[[!meta title="Call for Proposals"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2020 Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, David Bremner
Copyright © 2021 Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, Leo Vivier, Sebastian Crane"]] **EmacsConf 2021 | November 27 and 28, 2021 | Online Conference** [[EmacsConf 2021|2021]] will be a virtual conference on **November 27 and 28, 2021 (Sat-Sun)**. If you'd like to present at the conference, please [[submit your proposal|cfp]] by **September 30, 2021**. EmacsConf 2021 is about the joy of [Emacs][emacs] and Emacs Lisp. Come share your experiments and adventures with the Emacs text editor / operating system / way of life! We welcome speakers of **all backgrounds** and **all levels of experience**, including newcomers giving their first talk. What have you found exciting about Emacs lately? What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? What part of your workflow might inspire someone to get into Emacs or go deeper? A great way to get started with writing a proposal is to start by exploring the programs from previous years: [[2020|2020/schedule]], [[2019|2019/schedule]], [[2015|2015/schedule]], [[2013|2013#program]]. You might also find some neat ideas on the [[ideas]] page. Feel free to add yours there too! If you're still not sure, come by our IRC channel `#emacsconf` on `irc.libera.chat` and say hi. You can join the chat using [your favourite IRC client][libera-emacsconf], or by visiting [chat.emacsconf.org][chat] in your web browser. All kinds of people use Emacs for all kinds of things. We'd love it if EmacsConf 2021 could highlight interesting perspectives and reflect the diversity of our community. If you know someone who might have a good idea for a talk, please reach out to them and encourage them to submit a proposal. Many people (especially from underrepresented groups such as women, people of colour, non-developers, etc.) might not consider themselves expert enough to share their thoughts. If you let them know that you value their knowledge and maybe even suggest something that you think others would like to hear more about, they may realize that they have something worth sharing and that we would love to hear from them. ## Important dates For EmacsConf 2021, we are planning for 9am to 5pm Toronto/EST (2pm-10pm UTC) on November 27 and 28. Depending on people's availability, it might be two half-days.
CFP opens August 5, 2021
CFP closes September 30, 2021
Speaker notifications October 15, 2021
Schedule published October 31, 2021
EmacsConf 2021! November 27 and 28, 2021
If you are not available during the conference itself but you have a neat idea that you'd like to share, please propose it anyway! You can always handle questions after the conference, and we might even be able to coordinate with other Emacs meetups for regional events (if you're an Emacs meetup organizer and would like to make this happen let's [[get in touch|contact]]!). Please note that although we will try our best to stick to the above dates in the coming months, given the current state of the world, we may have to move things around a bit in case of unforeseen events. Thank you for your patience and understanding. ## Talk formats We'd like EmacsConf 2021 to inspire lots of different people to explore lots of different things in Emacs. We hope to put together a stream of quick ideas followed by lots of conversation over IRC and/or Q&A sessions, with occasional deep dives into topics that many people might find interesting or useful. As you think about your talk, consider what you can share in: - **Up to 10 minutes total:** What is the core idea? What do you want people to do or remember? You can show just enough to get people interested and then point them to where they can learn more afterwards. You can answer questions over IRC, the pad, or the wiki, and there's no limit to how long that conversation can go. - **Up to 20 minutes total:** How would you flesh out some of the points from your 5-10 minute presentation? How can you show the pieces working together? - **Up to 40 minutes total:** What would benefit from a deep dive? How do you keep it engaging? When writing your proposal, please write an outline of what you plan to talk about if you have 5-10 minutes. If you'd like to propose a longer talk, outline what you might include if you had more time to present (up to 40 minutes, including Q&A). Here's an example for a potentially 40-minute talk: - 5-10 minutes: quick demo of the abc package working together with xyz package. - 20 minutes: same as above, with some customization options to accommodate a different workflow. - 40 minutes: all of the above, including modifying the behaviour of the package in order to add something new. This flexibility would help us in devising the conference schedule so that as many people as possible could get a chance to present their ideas, while still allowing for featuring longer deep dive talks. Other session formats such as tutorials, workshops, and hangouts are welcome as well, in case you would find those other formats preferable to a traditional talk format. If you're interested in these or other session types, please let us know [publicly][emacsconf-org] or [privately][emacsconf-org-private]. We'll be happy to work something out with you. ## Office hours We're aware that it can be somewhat intimidating to submit a proposal to a conference, so we thought we'd try to help! This year, we're opening up the doors of our virtual offices for you to come talk to us about your proposals with hopes of helping you with any hurdles you may be facing with preparing your proposal. We'd like to publish a schedule of availabilities of volunteers for holding office hours. Currently these volunteers consist of some of the EmacsConf organizers, but we'd love to have the help of other members of the Emacs community as well. If you are a more experienced Emacs user and would like to help with this, please [[get in touch|contact]]! Our first office hour this year is planned for Saturday, August 14, from 3pm to 4pm UTC with zaeph (Leo Vivier) at the following BigBlueButton room: . ## Submitting your proposal Once you're ready to submit your proposal, the [[submit]] page has the instructions on how to submit your talk. We use an anonymized submission process to reduce bias and encourage contribution. Identifying information will be removed from submissions by a conference organizer who will not participate in talk selection. The anonymized submissions will then be reviewed by a selection committee. If your talk is approved, we'd love it if you could help us make sure the conference runs smoothly. After we email you with the time alloted for your talk, we'll ask you to - prepare a prerecording of your talk, or record it with our help if that'd be easier for you; and - schedule a short tech-check if you'd like to be able to answer questions in a live session. Don't forget to subscribe to our main mailing list, [emacsconf-discuss][emacsconf-discuss], for discussion and announcements about the EmacsConf conference. We look forward to your ideas and submissions! ## Getting involved If you would like to help with the conference (planning the sessions, reviewing proposals, helping with infrastructure, making sessions more accessible, editing video transcripts, etc.), see our [[planning]] page and come say hi to us at `#emacsconf-org` on `irc.libera.chat`. In addition to the [emacsconf-discuss][emacsconf-discuss] list, feel free to subscribe to [emacsconf-org][emacsconf-org] as well, for discussions related to organizing the conference by the EmacsConf organizers and volunteers. We'd really appreciate your help in making EmacsConf 2021 the best one so far! ## Commitment to freedom We remain fully committed to freedom, and we will continue using our infrastructure and streaming setup consisting entirely of [free software][freesw], much like previous EmacsConf conferences. [emacs]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ [freesw]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [libera-emacsconf]: ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/emacsconf [chat]: https://chat.emacsconf.org [emacsconf-discuss]: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss [emacsconf-org]: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org [emacsconf-org-private]: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org-private