path: root/2022/talks/community.md

[[!meta title="The ship that builds itself: How we used Emacs to develop a workshop for communities"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2022 Noorah Alhasan, Joseph Corneli, Leo Vivier"]]
[[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/community-nav)" raw="yes"]]

<!-- Initially generated with emacsconf-generate-talk-page and then left alone for manual editing -->
<!-- You can manually edit this file to update the abstract, add links, etc. --->


# The ship that builds itself: How we used Emacs to develop a workshop for communities
Noorah Alhasan, Joseph Corneli, Leo Vivier (Noorah: she/her, Joseph: he/him, Leo: he/him)

[[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/community-before)" raw="yes"]]

After meeting at EmacsConf 2020, and since then, convening weekly as
the Emacs Research Group, we gained a lot of experience working across
disciplines.  Building on our long-running small-group experience, we
developed a strategy for engaging others in the kind of light creative
work that we value because we want to share our patterns for building
effective joyful action.

Our new day-long workshop brings people together around a topic of
shared interest.  We use a scenario-development and exploration
process to help participants understand their common ground and
discover new ways to work together.  In this talk, we will give an
overview of recent workshops we’ve run on themes linked to public
space and future studies and how we utilize Emacs for our research.

Looking back at our recent pilots as a source of evidence, we’ll look
at whether and how the methods we used helped people quickly identify
core themes that they want to keep working on together.  While we
don’t expect everyone to meet weekly as we did, we do expect that
some participants will leave energised.  Underlying the workshop is
the claim that the right combination of methods should help people
find topics of priority that they want to get traction on, for
example, breaking down a topic like "public space" into doable actions
like cleaning up an abandoned lot.  Does the evidence so far support
this claim?

We also reflect on how technology — including the further evolution of
Emacs — could help people be even more effective at identifying and
addressing challenging problems.  As a small example, note-taking in
real-time with CRDT helps us practice ‘active listening’ in our
meetings and gives us a detailed record of what happened so that we can
return to for further reflection and analysis.  As we think about the
other affordances of Emacs, we get excited about how more advanced
data analysis and more structured interaction patterns could aid in
going back over our old thoughts and getting more out of the time we
spend together.  One potential application would be forming bridges
between the different community groups, we work with.



[[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/community-after)" raw="yes"]]

[[!inline pages="internal(2022/info/community-nav)" raw="yes"]]

[[!taglink CategoryCommunity]]