All right. Hi, again, everyone. So, we are back. And I am with Vavin. Hi, Vavin. How
are you doing?
I'm good. How about you?
I'm doing well. You will note that I now have an extra layer because I was absolutely frozen
in the first half of this year's EmacsConf. But now, hopefully, I should start getting
a little warmer. Usually, I'm more stressed, you know, when we only have one track and
we only have about two minutes between every talk. I need to run all the time. And even
though we are in the dead of winter in Europe, usually, I'm pretty warm. But today, I am
so relaxed that I have the mental availability to be cold. Anyway, this is not about me.
This is about you, Vavin.
So, for the new joiners, newcomers to the chat, we do have a pad where you can ask questions.
And we are primarily looking at this pad for the questions. What we'll do afterwards is
that we'll open up this current room in which we are. And we will allow you to ask questions
directly to Vavin. And it's a subject, you know, user group that is very close to Sasha
and my heart because we've done a lot of work towards it. And we might have some knowledge
to contribute afterwards. But for now, I prefer if we heard about Vavin. So, Vavin, take it
away.
Yep.
I see one question. What about using on multiple computers? I think that's not related or I'm
not sure what it is about.
I'm not sure either.
Yeah, I'll just do the next one. What about collaborative editing with this multiple computers
with Macs like CRDT or with R2D2?
I think there's something weird going on. I'll give you just a second.
I'll just pick up the relevant one in that case.
Sure, thank you.
Thoughts on physical meetups.
Yeah, so this year, I think a few months back, I had thought of doing it. But the way right
now it is, at least in my region, the community is comparatively small. So usually right now
the model is working is basically the remote one. And we get people from some people from
I think China, some people from Australia. So we get to have a couple of people and good
discussions usually. Whereas for physical meetups, what I've been thinking is maybe
one off meetup can be physical. Let's say you come together similar to people have been
watching Emacs on this year. So something like you come together, do the online meetup
first and then networking and discussions can happen offline. So that was one of my
idea. Maybe I'll try it with Emacs APAC sooner or later and we'll see how it goes. So that's
the current plan about physical meetups. And in terms of if you ask me thoughts, they are
good too. So you get to talk with people face to face, you got to make more connections.
So yeah, I might experiment some mixed way of doing it right once in a while you meet
or otherwise you do it online so that people who are not able to join in or travel to that
particular area or region, they can just join online.
Yeah, it's a very interesting topic of physical meetups because we, so I participate in one
of the workshop Emacs Paris and we used to have in-person meetups in Paris and usually
there were about five to 10 people showing up, which was a good number. But when COVID
happened and we moved to virtual meetings, we started having a lot more people. Now we
are averaging about 15 to 20 people at every session and it's amazing. But the problem
is, I'm knocking on wood really hard, but now that COVID is a little easier to manage
and that's a lot of people are returning to in-person meetings, it's a little more complicated
really to say, do we go back to physical meetings even though we have more people on a virtual
meeting? It causes us to ask many questions about why do we want those meetings to be
held? And we need to think about this in 2023 with the organizers of Emacs Paris and I think
Emacs SF also was in the process of thinking about how to go back to physical venues. And
I think right now the consensus amongst a lot of workshop user group organizers is that
they would like to have both. So if it was a monthly meeting before, why not have a physical
meeting every month and a virtual meeting every month as well on a two-week cycle. So
that's a lot more work, obviously. It's not choosing, it's choosing. I'm not sure how
big the pool of people you have in Emacs APAC actually is but it feels like it's a much
larger area than say Emacs Paris for France. So you try it even though. Yeah, exactly.
So in India, there is the region with this Maharashtra Pune, it is like one end and across
maybe you can say 500-600 kilometers radius, you have many other cities where more people
are there. So having all of them at one place is basically event like conference or something.
Monthly meetup, probably not. So there is one more meetup group I managed, not related
to Emacs, but we had same question, what to do now? We have many people joining us throughout
the state and should we have a meetup in one city only? So yeah, I think we'll have to
experiment and see. Yeah, but it's fun to experiment, it's fun
to have. We know that we have interested people all around the world, like that it showed
you the type of workshop that we can have and how to run your own, but we already have
many workshops around the world. It wasn't the case if you go back three years ago. I
think if I'm completely speedboarding now, but I think we had about five user groups
worldwide three years ago, and now we must have something like 12, 13, 14 even, which
is a massive increase when you think about it. Now that Babin has provided you with the
tools to do just the same and start your own workshop, and also you have the buddy system
of Andrea that you saw earlier today, you have more options than ever to be able to
meet people talking about Emacs. Now, there's obviously EmacsConf as well, which is helping
and we have a lot of lovely tools to share with you, but I think it's better or it's
a good compliment to have a monthly checkup with people who might feel a little closer
to you, either, and closer can have multiple definitions, you know, it can be closer in
terms of proficiency with Emacs, or it can be closer geographically, which makes it easier
or culturally, which will make it easier to converse with people. We do have a question
about hybrid meetings. Do you want to take this one, Babin? It's so related to what we
were talking about.
Yep, yep, yep, yeah. So I tried it, not with Emacs one, but with the other one I organized.
And even I had some thoughts. The only problem is what happens, the people who are joining
virtually, they usually end up feeling left out. Because people who are in the room, they
might be discussing something face to face, they might have some discussions. The only
way I think would work is everyone joins the online link from their own machines. You do
your regular meetup discussions. And after that, you have some discussions. Because otherwise,
one side or other side will end up feeling left out. Rather than doing it, I'll just
keep it one or other, either completely virtual or completely in person.
Yeah, I think it is really complicated to do a hybrid stream well. I told you the figures
of the people we had, which was roughly between five to 15 people at most in physical venues.
Right now, by the way, we should probably say hi to the people in Switzerland who are
currently watching Emacs in a very nice, warm room. I'm thinking warm because I'm cold.
It's not only warm in terms of the weather inside the room, but also warm in terms of
the people around it. Hi, everyone. Hybrid meetings pretty much take the attention
of two people entirely. One to manage the physical venue, and one to manage the virtual
interactions. And generally, those two people would be core organizers of the events. And
that takes a lot of energy. And I think people are a little scared to do such events because
you also need to manage webcams, you need to manage presentation, how to take questions,
how to relay audio. And frankly, as someone who organizes or helps organize EmacsConf
every year, I can tell you that it can be plenty of wrong going on with audio setup,
video setup, and making sure that everyone is being listened to. But ultimately, we are
sharing these tools. So maybe we could share the tools for EmacsConf for people to actually
start running their own workshop. That would be interesting. But please don't send me an
email asking for this. I need to rest.
So there is one, I think, thought. Yeah, one thought in the IRC. It is about the time it
takes for me to organize the meetup. So what I have done is creating the announcement,
posting it at least on the website, I have automated it. So at times, even I forget that
when is the meetup and all. But my automation takes care of creating the online website
entries, announcements and all. So that saves me a lot of time and a lot of cognitive load
I should say. I don't have to remember I have to announce it. And what happens is, I do
plan to automate more things like announcements on IRC, announcements on Mastodon and stuff.
So that will save a lot more time. But usually, that basically means I don't have to do much
stuff before the meetup. It's like 15 to 20 minutes. And during the meetup, obviously
I attend along with everyone else. And post meetup, it might take more time. But I haven't
worked on processing or collecting the video and publishing those. So maybe add more, let's
say, 30 minutes or so. So yep.
Yeah, there is definitely something to be said about how do we use the workshops to
make content that lasts after the workshop. It's a discussion we've been having with some
of the workshop organizers. I remember mostly Emacs SF again, and also Emacs Paris. We were
talking about, yes, we record the sessions, but we share the sessions only with members
of the event. What if we have a really great presentation? It would be such a shame to
leave it live merely on the BBB record server where only users can see it. No, it's actually
much better if we could find a way to share it on YouTube, for instance, or any other
distribution platform where people would be able to share this. With EmacsConf, we share
all the talks that happen in prior years. What if we could have user groups and workshops
do the same? That would be amazing. But I think people are feeling a little iffy and
rightfully so. This is a lot of energy to first make presentations like this for the
speakers, but then to package them, to caption them for accessibility. We are able to broadcast
talk this year with captions with no little thanks to Bavin, who is actually helping us
a lot behind the scenes working on the subtitles. Thank you again so much, Bavin, for all this.
You will be the first to tell, this is a lot of work, actually. I'm not sure how much time
you've spent in the last two months working on subtitles, but it's been a long time.
It does take time. That's why I'm still not sure how much time it will take for me to
get those talks or recordings out, right? But as a first step, like I mentioned in the
talk as well, just get it out first and then work towards refining it.
Yeah, that's the usual saying that good is better than perfect or here and there is better
than later and never. I think that's a very good plan here. Bavin, we have about five
more minutes until we need to head into the next store. We have opened the chat room,
so if people wanted to join and ask questions with Bavin, mostly if you're interested in
running your own workshop, this would be a golden opportunity to converse with Bavin
and see how you could get started on this. Or maybe if you want to find people interested
in starting a workshop, maybe not in BBB today, but it'd be interesting for you to connect
on the pad or whatever else really to be able to say, oh yeah, I want to start an Emacs
Michigan meeting or whatever. I'm not sure why I defaulted to Michigan, don't ask me.
But you would be able to find maybe other people willing to do so and that'd be great.
Why don't you stop moving my hands like this? This is the one gesture I'm doing today and
I need to pluralize it a little bit. Do we have any more questions on the pad? I think
no.
Not on pad. I think there are two questions in IRC. I'll just quickly answer them. One
is about automation. So I have my repository, the website repository on GitLab and they
provide something called pipelines. So you can just schedule things and I have a cronjob
you can say sort of on their platform itself, which goes and gets triggered on certain days
and my script basically takes care of publishing a new blog entry basically. And there was
one question, what is iLuxy? So it is a new Linux user group from Chennai, India. So yeah,
I think I've been using their mailing list and there have been a couple of people from
that part of the country who joined the meetup as well.
And we're definitely trying to make Emacs user group a thing. Like Lug, Linux user group
has been a thing for decades at this point. And if only we could manage to make, I mean,
the thing it doesn't sound as well, a huge, probably the worst argument in its favor really,
but Emacs user group feels like it should be something that is widely adopted as much
as Linux user groups. Because when you think about it, whether it be Linux or whether it
be Emacs, those groups are where a lot of people get to experiment with those tools
and learn, especially a lot of beginners who make it to those meetings. They get propelled
in the future in terms of how much they learn and it's so much better. You probably heard
more about this in the Android talk we had earlier today. Right, I'm blabbering on about,
but it's a topic very dear to my heart and I'm so glad that you managed to feel sorry
a topic and a presentation. Sorry, I'm mixing up everything there.
We will soon be moving on to the next stream. So I see that we have a couple of people still
on BBB, but no one with a microphone. So again, when we open the BBB chat room, if you want
to join and ask questions, it's all the better. It's good if you want to join and listen,
but we need people to actually be asking questions because that's when we have the speaker in
one room and you can gather all the questions. I'm going to give you a little secret. If
sometimes it doesn't sound like I'm making any sense, it's because on one here, I am
listening to Bavin. That's the left here. On the right here, I'm listening to production
and sometimes stuff is burning in the background and I have to take a deep breath and focus
on, for instance, everyone is talking in my ear. It's really complicated. So what I'll
be doing is that in about 1 minute and 20 seconds, we'll be moving into the next talk.
Bavin, thank you so much for taking the time to answer all the questions. You'll probably
be sleeping fairly soon, right?
Yeah, please help us in the backstage. But yes, thank you so much for all your help.
Thank you for your presentation. As for the others, we are about to move to the next talk
in about 1 minute. So it's going to be a bit of an awkward pause again. Sorry for this,
but at the top of the next minute, we'll be starting the next talk. See you in a bit,
I suppose. Thank you again, Bavin.
Thank you. Thank you for organizing the event. It has been fun.
Thank you for participating in it.