nudge people towards prerecs more to reduce tech risk
- How do we deal with divisive people? Do we need to change the way we handle the people we accept in the CFP?
- Using our discretion and judgement might be best, case-by-case
- With pre-recs, we’d be able to sense the tone; but we could also do that with the tech-checks
- Harking back to RMS’s talks, it was idiosyncratic; the other speakers didn’t have any problem.
- We don’t seem to be making too much progress on this question because it’s tied to tech questions. That being said:
- We’re going to coach speakers during the tech-checks.
- ‘Here’s what we do during emergencies.’
- EmacsConf organizers: Handling the viewport
- Do we need to reach out to people and encourage particular talks? How? How does that interact with the anonymous CFP process?
- What kinds of talks do we generally want?
- What are our goals? How do we want to nudge attendees?
- Inspirational: Inspired by interesting videos to go and check out stuff, try things out, push their config
- Deep dive: Explain something that can be used to build lots of stuff, help with questions
- Connecting: people see people like them using Emacs for things they do or want to do
- I want one that dives into Org technical stuff, and a nifty org-babel use, and maybe one that dives into an Emacs Lisp library or C, and maybe one on collaborating with others, and maybe one on graphics, and maybe one on interesting UI, and one on music/games, and one on an interesting non-technical use case, and one maybe on the Emacs alternatives (remacs, guile, emacs-ng?), and one about Emacs meetups, and a really cool coding talk, and a newbie/user story... - sacha (who has a surprisingly long wishlist)
- package maintainers - going from one to many people (or also one package to many packages)
- We can ask as an individual asking another individual; doesn't have to be formal in the CFP or anything.
- shell
- automation
- Internet browsing / interacting with Internet services
- EmacsConf, automation
- Do we want to try the workshop-during-the-conference idea again?
- Showcasing diversity? Might be fun for podcasts, and maybe make an index on EmacsWiki
- Ideas for future actions
- Mailing list for workshops
- We could mediate people doing workshops by managing a custom domain, offering email addresses
- It would allow us to circumvent the Emacs maintainers which are busy enough as it is, and might generate some
- Two elements that we’d need to cover to federate the community
- Mailing list
- Mailman
- Amin says it’s a little complicated to set up, server-side.
- Landing page
- Questions to figure out:
- Which name do we use for the domain?
- It’s a lot of time investment; shouldn’t we be waiting for the FSF sponsorship to actually have a way to remunerate people for their work?
- Follow-up:
- Referring up to know how others manage spam?
- Could we ask them to handle our email for us to avoid investing too much time into spam rules?
- Podcast
- No podcast this week (which is fine, don’t worry!)
- Roadmap
- Probably another recording tomorrow about ERC
- With an Emacs-news segment
- Gopar’s journey into Emacs
- Future people
- David from System Crafters also interested in talking
- Maybe something in parallel with ERG?
- Maybe bringing Leo later?
- Fermin (Maxima speaker) Reach out: irc? email?
- Rethinking the intro
- Maybe a song that kicks in 7-8 seconds to not delay it too much
- We still need to look into a good outro music
- shoshin has been super busy, but we might be able to get something from them later on.
- Future actions
- Maintenance
- Re-add CFP to the sidebar (since it might be useful for users checking previous years for info)
- Checking the price for live-transcription; maybe they could make a price to us?
- Does LibrePlanet live-caption?
- Could we find a stenographer who knows about Emacs?
- If not, we could feed them a list of words to use for them to prepare
- Icecast?
- Wiping the emergency contact from the repo (and purging the history)
- To investigate
- Creating an awesome-emacs repo which would list community people who would be interested in doing more for/with the community
- Link for reference: [[https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs][emacs-tw/awesome-emacs]]
- EmacsWiki should have a people page, but it just has https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryHomepage . Time to make a better one. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsChannelDemographics and https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsChannelPeople are #emacs-focused; see also usesthis
- L: We’ve created one for usergroups, so we might as well create one for users as well!
- crdt for the question pad?
- Might not be stable enough.
- Ideas for crdt
- BBB & Accessibility
- Can we have multiple channels? (transcription vs. audio-description)
- Can we have a synthetic voice to read them out?
- Blind people might prefer
- Finding a monthy slot for getting more people into the EmacsConf meetups.
- Homework
- Answer this question: ‘What kinds of talks do we generally want?’
- Amin: Check how much time it would take to deploy Mailman for the workshops.
- [X] Leo: Update bhavin on the mailing stuff to let him know that we are currently looking into options.
- [X] Leo: Sending a get-well-soon to David.
- How strongly do we want to ask for pre-recs?
- Definitely at least as much as this year.
- It’s also much easier for Amin to chill when we have pre-recs.
- We need to incentives speakers by telling sending their pre-recs early, we can do some adjustments.
* January 21, 2021 meeting
- Updates:
- Sacha: one more talk left to transcribe for day 1, hooray!
Everything else has been edited. Next step for day 1 is to edit
the subtitles into transcripts and make them available. Also want
to check if ableplayer passes LibreJS, since that can give us
clickable transcripts; will include text transcript anyway for
non-JS.
- zaeph: Emacs Research Group wants to meet daily
- bandali: A little tired because of work; but good progress is
being made (yay!). Some progress done on the podcast.
- corwin: mental health improving; looking forward to getting back
to the swing of things :)
- Next EmacsConf: Calendar?
- We could stick to the same period as 2020's edition (i.e.,
mid-November to mid-December)
- CFP?
- start earlier: accomidated anticipated higher
- First entire week of July might be a good time: it'd give us 4
months before the actual conference
- Office hours
- Could be used for the outreach part of the CFP
- Could also keep people excited about EmacsConf
- On the format
- A regular timeslot where people can join
- We ask them whether we could use a recording of the session to
build some hype for the EmacsConf
- We can also have a private moment with them to address some of
the possible problems with their talk/topic
- Short-ish and regular works best, probably
- Let's work on this during February, and let's aim for a first
session in March
- if there are not presentations we can record and share we
could use clips from recent orginizer meetings; we could close
meetings with statements intended for this use.
- On having multiple tracks for the next EmacsConf, either
simultaneous or single-threaded
- Three tracks based on levels of mastery, e.g.:
- Beginners
- Pro-users
- Package developers
- Last year, we had de-facto tracks, or recurring topics like music,
academic research, SVG-graphics, games, typography/themes,
free-software philosophy, etc.
- We could use this info for the *outreach program*: 'We'd love to
have people come talk to us about music'
- Overhauling the graphics for the conferenc
- Posters?
- Scenes in OBS
- Custom dashboard.el ?
- Figuring out the roles for the next EmacsConf
- Fleshing out roles for everyone in advance (so that we're not
figuring it out one week prior) and along with this any private
comms to faciliate (e.g. iff voice-over and cuts are different
roles).
- Diversity discussions
- Taking inspiration from the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
- On changing the time for the weekly meeting
- Corwin is happy to keep the same time because it'll motivate him
to wake up early on Saturdays
- We could have a monthly session which takes place on a weekday to
try to get more people on board (David O'Toole, David Bremner,
Karl Voit, etc.)
- Ongoing projects for February:
- Fiscal sponsorship (Leo)
- Office hours roadmap (Leo)
* January 14, 2021 meeting
- Updates:
- Sacha:
- More subtitles edited (bhavin192 is helping too). Almost done
with day 1 except for opening/closing remarks and manual transcriptions for 03-questions and 08
- switched to using emacsnews Reddit account
- scheduled tweets from @sachac about upcoming Emacs events - do you want these mirrored to @emacsconf or something?
- no new events aside from the ones already on the calendar
- bandali: recorded first episode of Emacs Weekly, skipped the news component and just had an interview about EmacsConf
- next:
- mix audio together and edit it
- plan to have several buffer episodes before releasing, maybe beginning of February
- can put together separate segments
- news might be doable with less prep
- can do solo episodes
- maybe community hosts, too?
- nudge from Sacha to transcribe or have show notes if possible =)
- gopar doesn't have a laptop at the moment
- which parts of your config might be good to contribute to core?
questions to nudge people to contribute to core/packages
- This question coudl also be used in workshops settings with a sense of chronology: 1. publish it online, 2. merge it to core?
- Q for mplsCorwin: would you like to transcribe 03-questions and 08, or shall I go ahead and do them? - sachac
- Q for bandali: is the emacsnews Reddit thing handy for you? It's okay if you're still experimenting.
- not tested yet
- Testing quick collaboration
- Testing tmate so that other people can edit the meeting minutes easily
- Test? it is working!
- Here I am in tmate and emacsclient. Each person can have their own emacsclient tab.
- pat selves on back for getting stuff done, yay
- Diversity workshop: It'd be nice to organise a 2h session where we discuss every problem that arised in the last conference, and pre-empt those that might arise for the next editions
- Using the word 'open source'
- Lack of diversity in the presentations (CFP?)
- Next steps:
- sachac: follow up with mplsCorwin or transcribe 03-questions, 08; then all the day 1 talks will be done
* January 7, 2021 meeting
- Checking in:
- bandali, zaeph, gopar, sachac, dto
- bandali: fairly uneventful, things are going okay, learning more about Jami, experimenting with DSLR for webcam but aspect ratio is a little weird
- sachac: virtual school started again; EmacsNYC meetup; emacs calendar in HTML and Org
- dto: having fun with neural networks
- zaeph: at his parents, can't do much work, enjoying the lull; figuring out collaborative slipboxing with org-roam; getting more into writing
- gopar
- Agenda:
- Update: emacslife.com/calendar
- Update: attended NYC meetup
- methodology
- bandali
- met with organizers of EmacsNYC. They were curious about BBB and Jitsi, streaming, IRC web client
- met with gopar last night re: podcast
- will work on a blog post about the technical setup
- someone wanted to set up a meetup in Mexico, too, so maybe we can make an updated starting-a-meetup guide (https://harryrschwartz.com/2015/09/14/starting-an-emacs-meetup.html)
- how to find people and advertise
- reddit.com/r/emacs
- Emacs News
- https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Usergroups
- how to stream and record
- what it might be like if there are no presentations (don't worry! hang out, share cool stuff, figure things out together, flip through Emacs News)
- sharing afterwards
- CRDT: see BBB chat if you want to try it
- dto:
- tutorial; (also, SystemCrafters just livestreamed an Emacs Lisp tutorial too)
- Hmm, it's like having lab hours
- Could be open (office hours, bring your questions; maybe a liiittle structure) or guided (here's an exercise to start with)
- podcast
- Upcoming workshops
- BBB has breakout rooms, might be worth looking into if it scales up a lot; Jitsi can have multiple people sharing screens at the same time;
- EmacsNYC said Jitsi is okay for the 20-30 people they've seen so far; EmacsBerlin said the same too (I think they self-host; want to see how they're doing it?). Sounds like it's much better now than it was last year
- dto will figure it out and write things up =)
- one-on-one tutorial was nice; finger memory for how to type some of these Lisp expressions
- it's better to have that interactivity, I think, since there are plenty of lecture-type resources on the Net
- one-on-one is fine, and then you can scale up (1-on-2, etc.) as you become more comfortable with it and see what can help you scale (ex: having them SSH into a shared server with emacsclients and then being able to quickly flip through their buffers so that you can peek over their shoulder or quickly show something?)
- gopar: upcoming podcast recording re: EmacsConf experience
- figuring out name
- planning to have a little buffer
- Hey, do you want to blend that into the Emacs Lisp / Emacs tutorial/workshop idea? Whenever you don't have any content, you can teach people a little more
-
- bhavin192: Mailing list for meetups (some common prefix or something similar).
- *let's remember to discuss this and the next point* =)
- bhavin192: Update to Code of Conduct (I was hoping to use the same text or page for Emacs APAC meetup)
- zaeph: figuring out collaborating via Org Mode
- per-project pages make sense if you think about it from the web publishing point of view
- bandali: can be a different wiki if you want
- zaeph is a little intimidated by the idea of working with the garage door open
- there is already a private organizer wiki, so we can use that to incubate things if you want to collaboratively work on notes and stuff
- also totally okay to work on things individually and not collectively if you want, and we don't have to figure out workflows that work for everyone or a name that covers everything; sounding official increases expectations and may cause problems
-
- Next:
* January 2, 2021 meeting
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: january-2-2020-meeting
:END:
- Conversations
- mplsCorwin: FOSSHost: okay to experiment with being a CDN, will
experiment with videos
- authenticated RTMP server to support streaming meetups from Jitsi?
- PeerTube?
- sachac: added more events to
[[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Usergroups]] and the calendar
- sachac: subed.el patches for splitting and merging subtitles, will
continue editing subtitles
- Podcast:
- Thinking about name:
- Current: emacs.el podcast
- Emacs Weekly? Probably okay, although includes commitment to
actually make it weekly
- Amin and Gopar's Wild World of Emacs?
- ideas for making it visually interesting when there's no video
- Suggested guest: Fermin - interesting story about how he got into
Emacs and started making it better for PHP
- Making these conversations more public:
- Maybe start with just putting public meeting minutes somewhere,
like the wiki, and then figure out if anyone actually wants to
subscribe to it =)
- E-mail summary to mailing list?
- [[https://emacsconf.org/2020/meetings/]] announced on IRC
#emacsconf
- With long-form summary at some point?
- dto volunteering to help Leo (it turns out dto was also an
English major in his past life, and has done a fair bit of
copyediting)
- mplsCorwin can handle social media
- bandali: avoid perfectionism
- Lots of people have a hard time with this
- getting things out of your head = good
- don't let the great be the enemy of the good. Take advantage
of the friendly community.
- dto: story about local trails committee, which is kind of like
this
- Look, we can just post a rough outline, whee! =)
- bullet-points are fine as a starting point
- Segments of recording? Timer in the pad can help.
- Livestream with delay?
- Something to grow into, maybe; let's start with text and
possibly recording segments
- Maybe private part and then public part, with time notes in case
there are things we need to remove from the recording, keeping
private segment as short as possible
- Everyone's cool with this
- Discussed: Separate days for private and public meeting? Might
take too much time.
- Guidelines for private segments: document reasons if possible
- Confidentiality
- Buzz factor: vet ideas before unleashing them? preview?
- Figuring out the persona/voice/feeling for EmacsConf, for the
meeting
- Hard to figure out how to communicate both excitement and
reserve
- Diversity and perspective: we're trying to figure out how this
comes across from the outside, without our own knowledge
- sachac: We could try to just dump the outline for starters, and
can come up with quick automation for transforming the Etherpad
=)
- Is it because we're trying to figure out the official voice for
EmacsConf? Is it easier to talk as individuals?
- Sticker giveaway: mplsCorwin
- Next week, 3PM UTC Saturday, Leo to send calendar invite and/or e-mail:
- Leo will write a summary of what we've been doing and put it in the
pad, for e-mailing out?
- Braindumps welcome =)
- Week after: public meeting/recording
* Some notes from the debrief after last year's conference
Proceedings:
** On tech
*** Observations
- BBB worked better than last year's Jitsi. It was nice to be able to set up several moderators and have consistent URLs. This year's Jitsi
seemed more polished than last year's Jitsi, so maybe they've resolved their technical issues, but it was still nice to have a reliable host.
- amin generally happy. Leo ran into technical difficulties with BBB, also some speakers may have had Internet connectivity issues or BBB issues
- gstreamer seemed to hold up fine; might want to figure out how to switch scenes or send only the BBB audio
- amin: Very nice, happy about that, gstreamer not as harsh on laptop.
- low-res stream was handy, and running the ffmpeg command on live0 was fine
- amin: Super happy about that
- Audio check with a decibel meter was great (sachac)
- ffmpeg splitting had an i-frame issue when using -c:v copy:
https://superuser.com/a/704118 and
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Seeking#Seekingwhiledoingacodeccopy
- https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/7XrMLmwLBQ0mp2RQ8S6l - technical
notes, looks like we can adjust -ss to the keyframes that happen
every 4 seconds in the captured stream
- karl: BBB doesn't audio-level as well as other platforms. bandali
was loud, zaeph is not as loud, need to manually adjust. Other web
conference platforms handle it better.
- zaeph: BBB seems to aggressively add gain. Video fairly
low-quality when viewing both webcam and screensharing, probably
lost a lot of pixels. Recording quality is not that great, big
quality difference compared to prerecs.
- Might need to be more active shifting between webcam+screenshare and just screenshare.
- OBS can stream with picture-in-picture, maybe, but a burden for live presenters if there are too many technical hoops
- Cheese etc. can display their webcam while they're sharing their desktop
- BBB didn't handle multi-monitor sharing desktops well - one of the presenters couldn't share just one monitor's desktop
- Bit wasteful use of screen real estate. Jitsi might do it better.
- Focusing on speaker webcam during Q&A might help.
*** Improving
- Can test improvements throughout the year instead of waiting for next conference
- System audio out isn't captured by BBB. Maybe presenters can set up a virtual audio loopback device and test during the tech check?
- Play intermission audio from Emacs, naturally ;)
- Normalize audio for prerecs?
- We could also use a compressor on all the ones which are 'voice-only' (i.e. not those with music/video in them)
- Re: decibel meter, it might have been even better to use PulseEffects which would have allowed bandali to apply auto-gain and a limiter to the sound output of selected apps on his sytems (mpv & FF for BBB). ( https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects )
- In my experience, it very rarely misbehave.
- It could also save us the trouble of applying gain to the talks which happened live.
- Make sure I've copied the right low res command line into my notes, and test it again
- Start streaming even earlier if possible, so that there's plenty of room to stress out about mirroring, update the status page, etc.=)
- Write a script to curl the total live viewers across streams.
- I prototyped something during the breaks, but gave up halfway because making it with scrapy would have been much faster than what I'd been doing.
- live0.emacsconf.org tracked peak viewers, so it was fine to not worry too much about it
- Find a better solution for streamers to toggle mute/unmute for BBB and the stream
- As a temporary backup, I visualised the stream's audio spectrum to make sure that, when bandali was speaking, I could see speech waveforms on the stream.
- mpv --config=no --quiet --vo=tct --lavfi-complex='[aid1]asplit[ao][a1];[a1]showwaves=mode=cline:colors=white:rate=25[vo]' "https://live0.emacsconf.org/main.webm" --mute
- Have an easy command to show local time.
- On GNU/Linux:
- watch TZ=America/New_York date
- http://www.tmzns.com/ looks nice but it doesn't understand "UTC" as a time-zone and you need to find a matching city
- If we find a way to publicly serve the icecast dump, I wonder if we can make it quickly viewable with offsets on the day of, like with videojs-offset, so that people can access quick replays of talks they've missed
- It might be interesting to have an overlay of time - talk title - speaker name - info page etc., maybe on the bottom of the stream. That way, people tuning in mid-stream can see what's playing. People would need to plan for that in their recording.
** On emails
*** Observations
- bandali struggled a bit getting all the speakers in the Bcc, always seeming to forget some of them.
*** Improving
- Create lists.
- Have one source of truth (in the private wiki), and use that to prepopulate the emails.
- TODO sacha: export uniquified list for copying, also do mail merge (maybe based on https://github.com/jkitchin/jmax/blob/master/mail-merge.el )
- index.org doesn't contain all the e-mail addresses at the moment. Maybe an org-capture for grabbing the initial submission from the e-mail might be nice in the future.
** On time-keeping
*** Observations
- We managed to stay on schedule throughout the entire conference with minor adjustments.
- This was totally surprising because I expected the schedule to be
penciled in, given our experience last year with dropped talks and
technical issues.
- Come to think of it, automatically scheduling all the sessions
with some nifty Org code worked great for both planning (do we
have enough time for the talks?) and timing on the day of the
talk. In 2019, we relied on playing pre-recorded talks with no
live Q&A in order to manage our time, playing them ahead when we
needed to cover technical issues and sticking all the rest at the
end of the conference when we reached the end of the time. In
2020, we actually followed a plan instead of adjusting on the fly,
and it was great!
- Check-ins were done sufficiently in advance (we said 15 minutes, but
~30 min before was nice).
- Problems with check-in were minimal due to prior tech-checks with
the speakers. Thanks to all the people who helped with tech checks,
and to Amin's repeated nudges to do tech checks!
- Small adjustments were pushed when needed.
- The pre-recorded talks had set durations, which removed variables.
- zaeph watched time like a hawk.
- zaeph even called people thanks to the emergency contact information
we collected during the tech-checks.
- Karl is curious: how often did you call people via phone?
- 5 phonecalls total.
- We allowed for 3 minutes of buffer between talks, which let us juuuuust squeeze in the talks with a little bit of overtime.
*** Remarks
- Time-keeping on D1 was good, but on D2, it was great.
*** Improving
- More buffer might have been nice for questions, but then we would
have had to say no to talks. Switching between talks was smoother
last year because bandali used OBS to stream prerecorded videos, so
he could join the other conference room while the prerecorded video
was playing. But OBS killed his laptop, so that's why he used
gstreamer. Maybe we can look into a way for gstreamer or another
tool to stream a file while bandali joins the next room? Then we
don't have the echo test showing up in the stream, and bandali can
more smoothly give the go-ahead off-camera.
- People had strong fear-of-missing-out despite the heads-up about
prerecorded presentations. If we have the opportunity to do so, it
might be good to build in more breaks.
- We can make a list of pre-recs and their durations to avoid bugging
Amin all the time. It was challenging for Amin to deal with late
pre-rec submissions, but maybe he can stash the submissions on the
shared server, or have a shell script that can list all the
filenames and times and copy them to a file on the server. He made
me a list of prerecs that I could use to quickly check which talks
were actually available, so it just needed duration to be perfect.
- I wonder what an Org command for quickly adjusting timestamps could look like... What would that interface be?
- Don't we have a way to shift <...>--<...> timestamps by min ?
- Oh, we recalculate the timestamps for all talks based on
MIN_TIME properties, actually, so I'm thinking more along the
lines of an interactive command that lets me say that [talk]
actually started at [time] and then it adjusts all the talks and
republishes the schedule files and pushes them. I already have
something that goes off the FIXED_TIME property, so I think it's
more like a matter of kicking it off with fewer keystrokes and
making it part of the talk transition process. And maybe
something that sets a QA_START property for the timestamp of the
Q&A.
** On starting early
Observations Starting early caused frustration for some people
who had written down the times. We had disclaimers, but of
course people skipped right over them. =) Explanation Our
opening remarks were designed to buffer technical problems, but
we didn't have any. Well, I was stressing over the 480p thing,
but that wasn't worth holding up the talks. Remarks It's better
to be early than late during those events. (Well, maybe...
People regret missing out on talks they were looking forward
to, but we also don't want to run way past our time.) Improving
The problem was addressed live by prepending all the times with
~; we could do the same next year. Since we were great at
keeping time this year, we might do away with with the
buffering time at the onset. *knocks on wood*
** On accessibility
*** Observations
- jcorneli and dto did an amazing job of describing the talks.
- jcorneli and dto had to sign off at times, and despite calls for volunteers in #emacsconf, nobody took over.
*** Improving
- Get more volunteers on-board beforehand.
- (possibly) ask volunteers to commit to various morning/afternoon
shifts ahead of time so that there is always at least one planned
volunteer, but preferably two "on duty". I.e. a simple schedule for
volunteers.
- I said I was probably mostly available for day 1, but day 2 might
be a bit tougher. I can make sure people are more comfortable with
checking in people in case kid stuff comes up
- I recommend breaking things into two-hour shifts, the transcribing
is a bit brain-heavy and kind of burned me out.
- Choosing particular time blocks would make it a bit easier to
coordinate "interruption free" times with family/housemates. (This
was a big factor for me on Sunday afternoon, multiple kids and dog
plus other people. Next time I'll probably commit to transcribing
more on Saturday and then Sunday morning, and see if we can find
someone besides me for Sunday afternoon)
- Hah, there are no real interruption-free times with a 4-year-old
- Get OK from jcorneli, dto, and other volunteers to add the
timestamped logs as possible descriptive text for the videos as
temporary subtitles while there are no proper transcripts.
- (ok from dto)
- have opportunities for different levels of time sensitivity of
commitments (e.g. stuff people who can just drop in sometimes can
usually learn to do pretty easily and that helps).
- A green-room could be fun, inviting speakers a "quiet" place to
talk about things before they "happen", answering questions, even
FAQs for speakers on a priority then becomes both a thanks and an
easy starter voluntering opportunity with obvious perks built in.
- I thought about having speakers check into a green room so that
the audio alert from it could be always available, but I thought
that having them check in directly to their room would be less of
a hassle than two successive echo checks. It was nice to have
zaeph join me as I checked in some people.
- Cuttings streams as point-in-time markers collectievly assembled
could provide a path to CI/CD flows toward speach-to-text during the
event, or at least faster and eventually less manually after.
- The pad had timestamps with some formatting differences, so I was
able to pull them out and set them as properties. I ended up
manually reviewing the stream to see where to set the timestamps
anyway, since that felt like it might be easier. It mostly worked
except for the part where I accidentally included the prerec that
followed one of zaeph's talks. =) Maybe if we displayed a clear
timestamp at the start of the stream and then had some code that
would take that timestamp and calculate the correct offset for any
timestamps from the file... Yeah, that could work.
- So, like, a step in the check-in process that tells Emacs "All
right, this talk has started" (or "Oops, this talk started at X
time and I was distracted"), and it announces it to IRC and
stores the timestamp, and maaaaabye even spits out the ffmpeg
command to extract the previous talk out of the Icecast dump
** On the pad
Observations The pad was opened by many people. I believe we
peaked at 145. On top of being opened, many people used the
pad. People appreciated being able to immediately access links
and notes from previous talks publicvoit kept the pad up to
date and super clean. It probably was quite exhausting to do
all this by himself, even though he had some help from ??? (b-
something, I've closed the query in IRC. :( ) Karl was the only
person who contributed to the time-stamp logging. As long as
Karl is at the event, that's perfectly fine but I had to leave
earlier because of time-zone shift and exhaustion. Clearing pad
colours periodically helped speakers focus The Q4: Q3: Q2: Q1:
template that evolved by the end of the conference was really
handy, since experienced volunteers could keep adding slots and
people could add in the convenient blank spots. Might be handy
to keep a copy of the boilerplate ready for pasting in. The pad
got zapped once, and the Wikimedia Etherpad didn't have an easy
way to restore to a certain point aside from copying and
pasting. If there's another pad with good revision history
management, that might be worth checking. Winding back a few
minutes and cutting/pasting the contents back to the current
pad, worked okay in a pinch but probably isn't ideal. Karl
agrees: restoring content once for the whole event with ~140
people reading/contributing is actually much better than
anticipated. However, when there is a better alternative: let's
switch. Reverse-chronological order worked better than
chronological order for typing things in. I don't know if
chronological order might be manageable if we have a Q1: Q2:
Q3: Q4: template so that people aren't accidentally pressing
enter in the middle of someone else's question. Also,
chronological might require more scrolling on the presenter's
part, and the questions move when people type things above
them. Karl: I don't see any advantage with
reverse-chronological order but several disadvantages: People
had hard time to add a new itemize-item at the top: I had to
fix many questions that were normal paragraphs. This cancels
out the main reason we had for starting the reverse order IMHO.
Everybody had to learn not to use the "normal" order of things
people are doing all the time: from top to bottom. Most
speakers on day one started with the topmost question for
answering as well. Karl: If the majority thinks, this is worth
the effort, let's continue with that. Otherwise, my guess would
be that having a few Q1, Q2, Q3 (in order), people will be fine
adding questions. I think some IRC questions fell through the
cracks. For people only posting questions on IRC, we would need
to teach them to prepend them with something like "Q:" or
similar. Otherwise, IRC is hard to skim for questions among the
chitchat.
** On the topic of the talks
*** Observations
- Plenty of topics.
- Varied topics.
- People enjoyed the more personal talks.
- shoshin's talks.
- Pierce Wang's talk.
- My user/developer story.
- People liked the face-to-face.
- I'm so happy about that! I think people's stories are an important part of humanizing Emacs, and I'm glad we made space for those talks.
- People liked the sequence of talks, too, which meant the time that we spent fiddling around with the flow of the talks worked out.
- Even though it was tough for speakers to squeeze their talks into even smaller timeframes than they asked for, I think it worked out well that people got a taste of lots of different topics + Q&A time afterwards. I'm glad we were able to accept all the talks. As Karl pointed out before, most conference committees have to make tough decisions about which talks to accept and which talks to reject. If we can figure out a way to make it happen time-wise, I'd like to make our role more of accepting as much as we can, and then sorting and shaping talks so that they flow well together.
*** Questions
- Should we develop the idea of tracks?
- This year, we had an org-mode track which allowed people interested in org-mode to tune in at a precise time, and have many topics that could interest them in quick succession.
- Parallel tracks split organizer attention and result in high fear-of-missing-out; not sure we could have pulled it off this year, but maybe with more practice? I think it would be super-cool to have workshops if volunteers wanted to do them, like an Emacs Lisp workshop or an Org workshop where people can just drop in and ask questions or show stuff. Gotta have people, though.
- dto: I like the workshop idea
- Karl would love to see a switcher-track since approx. 97% of all people I work with are using vim and still do think that it's just about editing. Furthermore, a switcher-track overlaps with the newbie-track - so it's probably a matter of track-name marketing ;-)
*** Improving
- Finding more use for the alt-stream.
- ~30 people, 10% of the stream, like I thought! =) Didn't have the brainspace to pull it off on the first day, and narrowly had enough brainspace to do it on the second day. Might be able to do it more easily next time, now that I've remembered my laptop has a mute shortcut. That was only an issue because wasamasa couldn't play a game full-screen while looking at the Etherpad. Other speakers would have been able to look at the Etherpad on their own, so I wouldn't need to read things out to them and can stay muted for the whole time. It also tied me up attention-wise, so it was great that zaeph could handle checkins too (and I appreciated how he could drop in and say stuff). If I get bbb-recorder or some other virtual framebuffer-based streamer working next time, I might be able to run the alternate stream with less attention.
- Wouldn't it be amazing if next year we nailed the implementation of alternate streams and were able to pack in tons of talks, maybe with 10 minute summaries on the main stream and then extended demo/Q&A on the alternate streams...
** On coordination
*** Observations
Stellar coordination on #emacsconf-org.
*** Improving
- We lost contact with mplsCorwin during his talk because the rtmp stream was one-way.
- We should have told him to keep an IRC window opened.
- Phoning him did the trick, but it was definitely more stressful for the speaker than just casually looking at the IRC window.
- I had the wrong channel open and wasn't watching the right screen. Thanks so much for the call Leo! The personal touch, like a call from an organizer when things aren't going right, can be huge.
** On tech-checks
*** Observations
- We had a check-list to make sure that we weren't forgetting anything.
- Asking for emergency contact info was a great idea.
- It saved our butts many times this year. =) =)
*** Improving
- Filling a table with all the info we gather (pre-rec or live: Q&A: live or pad/IRC, contact information, IRCnick)
- Our private repo was a good start, but we didn't prepare enough for the format.
- I like formalized processes, even when their steps might seem a little pedantic. Often there are complexities that we have the opportunity to prepare better for "between the lines" given such orginization. Maybe tech check is an easy place to start? IDK. I'm going to be trying to take this approach to everthing now, having hit upon it over the course of the conference at. al. Can we have too much org? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- It was nice being able to add things to the tech checklist, such as making sure speakers knew how to check in via IRC.
- Karl would like to be able to use a BBB room for tech-check so that we could share the load on those checks.
** On asking for pre-recs
*** Observations
- We pushed speakers to send us more pre-recs this year.
- As a result, we received more pre-recs (% ? I'd eyeball it at 60%)
- Speakers mentioned struggling with recording. Maybe we can provide more explicit help: here are the settings for recording with OBS, here's a tutorial for video editing, here's an ffmpeg example for stitching images/videos+audio together and converting them to the right encoding
*** Questions
- Pre-recs are nice for us, but aren't we losing a bit of interaction with the public?
- Especially if we're having more tracks in the future like org-mode, it's nice to have the ability to react to what was said before you (cf. the talks on org-roam)
- We encouraged interactions between talk topics by asking speakers to coordinate beforehand, and I think everyone took us up on our suggestions. Tech demonstrations are always a little nerve-wracking, so it's nice to have everything smoothly running. (And it's hard to properly focus on someone else's presentation when you're worrying about yours and whether it'll still work... =) )
- If pre-recs have a negative impact on interaction with the public, do we feel capable of handling more live presentations?
- Some moments during the conference were particularly stressful: on the one hand, I couldn't take a pause for 3h straight on D2 because of the late check-ins. On the other hand, some other moments were particularly calm. I believe we've gained some valuable experience on this, and we might be better at this the next time.
- We can stress a little less about checkins knowing that we can either check people in during the playing of their prerec or say that the Q&A for them will be deferred, or by asking people to check in even earlier if they can. It would be nice to get their IRC nick during the tech check, so we can check if they're around.
- Short prerecs worked better than expected. Short prerec + live Q&A. 40-minute prerec talks are a little harder to stay engaged with
** On animation/hosting
*** Observations
- My style of animation seems to have gone well with the public
- Self-deprecating humour.
- Making fun of tech-problems.
** On check-ins
*** Observations
- Check-ins were done efficiently.
- Protocols helped us streamline the process so that 1) we didn't forget anything, and 2) we could get things done quickly. Final protocol:
- Say hello, thank them
- Check if people's mics/screensharing work
- Check screen readability
- Check live talk vs prerec preference, live Q&A vs IRC/pad, and whether they want to read the pad themselves or have Amin read questions to them
- Let them know that they can answer questions in any order and skip questions if they want
- Tell them Amin will join and then give them the go-ahead
- Remind people about personal information (especially Org)
- Coach people to start their segment by saying their name and a quick intro to their talk (so that Amin doesn't have to stress out about remembering pronunciations)
- Give them a brief heads-up shortly before Amin joins
- Start recording when Amin joins
- Track timestamp of start
- Announce topic in IRC
- Leave
- TODO: automate scheduling, announcement, publishing previous talk, etc.
- I like the ERC commands I made for sending people URLs and telling Amin who's ready where. =) They're in emacsconf-2020-private/index.org.
** On live Q&A
*** Observations
Check-in involved asking speakers if they wanted to do a live Q&A.
*** Improving
- Our tech-check should include if speakers want to do a live Q&A
- Letting speakers know that they're almost out of time
- bandali suggested warning them via BBB whilst keeping his mic muted to the stream
- Problem: Speaker are startled and look like they're hearing voices :o)
- A bell? A chime? Something instrumental? If BBB webcam video is visible, Amin can hold up a sign.
- fun video of time-boxing Ig Nobel talks you need to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA
- sachac had a great idea of writing it in the pad, so that the speakers may know that they only have one minute/one question left.
- Yup, especially since most people were able to watch the pad for their own questions, and the ones who didn't were getting questions from Amin.
** On publishing the recordings
*** Observations
- Figuring out the timestamps and splitting up the bulk recording into individual talks/Q&A takes time
- We can satisfy the initial "Aaaaah! I want more!" by posting the
prerecs. If Amin keeps all of the day 1 prerecs in one folder, he
can just mv them into a public folder, and add any last-minute ones
as they come in. If we want to be super-fancy, maybe we can even
move them one at a time after each talk. although I think Amin likes
keeping them on that uwaterloo server, so it would be one more thing
he has to do.
- Slicing is actually pretty fast and can be done on a partial copy of
the stream, so we might be able to do it in the future. We can
quietly replace them with higher-quality versions if we want to. **
Improving
** On publishing the Q&A logs (brought up by bhavin192)
*** Observations
- Some of the logs have lots of '+1' which are a tad useless now.
- We've mostly plopped whatever was in the pad in the relevant section on emacsconf.org.
*** Improving
- Process the logs to remove the extra stuff.
- It's definitely not a hgih-priority item, and I'd much rather have us on publishing the recordings as we have this year. (zaeph)
- Rethink the format.
- Go for a newspaper style.
- Questions in bold.
- Answer below with the name of the speaker prepended.
** On live viewership
** Observations
- We peaked at ~400 viewers during RMS talks.
- dto: wow!
- Last year peak viewers = ~270
- D1 averaged at ~340 viewers. (eyeballing)
- D2 averaged at ~250 viewers. (eyeballing)
** On asking feedback
*** Observations
- Viewers gave us quite a lot of feedback in the Other Pad™.
*** Questions
- How are we going to ask speakers for feedback? Etherpad/email
- Form to fill send via email?
- FOSS online form?
- (Off-topic: Do we have news from the Emacs Developer Survey?)
- I think the number-crunching from the Emacs Survey will take a while
** On having talks which could be construed as 'commercial product pitches'
*** Observations
- gmj`` on #emacsconf brought up the fact that Rainer König's talk
could have been associated to his Udemy course on org-mode (which
requires a fee).
- His Org talks are actually also available on Youtube for free. I
would have had no problem with Mickey Petersen plugging Mastering
Emacs update, too.
*** Remarks
- There's a general aversion to 'paying for stuff' in FOSS because it's often conflated with non-FOSS practices.
- This sentiment is problematic because it makes it hard for developers and community-figures to sustain themselves financially.
- FOSS has always allowed people to get paid for it; F doesn't mean $, but freedom. Also, it looks like the sentiment is shifting - more people are looking for ways to support the people who work on the stuff they like
- The systems of donations and patronage are the most widely accepted, but they're also the poorest in terms of results.
- Donations disproportionally favour prominent members of the community.
- The 'buy me a coffee' attitude downplays the amount of effort that goes into writing and maintaining software.
- A better solution for developers is project- or milestone-based financial goals: 'To develop feature X, it's going to take Y amount of money.'
- The idea is developed in https://sustainoss.org/
- To quote François Élie, an influent FOSS advocate in France:
- Free/libre software is free once it has been paid for.
- Having a service industry around FOSS is what allows plenty of non-dev actors (educators, tech-writers, etc.) to sustain themselves.
*** Improving
- Develop arguments to use with people who conflate 'paid services' with 'non-FOSS practices'.
- Anticipate those problems by asking speakers how they sustain themselves in the FOSS world during the CFP.
- What would we do with the information?
** On the CFP
*** Observations
- People appreciated the nudge to talk to people who might be having imposter syndrome
*** Questions
- Do we want submissions to be anonymized next year? I think it adds quite a bit of load on the volunteer handling the incoming submissions.
- Do we want to experiment with the accept-as-much-as-possible approach next year as well?
** On BBB
*** Observations
- Audio quality was all over the place.
- BBB aggressively adds gain to participants, but it doesn't seem to be doing it in an intelligent way.
*** Remarks
*** Improving
- Prefer pre-recs?
- Has problems, cf. previous point on pre-recs.
- Find other tools?
