[Speaker 0]: All right. I have unmuted.
It's been a while since I've actually done an
actual presentation. Hi.
Okay. I'm going to deafen myself and mumble
so that I don't get distracted by backstage
chatter. Hello, everyone! Okay,
so where are we? Questions,
questions, questions. Okay,
how easy would it be for someone else to
reuse the Emacs conf strips and config to do
a conf of their own? Like everything else,
I have no idea if things actually work until
somebody does it for, you know,
to get everything to run on a computer that
isn't my computer and with assumptions that
aren't my assumptions.
So, I have no idea. But optimistically,
I have put most of the EmacsConf things,
like EmacsConf, the name of the conference
and things like that in variables.
So if theoretically someone were to run an
org mode conference or something like that,
it might be possible to reuse all this code.
We'll see. I don't know if it's going to be
easy. I don't even know if it's going to be
possible, but it might be fun to try.
What tools would I like to exist in Emacs
land to help with preparing the conference
next time? Well, I've already been thinking
about adjustments that I want to make to
sub-eds so that the audio synchronization
issues that we sometimes have with FFmpeg can
be something that I can flag and maybe fix
even while I'm watching a video.
But also as much as possible,
I like to leave the actual FFMPEG audio and
visual tinkering with to other people like
Leo, whose patience is slightly more than
mine, because audio is,
I still don't have the patience to sit for
it. You can tell I talk really,
really quickly. I'm still trying to squeeze
everything into however little focus time I
actually have. So it would be kind of nice to
use that. Emacs is already doing quite a ton
and stuffing more multimedia processing and
other fun things into it might be
interesting. Who knows?
Oh, the other thing that I would really love
to have that people always ask for is a way
from Emacs to interact with the Etherpad.
The Etherpad API, it seems very granular.
Like, you can set the HTML of a pad,
but you can't actually just append stuff to
it. And I was trying to get something that
could take questions from IRC and
automatically push them into the pad,
even from an ERC bot or whatever,
but no go. If someone were to figure out some
CRDT thing where we can collaboratively edit
the document, that I think is the number 1
request that people always have around
EmacsConf. That would be really cool to do
more of the conference itself from within
Emacs. I don't know if actually,
well, we have an org file now that launches
the MPV from Emacs. But if you want to have
an ex-widget or something else watching the
conference from within Emacs itself.
I think that will also be really cool.
Yes. And then other fun stuff.
OK, how can speakers and viewers help make
preparing for next year's Emacs Conf even
more fun for the organizers?
Well, I love it when not only do the speakers
do all that work to prepare their talk,
but lately people have actually even been
volunteering to caption their own talks.
And that's great because then they know the
words that they use. And if I can show them
the workflow that we have so that they can do
it very efficiently, because there's all
these wonderful things that I do now with
Subweb Waveform and Aeneas for like the
forced alignment so we can get timestamps
from text and all these other fun things that
make getting a transcript or editing the
captions fun and easy.
That makes it easier for not only speakers to
contribute captions for their own talks,
but also interested volunteers who,
as mentioned, get early access to all the
talks and can watch them at leisure.
And it's, you know, nice prick there.
Definitely should try that.
I do have some sample videos of how we use
subed. But of course, in the process of
shoving like 30 or 40 talks,
maybe 30 talks through it for EmacsConf,
this is like the stress test season for
subed, which is great,
I ended up adding more features.
So 1 of my big to-dos afterwards is I have to
document the different workflows for things
like, okay, you've got a script.
You can use WDiff to get word diffs so you
can take the subtitles and compare them with
the original script and see where the
misrecognized words are.
And that's great. Or you can use SubWeb
Waveform to start adjusting things.
Or for example, if there's a synchronization
issue, I can now middle click on a subtitle
where I want the subtitle to actually start
and then move all the subtitles to start at
that point. So it's getting to be a really
elaborate tool. And I definitely need to
document that and stick all the blog post
links into the readme so that people can find
this in the future. So it's very,
very nifty. And the reason why we do this is
because, well, personally,
I have a hard time sitting and watching
videos. I like to be able to just jump to the
interesting parts or watch it at 3 times
speed, which MPV lets me do.
And the text makes it a lot more searchable,
which is fantastic. And also because,
you know, if you've got all these interesting
variable names and key bindings and whatever,
and the automatic subtitles just don't do the
right thing. So it's nice that people do the
captioning. So, yeah, so that's 1 thing that
people can help with. Captioning is always
very interesting. And the other thing that
people can do is take the inspiration that
you get from EmacsConf and from the ideas
that you have when you're working with Emacs,
and suggest talks for next year's EmacsConf.
And it doesn't have to be a super fancy,
nobody else needs to go out and do a really
professional-looking video.
Even though Howard has set the bar this you
know it's pretty high you don't have to do
that kind of thing it can be just you in a
screen or even just a screen and you talking
about this cool thing that you learned and
they could be a video or it could be a blog
post it could be something else and that
those those things are fantastic because they
inspire people to see what's possible with
Emacs. So that's another big thing that
people can do to help.
And then there's sharing the word about it.
So if you saw something that you really like,
if you write a blog post about it or a tweet
or a toot or whatever else you want to do,
you make a reaction video,
that helps other people discover that stuff
not just today, not just next week,
but you know even later as they search for
these words that as people search for ideas
using words that are not necessarily the ones
in the video, you describing things in other
ways helps with the search engine
optimization, you're not really,
it's just people finding stuff,
which is amazing. So yes,
please write about the cool things that
you've seen and what you'd like to tell other
people about. Suggesting ideas for talks.
Yes. Making talks. All sorts of wonderful
things. OK. Could you elaborate on the
workflow that goes on in your mind for when
approaching these things?
Do you start with an Emacs org solution right
off the bat at this point when faced with a
task? Are there some conscious steps involved
from early ideas to automation of the kind
you just showed? Mostly it starts with,
okay, we got to do this thing.
So I have this to-do. And sometimes,
like in the week before the conference,
I have to think, okay,
is this a top priority thing that I can do
before the conference,
or is it something that I can,
I, I, like we can still do the conference
without doing so I have to just postpone it
until afterwards? So some prioritization
happens. But a lot of times it's like,
okay, you know, like this,
there's a thing that I need to do here.
I don't know how to figure it out,
let me start an org Babble block and start
sketching out something,
you know, custom function or whatever else,
and then say okay, you know,
hey, that looks kind of useful,
let me see if I can generalize that,
and then let me stick it into the library so
that I can find it next year.
And that's basically how it goes.
It just goes, it just like,
I have a thing that I need to do.
If it's, if I'm going to do it more than
once, or actually even if I'm going to do it,
you know, once I tried to automate it just so
that I can understand it and,
and then I can, I can,
I can squeeze it into like the 15 minutes I
actually have and I can pause and I can pick
it up again and the code is still there and
my notes are still there?
And then every little bit of the,
every little step like that builds up.
So I can write a short function today,
and then tomorrow when the kid was asleep,
I can write a little bit more of that.
And so it just goes on from there.
And then I just stuff that all in there.
How well does this approach allow for other
organisers to do individual customisations to
their liking while still being able to
collaborate effectively?
We've actually split things up fairly neatly
in the sense that for this year,
for example, most everyone else was super
busy, so I did all the heavy lifting up until
people were available and then they jumped in
with the audio normalization.
Thank you very much, Leo,
for doing all of that stuff and the hosting
and all the other things.
So I tend to do most of the Emacs list
fiddling with and the shell scripting and
stuff like that, aside from the FFmpeg
incantations, which are too arcane for me to
even think about. And then in the course of
watching me deal with like,
oh, no, this video is not playing.
And then they see the commands that I'm
using, like play and then,
you know, play a world,
which is the ideas of the talk that we were
having a hard time with or MPD or whatever.
Then the other organizers kind of just pick
that up by osmosis, because We didn't even
have time to do dry runs for training this
year. So it's just there's not much
collaboration in the sense that I'm just
basically saying, OK, these are the scripts
that I'm going to write for myself.
And you all figure out how to work with that.
What was the hardest problem you encountered
in organizing or running the conference this
year and how do you deal with it?
Oh, the constant, constant problem with
e-mails. There's so many amazing ideas.
I want to fit into the time.
And then afterwards, like,
Sasha, do not mess with production the day
before the conference.
You're going to save that for after the
conference, right? So that's the hardest
part, is just saying, OK,
yes, that's an idea. I'm going to put that in
the inbox. We're going to maybe get to that
next year. But right now,
these are the things that I need to do in
order to get the conference off the ground
reasonably in a reasonable amount of time.
So earlier in the conference,
then I can be like, OK,
what if we do this? What if we run everything
off a crontab instead of using Emacs tramp
timers? Wouldn't that be great?
And then I can explore all those crazy ideas.
But then as we get closer and closer to date,
I'm like, okay, fine. I'm going to like just
capture the idea and deal with it later.
So that's really, really hard for me.
Year to your growth in attendance and after
the conference video watching.
The growth, well, first thing,
there is like absolute growth in the kind of
the quantity of things that people are
sharing. I have a blog post about this that
talks about a number of minutes of talks,
and it's going up. Last year,
we did 2 tracks because I couldn't fit
everything in 1 day. And this year,
we did 2 tracks, but even then,
everything was kind of squished,
and I was trying to find space in the
schedule. And if you make it so that next
year, we have to figure out 3 tracks,
I think We have another host now,
so it might be doable,
which is great. Who knows?
We'll see. And the other interesting thing
that I'm seeing in terms of growth is that
people are starting to refer to the talks
from previous conferences that inspired them.
So the evil plan is working in that it is
getting people to get cool stuff out of their
heads and into videos that have like
searchable transcripts and that people can
refer to as for inspiration and for showing
other people, hey, look,
this is what it can do.
So that is fantastic growth.
The actual numbers, I'm intense to look at
the number of simultaneous viewers.
And every so often, it's kind of nice to go
through the YouTube stats or whatever.
But that's not so much as a,
like, I don't really keep that in mind as
much, just because as long as people are
connecting to the ideas and getting stuff out
there and being inspired to think around
more, then it's doing the thing.
Cognizant is working. So where are we now for
questions? Ooh, I can actually,
I have ERC here. I can find eventually.
1 of my screens has Dev in it.
Okay, here we are. What are the other
questions? Probably, Probably an IRC.
Where's IRC? Dove, dove,
dove. I did try to record things more slowly,
and I tried several times,
but I really just speak very quickly when I
get excited and Emacs is very fun so it is
tough oh yes okay so 1 in once yes automated
present workflows oh yeah okay so where are
we now for time? Oh look,
it's 4.30, should we do our closing remarks
or like how are things going over in the
other stream? I should find out.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, I've been keeping a close eye on the
other 1, but yeah, I believe that-
[Speaker 0]: Yay, look at that, good timing.
Okay, I have managed to zoom through the
questions and we can switch over to the
closing remarks how do we do this yes okay
okay we're gonna oh wait people okay people
who wanted to ask questions how do you want
to do this? Because there are a lot of people
in this 1 here too. You want to go to the
other 1? 0 no, they aren't done yet.
Sorry, I forgot to turn on the con tab
because of course I got excited.
Okay, so Jacob is still answering questions,
which means I get to still answer questions.
Now I'll try to be quiet and let people in
the BBB room speak up if we want to.
Okay that means
[Speaker 3]: are going to hear.
[Speaker 1]: Some more
[Speaker 2]: people in the chat ideas I had on the Emacs
conferences you could have like a little
Emacs starter config just for like the Emacs
conference where you have emms playlist and
IRC help cheer function to help get you into
IRC into ERC and then the to-do states that I
was talking about before.
So you can say, I'm watching this 1,
I want to re-watch this 1,
but I'm going to skip it because I'm watching
something else. I used the HyperBowl package
to go straight to the web pages to all the
either pads but you can also have some quick
functions to go into a CRDT buffer hosted
buffer, where all the org mode Etherpad
documents would be. And then that would get
everybody using Emacs,
and then they could all be chatting with each
other with CRDT, with controlling Emacs.
I don't know how the sub stuff,
I don't know if you can get the sub stuff in
there working, but yeah,
It could be a good way of getting it all
wrapped up together. And also,
Mkron, if you ever looked at that versus
Kron, Mkron is configured in Elisp.
Then you can also write some custom functions
in the middle of your Kron.
So maybe you could make some like conditional
things where you can start or stop it.
And like 1 of the differences is if your
computer reboots, it can start up and say,
oh, I'm supposed to run this cron job at this
time and then just Do the correct thing
rather than losing the state Randomly because
your computer lost power
[Speaker 0]: Thanks for those recommendations I will add
mcron to my list of things to check out.
And yeah, we finally remembered to publish
all those schedules as org,
and I decided to just spam all the time zones
with them, which was fantastic.
And other people have mentioned that this is
useful. We get to figure out how to use this
to teach people more about what you can do
with org. As you mentioned,
encouraging them to tag the stuff with things
that they want to attend gives us the ability
to set up an agenda view for them that has
the talks that are tagged with those tags.
[Speaker 3]: So I
[Speaker 0]: was like, okay, let's,
let's teach org mode and lisp in the process
of doing things. Okay,
there was a question about any chance of an
in person EmacsConf again someday.
And I was actually at the very first EMAX
Conf, which was 2013 and organized in London
to take advantage of the fact that I had a
business shift there. It was fantastic being
in a room with 100 other people who are all
really interested in Emacs,
but I'm not traveling like any time for the
foreseeable future, so if other people are
interested in organizing something like that,
I am totally happy to spread the word.
It doesn't fit with my current lifestyle,
but it might fit somebody's.
I don't know. We're still just here.
And I like the virtual conference.
I really like the fact that we can bring
together people from all over the world.
I can take a look at my schedule with all the
time constraints. Okay,
I need to put this person in the morning
because they're in Australia and I need to
put this person in the afternoon because
they're from Vancouver or from somewhere else
in the Pacific time zone.
And it's just this breadth of people.
But the other thing that I would love for
people to start thinking about is if we could
have a virtual conference in other time
zones, so that's easier for people in Asia
Pacific or Europe to attend.
And as we're getting the hang of this,
this crontab-based thing,
I think we might almost be at the point where
I can set it up to run even when I'm
sleeping. And then other people can figure
out, you know, the exception handling,
oh, you know, this talk needs to be
restarted. Okay, just play it again and scrub
around to find the right part,
which means we could have replays,
or we can have like the Asia Pacific
Alternate Event that we had the other time
where some speakers came back online and did
another Q&A session just for that kind of
event. So those are other cool,
fun things that would love to be,
would be great. Satellite events,
someone mentioned in the etherpad.
Some people have been organizing these,
which are great. Basically a bunch of people
get together in a room or 2 rooms now because
of the tracks and watch Emacs Conf together.
So if you have a physical meetup or if you'd
like to start 1, It's basically,
you know, do this, maybe have stickers if you
have stickers. You know,
it's just have everyone come over and hang
out and meet people. I don't know.
It's a thing. Specifically how to do it,
I have no idea how to organize these things.
But Alain does. So talk to him.
[Speaker 2]: Another way of adding multiple tracks is
changing it to doing it like 2 times a year,
in max confidence.
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, yeah, people have mentioned something
like that. Or the fact that org often has
like a full day of talks by itself,
and actually a little bit more than a day
now, because I've been squeezing things into
other tracks. There has been some potential
interest in having an org conf.
It could be a thing. And I'd love to see
also, we'd love to experiment with other
formats. So there could be a bug hunting
session or let's use the breakout rooms to
split up into little mentoring groups and see
how that works. So lots of things that we can
do. They've actually finished over in the Gen
track so I don't know if people want to very
quickly ask questions here or if we go there.
Leo has come over here instead so okay he's
joining over here on the other side.
Okay, hello.
[Speaker 3]: I
[Speaker 1]: have 1 thing to add. Yeah,
[Speaker 4]: No, no, no, I was just about to say I am not
hosting anymore. You 2 do a wonderful job,
and I'm happy to just watch.
[Speaker 1]: go ahead. Cool. Yeah, I was going to add 1
quick note about any potential suggestions or
recommendations for hosting Emacs on
satellites. Is that, I mean,
given that we are an event centered around
Emacs, and Emacs is backed by the Free
Software Foundation, if you do reach out to
them, they're usually pretty helpful in terms
of sending goodies and stickers and such.
So yeah, if you give them a heads up and
reach out to them in advance,
you might well end up with a whole bunch of
swag on your hands that you could give out
during the satellite. So that's the thing.
[Speaker 5]: Well, I just wanted to note it felt kind of
even smoother. I mean,
you guys always run a nice conference,
but it felt smoother this year than ever
before, which listening to your talk,
Sasha, All the automation that you're doing
is pretty incredible. So I think it's paying
off.
[Speaker 0]: Yay! You know, it is very amusing to hear the
host say, okay, you know,
but we've got to wrap up in the next 30
seconds because Sasha's contact is going to
go yoink!
[Speaker 5]: I have a person I work with who keeps the
trains running on time shall we say and like
cuts off every meeting like the second that
it's supposed to end while somebody's in
mid-sentence and I hope we don't get to that
point here.
[Speaker 0]: So do we have any more,
[Speaker 4]: oh sorry I'm reverting to the hosting,
Do we have any more questions for MaxConf?
Although maybe we want to switch to the other
room so that we don't struggle too much to
find... Organize the stuff on BBB afterwards.
[Speaker 0]: Oh, the recording. Well,
this is a way to make sure the recording gets
online. But we could do that too.
I don't know. What do y'all think?
[Speaker 4]: I'm personally fine. If we want to stay here
right now, the development track is currently
streaming this BBB room.
So are we on Jen. So we're going to leave it
at is and move into closing remarks if we
want.
[Speaker 1]: Oh, yeah, just, I guess,
make sure that every 1 of the organizers are
here. I see Flo here. Let's see,
Corbyn, are you here? Can you maybe speak
here on BBB?
[Speaker 4]: We'll give some time for Corbyn to figure it
out. He did figure it out eventually
yesterday, so surely today will go
swimmingly.
Right. We're getting everything ready,
folks.
[Speaker 0]: Okay. So while we sort out Corwin,
can someone tell him on mumble,
I guess? Because I'm not sure if he's...
Anyway. I also want to say that in the Emacs
conference channel, people have been
mentioning that the remote stuff has been
working for them. And I really do like the
way that this means we can have all the
videos, you know, all prepared,
they're captioned, you know,
We can send them to people,
we can post them on the website afterwards.
We can bring all these people together who
might not be able to convince their companies
to fly them somewhere for an Emacs
conference. And also I can do this kind of
prep while having my now seven-year-old still
be able to wander by and whatever.
Travelling is really tough.
So, this is fine. This is cool.
I like this. We'll keep doing it.
[Speaker 4]: It's definitely playing into the low-cost
conference. To do it online,
So many people can just access it very
easily. All right, so we've messaged Colwyn.
I guess we can get started with Dalim.
It should maybe take a minute or 2 to join
us. Should I get started with the Final words
of the day? All right,
cool. All right, folks,
we made it. We are at the end of the second
day of EmacsConf, the second of 2 days.
And the first thing I want to say is first,
thank you so much for joining us for this new
edition. It's personally my fourth year doing
the EmacsConf, but if you go to emacsconf-org
and you see the different sessions,
you will realize that the first 1 was in
2013, which happens to be 10 years ago.
So we are obviously very excited about all of
this and we'll tell you perhaps a little more
about what has changed over the last 10
years. As usual, you know the pre-recorded
talks are available right now on the talk
page, at least for all those which were
pre-recorded. All the ones which happened on
the Google button, it will take us a little
bit of time to figure out how to,
well, when to put them available.
We need to do subtitles and all this jazzy
stuff. And we'll also upload them to YouTube
and other places once we check the audio,
especially for the Q&As.
We need to clean up some of the audios and
make sure that we do not publish any personal
stuff. All the live talks and Q&As will do
this in the weeks to come.
Usually, it takes us about 1 to 2 months to
try to get everything out,
but if it takes longer,
it's fine. Eventually,
everything will be there.
The 1 thing we can say is that by EmacsConf
2024, when it comes around,
everything should have been uploaded at some
point. So that's a wide window.
So again, and as usual,
feel free to spread the word about EmacsConf
because, you know, we've been doing this for
a while and every year more people show up to
these events and more people watch the videos
on YouTube and it's wonderful to see,
you know, our main goal which is to get cool
ideas out of the head of people,
shared and viewed by so many people.
It's always amazing. Also,
I would like to ask you personally,
what did you like about this conference?
Or what do you like, what do you feel was
better than last year,
because the feedback is very useful to us.
We'd also like to know if you've got any
ideas for making things even better.
And we've got a general conference discussion
slash notes slash community message board,
which is pad.emaxconf.org
slash 2023. And you can also just mention
them. You know, we might open this room for
people to join us and chat,
although Flowy and myself,
your up team, needs to go to bed.
So please be mindful of this.
If you ask a very interesting question,
We will both have to make sacrifices to stay
a while longer because you're too damn
interesting. Now we'd like to move into
thanking all the people who make EmacsConf
possible. And obviously,
first, we have to thank all the speakers,
all the volunteers, the participants,
and to all those other people in our lives
who make it possible through time and
support, thank you so much for allowing us to
run EmacsCount. It wouldn't happen without
you, and without us, I suppose,
because we are included in this.
This year's conference hosts are myself,
Leo Vivier, Amine Bendali,
and joining our team of hosts for the first
time this year, Flobby Coder.
Thank you so much, Flobby.
You did a wonderful job.
It's right there. No, dammit.
No, I can't. I can never remember if BBB is
flipping stuff, so either 1 of those
directions. The streams this year,
as last year, were managed by Sasha Schwa,
obviously. And the check-ins by Flobby Coder,
and I'm in with Miscellaneous running around
by Corwin Brust, who will be joining us
momentarily. Apparently,
all his USB failed, so he will be with us as
[Speaker 3]: Roost. Rhymes with Roost.
Do I have audio now? Alright,
I'll go to work on my camera.
Hi. Hello?
[Speaker 4]: soon as he can. It's Lovely.
Okay, I'll keep going.
I also need to thank, well,
need, no, I want to thank all the captioning
volunteers, the captioners as we call them.
You've got Daniel Molina,
Bala Ramadoui, Durai, sorry,
Bhavin Gandhi, Amin Zayed,
Yoni Rapkin, who presented 1 of the talk
earlier, Daniel Alejandro Tapia,
Hannah Miller, Ken Huang,
Jean-Christophe Ellary,
and James Howell. Also thanking
Jean-Christophe Ellary,
Colwyn, Quiliro, Kern,
and Amin Bendali for helping with the early
acceptance process. Sasha,
do I read this 1? It's weird to think myself.
I'm gonna pat myself on the back,
I guess. Go on, Sasha.
I'll do it. I'll do it.
It's fine. Thanks to myself for fiddling with
the audio to get things nicely synced,
And thanks to myself again and other people,
we kept the mailing list free from spam.
Because I'm not sure what happened since May,
but we've been receiving about 3 to 4 spam
emails. And it just happened all of a sudden,
and I was really weirded out by this process.
Where was I? OK, thanks to Andrew Ducurty for
helping with whisper processing.
Thanks to Ashki Ghekwad for design
contribution. Thanks to Yoshin,
our grand changro for all the music that
we've been using for the last 3 years at this
point, I think. Also thanks to Rye for the
server that we're using for OBS streaming and
for processing videos.
And also thanks to the free software
foundation for obviously Emacs itself,
the mailing list that we use,
and the media.emacsconf-org
server where all of the presentations are
currently hosted. We'd also like to thank
BigBlueButton, Etherpad,
IceCast, OBS, The Lounge,
Libre.chat, FFmpeg, OpenAI,
Whisper, the E-N-E-S force alignment tool,
Site Transfer, SubD, and contributors to all
of the tools and services we used in the
making of this conference.
And obviously, all of them are free,
as Sasha obviously told you,
and as we will be telling you again for many
years to come. We'd also like again to thank
everyone for attending the conference and
making EmacsConf what it is.
And for those who were on the general track,
you know Sasha did it in parallel to the last
talk we had today. She did a wonderful talk
on how EmacsConf is actually run.
So there's her talk, there's also an entire
page on our wiki about the infrastructure
that we use. So if you're interested,
especially in running an event of your own,
you've got as much information as you want,
and as Sacha probably told you,
we are available for sharing the knowledge
and enabling your dreams of making a
conference. Amint, do you want to take it
over with the fiscal sponsorship
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, sure. Let's see.
Can you please scroll down a little bit?
Whoever is kindly sharing the screen.
[Speaker 4]: announcements? Okay. Oh,
I was scrolling on my end.
Sorry.
[Speaker 1]: Thanks, Sasha. Yeah, so kind of super excited
to finally get into this.
And this is something that we've been kind of
hoping to get worked out for a long time
actually and it's finally here.
So people might have already seen this but as
of this last Thursday we're actually fiscally
sponsored by the Free Software Foundation.
So we joined their Working Together for Free
Software program. And DFSF published the
announcement on their website.
You're welcome to go and check it out there.
But I just want to quickly get into a little
bit about what it means and some of the
benefits, I guess. So as part of this working
together for a free software fund,
the FSF provides fiscal sponsorship for a
number of important free software and new
technical projects, such as the new tool
chain and Replicant, which is a free fork of
Android. And starting this year,
EmacsConf has joined the program as well.
And as a fiscal sponsor,
DFSF can assist us by providing services
required by a legal entity,
like signing contracts and receiving and
processing payments. So to provide some
context, eMAXConf is and always has been an
independent initiative organized by a very
small number of people,
a small team of people without any corporate
sponsors. And that's important in part
because I believe part of our message is that
we want to showcase that everybody can do
this and organize a conference like this no
matter how small your team is and how modest
your resources are, which we will actually
get into a little bit later in the closing
remarks. But yeah, so now having the FSF as
our fiscal sponsor, we're in a better
position to accept donations as 1 potential
way to contribute or help the conference.
And just to clarify, we're currently not
struggling at all to cover these costs of the
servers and such, which we will get into
again. But this is just 1 extra avenue if
people are feeling generous and would like to
help, it's much appreciated.
And yeah, so having a 501c3 nonprofit like
the FSF, as a fiscal sponsor,
many donors will receive tax benefits that
they otherwise wouldn't receive if they were
to like donate to like individuals running a
project directly. And also donors can know
that, you know, the funds that they're
donating are being handled by an accountable
institution. And also importantly,
when donating through the FSF,
Let's see, text changing.
Okay, yeah. People can donate without having
to run any non-free JavaScript,
which is nice. Because unfortunately,
usually these days on the web when you do
want to buy something or spend money,
you have to run non-free JavaScript,
which isn't the case when donating through
the FSF. Yeah, so we just joined,
as I said, on Thursday,
and we've already received our very first
donation, so we'd like to extend our thanks
and gratitude to Scott Ranby,
who is actually our first ever kind donor.
They agreed to be thanked publicly.
So thank you, Scott. And yeah,
so this is a recent development.
And we plan to add much more information and
details about this whole situation to the
wiki, including links to the announcements,
some more information about the program,
and our donation page of course,
in the new future. And in the meantime I'm
also happy to help answer any questions as
best as I can, So feel free to ping me on IRC
or just email me at bandalia.guinard.org.
[Speaker 3]: Which gives me a chance to jump in and just
point out 1 question that we know people have
is just about how much of the money goes to
FSF when you make a contribution through the
fund toward EmacsConf?
[Speaker 1]: Right, exactly. Yeah, and the answer to that
is that it's 10%, which is for supporting the
operation of the Working Together program and
also the shared GNU infrastructure,
which we as EmacsConf use and depend on,
along with several hundred GNU packages.
So, yeah, and it covers things like
transaction costs that the FSF's payment
processor charges?
[Speaker 3]: And then again I'll come back to say this is
a real fair price. I have some experience
with working with payment processing and
things like this and like 10% that's a that's
something that you see in Bigger businesses
that have a model around making money on that
Transaction so to be able to do that as a
nonprofit. We're taking advantage of a really
awesome thing there.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, exactly. And yeah,
just for a quick plug,
the FSF is actually doing an end of year
fundraiser right now. So if you want to go
donate to them, or if you donate to us,
a part of it will go to the FSF to support
their work on free software,
helping grow the movement,
and spread the word about it.
So, thank you. And I guess now is a good time
for me to pass the baton to the next
organizer who wants to talk about some of the
specs of the servers that we use right now.
[Speaker 0]: We actually don't have to go about this in
detail. I just put it in there in case people
were curious about how much it takes to run
something like this. Not a lot.
It's just really, you know,
2 days of computing is not that expensive in
today's world, and all the rest is just
volunteer time and a heck of a lot of Emacs
lists as previously discussed in our
presentation. So, we'll just skip through
that instead of reading all of it.
Unless people are specifically curious,
you can ask questions afterwards.
But yes, happy birthday,
EmacsConf, and here's another wonderful 10
years.
[Speaker 4]: All right, I think we are at the end of the
closing remarks. Have I forgotten anything?
We haven't had Flowy yet,
I believe. Sorry for putting you on the spot
again.
[Speaker 6]: I guess I have nothing really to say besides
what you have already said.
So thank everybody to make a presentation,
to do anything here. Thanks for all of you
that I could be a part of it.
I have to admit it also.
So thank you all. And yeah,
nothing to say probably.
[Speaker 1]: And I also want to send the thanks to Flowy
for, you know, stepping in.
We kind of like throw this on you like at the
last second, but Flowy actually stepped in
and hosted graciously a couple of the talks
on the Dev track today.
So, which I think went very well.
So congrats and thank you.
[Speaker 6]: Thank you.
[Speaker 4]: Speaking of which we were not monsters.
We kindly asked Floey yesterday because
everything was going so well.
And now we can say it,
you know, I can say things are going well.
Usually it's a bad thing when you're doing a
broadcast to say things are going well right
now because it tends to backfires at some
[Speaker 3]: Hours of notice, hours of notice.
That, that's planning.
[Speaker 4]: point. But yesterday- So hours of notice,
Flowy didn't sleep all that much because we
tasked him with hosting,
so he was turning in his bed all night
thinking, oh, I'm going to host MaxCons.
But Flowy, you did a wonderful job and I am
so glad that not only you were able to join
us again this year, but that also you were
able to host. Because last year,
had we asked you to host,
you would have said no.
First time we asked you this year was yes,
but give me some time to think about it.
[Speaker 6]: Next year it is yes completely.
[Speaker 4]: If we've done a good job,
it will be yes directly.
All right, so since we are at the end of the
thankings and I did say europe team needs to
go to bed in about 12 minutes that leaves us
about 12 minutes to try to answer as many
points as you'd like to raise.
Sasha, I think the Q&A room is still open
because we are technically still in the Emacs
conference room currently.
So, if you... We're going to put the link
again if you need to find it.
Otherwise, scroll up and find the 1 on there.
[Speaker 0]: I think I can change the redirect.
Maybe. I will go figure this out.
Keep talking in the background.
[Speaker 4]: Right. So, whilst we figure this out in the
background, it would be nice if you could
join us and ask questions,
either by dropping them.
I see plenty of people have already left some
comments. We have 2 places,
right now it's more about a chitchatting
about the end of the conference.
If you've got general feedback,
we've mentioned it at the top,
but if you want to write your general
feedback here, it will find its way at some
point in the years of the relevant people who
can make things change.
So don't worry too much about where you put
your feedback, it'll be fine.
But now, how about we start reading some of
the notes that people have said or questions
that
[Speaker 3]: have been asked. So here's 1 for Amin.
Do you have any stats on how many people
watched for an IRC and BBB over the 2 days?
[Speaker 1]: Right, yeah, so I guess for IceCast,
which I can answer more readily,
I think yesterday we were averaging around
240, 250 concurrent viewers at a time.
And today, so today it varied.
I think the maximum was again like around 200
to 20-ish with the average being more around
180, 190 viewers. We've had a lot of hits to
the actual web pages for the Emacs Conf Wiki
or the pad, which are all being served on 1
server. I pulled some numbers.
I'm not sure if they're correct.
So I'm like a little bit hesitant to discuss
them. Safe to say they're easily in the tens
of thousands, maybe in the hundreds of
thousands of total visits over the past,
[Speaker 0]: Maybe the pad makes a lot of small requests.
[Speaker 1]: I guess, 48 hours. Right,
okay. So, yeah, that's why I'm hesitant to
say. But yeah, easily in the thousands or
[Speaker 3]: You know
[Speaker 4]: who you are anyway, the crowd,
you know how many you are,
you do not need exact numbers
[Speaker 1]: tens of thousands. Yeah,
so I don't have the exact numbers but I guess
it's always kind of fun to maybe try to pull
some numbers and look at it that way but you
know of course we all know that what we do,
every single person counts.
So I don't know, trying to look at turning
people into abstract numbers isn't,
I don't know, inspiring to me very much,
but it's cool. So.
[Speaker 4]: All right. So how about we go into the
questions. So Sasha is now in the viewport
where we can see some questions.
So how about we take some of them.
I can read them or if anyone of the
organizers wants to do this,
feel free, especially those who haven't
talked to a whole lot this year.
Cohen, do you want to try it?
[Speaker 3]: I didn't make my motive clear.
I did and I'm done. I took the first
question, I picked the bottom question off
the list because I knew exactly who it was
going for. The person who wants to answer or
direct the next question is welcome.
Sorry, I could have given a little better
stage direction there.
I'm not prepared to answer how many emaxers
are from Nordic countries other than to say
definitely yes and several.
And I haven't looked close enough at the
suggestion yet.
[Speaker 4]: Right, okay. I can take the question about
the BBB limitations. So it's the second 1,
the red 1. Small suggestion,
likely out of your control,
but anyway, the blue button seems to work
very well, but it would be a bit more
watchable if the webcam frames were lined up
vertically on 1 side, because it would allow
the screen share frames to be larger and
would make much better use of the viewable
space. Maybe worth a bug report to upstream.
And I agree, BBB has been really good.
Amine, did you want to say something?
[Speaker 3]: I'm going
[Speaker 1]: to continue and then I'll add something at
the end.
[Speaker 4]: Okay, sure. So BBB has been really good for
us. It allows us to have many parallel rooms
which are all recording service side at the
same time. And it's wonderful for us because
we can gather. At some point,
I think last year, we had 4 concurrent talks
being recorded because people were just so
interested in what was going on in rooms.
And you know, we only,
like this year, the co-organizers,
it's the 5 people you see in a room
currently. And if we had all of us to be in a
separate room, having to record on the
machine, it wouldn't work.
So we are able to demultiply the amount of
content that we produce thanks to BBB,
but sadly, we are also quite limited by the
interface of BBB. Another problem that is
dear to me is that audio tends to be fairly
bad at some points depending on the speakers
because BBB has really funky audio correction
stuff going in the background,
and sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't work,
and especially on my machine,
the specs are above in the document if you're
interested, but BBB and OBS do not play well
at all. You might have heard me speaking with
some clicks in my voice at some point.
That's another problem of BBB.
Anyway, I mean, you wanted to add something
as well.
[Speaker 1]: Right, yeah, I kind of empathize and also
emphasize the problems with audio on BBB
sometimes, but about the specific suggestion
here of like lighting things up at least
visually, I think that's like much more
doable even if you don't open a bug upstream.
I believe the Free Software Foundation for
their LibrePlanet conference,
either last year or the year before,
they had some custom, like clients signed
into browser, custom CSS,
where it would do exactly something like
that. It would like enlarge the shared screen
on the 1 side and then stack up all of the
webcam feeds on 1 side.
So we might be able to use something like
that.
[Speaker 3]: So I'll tack on to that.
And now I feel like a heel as soon as I
opened my mouth, because I think I almost get
the sense Floyd wants to jump in here and
we're all talking, everyone except Sasha who
actually wrote OBS, you know,
the OBS WebSocket plugin that is probably the
answer to all the different questions
everyone is bringing up.
So I guess I'll leave my input at that And
Chloe, did you have anything to say,
or can we pick on Sasha?
[Speaker 6]: Nothing to say.
[Speaker 0]: I need to update the OBS WebSocket plugin for
the protocol change, because I think the
protocol change was from 4 to 5.
It's 1 of those things that I haven't gotten
[Speaker 1]: Cool. But
[Speaker 0]: around to. yeah, so we'll try to solve it in
CSS. So if I can tinker with the CSS or if
somebody else would like to volunteer to move
things around, then that would be fantastic
because front-end should be things.
Okay, oh, what order of magnitude hours do
you each of you think you devote to the
conference yearly? I have I expected someone
would ask this question.
So I have I have my the past 11 years of time
analysis. This is my Emacs category,
so it also includes Emacs news.
So this is my Emacs hours by month and year.
So you can see last year,
it spiked up a lot. But this year,
it has taken less time.
So last month, it was about 93 hours.
And the month before that was just about 87
hours of prep. And this actually includes
things like captioning and,
and coordination. And then you can see a
little bit of time here like the EMAX news
and and harvesting q&a and adding chapter
index indices and things like that.
So I, I like it, it's it's my form of fun.
And Otherwise, I'm mostly just,
you know, helping the kiddo go to play dates
and carrying things around.
And, you know, so this is the stuff that I do
to keep my brain happy.
And if you're wondering,
okay, well, do you sleep?
That's the next question I expected people
ask. The answer is yes,
we still actually do manage to sleep,
or at least I do. Less so now that I have a
kid, this is like 2016,
had a kiddo, and then suddenly much less
sleep, but still a reasonable amount of
sleep. So Emacs stuff happens,
I can still sleep, and it's a lot of fun.
[Speaker 4]: Now that's data for you folks.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, we can't top that at all.
[Speaker 0]: It's a blog post also,
yeah.
[Speaker 4]: Especially, you start like this,
how do you expect all of us to say anything
after this? Whatever we say is not going to
be backed up by data, it's not going to be as
many hours, and it's not going to be as
qualitative in general.
I can remark on something because for me it's
my fourth year helping to organize EmacsConf
and there's a definite change this year.
I did spend, usually I get into EmacsConf
mode in late September when I start worrying
about the CFP, the call for proposal is
finishing, and then we need to start running
after speakers to secure the proposals to
make sure, oh, can you do this?
Can you do maybe a 10-minute format instead
of a 20-minute format,
you know, all this jazzy stuff.
And usually it kind of looks like Sasha for
me in terms of involvement,
or at least it did for the previous year.
But this year, now that I've been gainfully
employed as a software developer,
I found it much harder to find the time to
invest into MaxComp. But 1 of the things that
allowed me to still stay efficient at my day
job is the fact that I knew that Sasha and
all the work that we did in previous years
would come to help us organize this year's
conference. And I'm not kidding,
this year, I've been keeping an eye,
obviously, and we've been chatting with all
the organizers, but it's mostly been Sasha
holding the fort from the end of the CFP in
September to right about end of November.
So I'll use the opportunity,
as well my fellow co-organizers will,
to thank you Sasha for putting so much time
and energy into this. Not only Sasha from
this year, but also Sasha from last year,
and last year, and last year.
And I will not be able to give you a figure
of how much time it takes.
I can tell you that the 2 days of Emacs Con
are a bloody marathon because we cannot share
our screens with you, but Sasha has given you
a little bit of pointers about,
you know, how much stuff we need to monitor.
Sasha just switches constantly between
workspaces. I just put everything on 1
workspace and my screen looks absolutely
mental. And then I wonder why my microphone
is clipping on BVB, I suppose.
All right, that's all for me.
Anyone wants to say anything about how much
time it takes? Sasha, please.
[Speaker 0]: I have a nice setup this year because I
actually have a Matthew Lent donated a
computer to me that can handle the big
monitor and I'm stealing my husband's big
monitor over there. See,
So this is my setup today.
It's got like conference stuff on my laptop
and then just IOC on the other big screen and
the 480p so I can see,
I can make sure it doesn't fall down.
Yes, so I have a nice setup today.
[Speaker 4]: Anyone wants to comment about how much time
it takes for them to organize the MaxCon for
2, you know, including everything,
be it the brainstorming,
the answering volunteers and stuff like this?
Or we can move to another question,
of course.
[Speaker 1]: I mean, I know for myself,
I kind of dropped the ball this year,
somewhat unintentionally or unintentionally.
Well, yeah, I didn't have any other choice,
basically, at least in like September through
like early November or mid November.
But I think like, it sort of differs,
I guess, from year to year.
Sometimes life happens,
and no matter how much you would love to put
a ton of time into something,
you just can't. And maybe next year you can
do a lot more. So I'm optimistic I'll be able
to put in much more time into things for
EmacsConf next year, but that's just me.
[Speaker 4]: I just want to say something before Robin
drops in. Sasha, go please first.
[Speaker 0]: And I think people shouldn't like feel bad
about having those. I think designing
conference systems or processes so that they
can take advantage of little pockets of time
is the way to go. I love the fact that we now
have a system where hosts can show up on the
day of and just rock it,
right? So this is great.
It is good that we can get by with less time
throughout the process and just take
advantage of whatever time people have.
Whether it's, you know,
they've got 2 hours, they want to caption a
talk, that sort of stuff is already totally
awesome.
[Speaker 3]: And yeah, you both, thank you.
Yeah, you both stole my Thunder and then put
a quarterback in me. I couldn't agree more
with everything you said.
That's something that just typifies what is
amazing about this conference,
right? It's a kind of accessibility,
isn't it? Having some work I can give you
that helps you give back to your community
that is at your level,
that fits your time budget,
that is something that you're willing to go
care about because it intersects,
you know, the world you live in in some
practical way and therefore you can make time
for it. We all live in a lot of different
trenches and making them intersect is 1 of
the things Emacs does in a technical way
[Speaker 5]: and
[Speaker 3]: through this conference at least in a very
community way. Okay, and it brings me back
also on the OBS front.
And I think that's what really excited me
too. When I think about the potential that's
out there and getting a bunch of people
looking at the work you've already done with
OBS WebSocket and thinking about,
you know, oh, we want more timers that count
things down and we want each organizer to be
able to have a little palette of them,
some of which are gonna be handed to you by
the conference director and some of which you
can add yourself because they help you and
that's right. And, you know,
have, you know, keeping things really fast
and loose so we can make the artistic
decisions on the fly that make our conference
what it is, but then making,
you know, a simple automated tool chain that
anyone can learn and that we know how to
execute the steps of manually.
That's the actual design pattern that you've
implemented here that's working so well.
So the
[Speaker 4]: 1 thing I wanted to ask about Amin saying,
oh, I've dropped the ball this year.
Amin's, just to be clear with everyone,
Amin's definition of dropping the ball is
securing a sponsorship with the FSF.
So that's dropping the ball for you.
[Speaker 3]: Well attending a weekly meeting,
We take 1 week off a month where we
coordinate infrastructure issues between this
and other FSF supported projects using quote
unquote GNU infrastructure.
That's kind of a, GNU is really an umbrella
term once you get kind of close to it.
You know, it's like GNU is all of the
volunteers helping with this vision we have
of user rights.
[Speaker 4]: 1 last thing I wanted to add about how much
time we spend on this.
It's just the fact that we've experimented
over the 4 years I've been part of this.
You know, the first year we had so many
meetings because we thought this would be the
way to know 1 another and this would be the
way to create qualitative notes.
And we've come back to this.
[Speaker 3]: That is what I saw. I can't help but
interrupt you again. This is all I do.
Leo This is why I keep off the microphone
until the last 20 minutes of the conference
once everybody already wants to hang up Then
I know you'll be honest with me But I have to
say when I looked at that table of data all I
saw was 200 hours of Sasha's life that she
spent talking to the, you know,
all many of us were involved.
It's not just the 4 or 5 of us that,
you know, that have done this last 2 years
convention, right? It's,
you know, there's been many people that have
come in, shared wise thoughts,
helping us form the, I don't know,
ethos or all of the things that we're
carrying forward into 2024.
Sorry, Leo.
[Speaker 1]: No, no,
[Speaker 4]: you're fine, You're fine.
I mean, you pretty much continued with what I
was going to talk about.
So I'm looking at the time and I've already
extended by 5 minutes the amount of time I
was supposed to stay and Flowy is looking at
me with very teary eyes because he's thinking
about the meeting he's going to have at 9am
tomorrow, as will I by the way.
Yeah, don't you have to
[Speaker 3]: be commuting like right now Flowy?
I mean aren't you supposed to be...
I hope you get to sleep before work.
Thank you so much for your awesome work this
year.
[Speaker 6]: I mean, I didn't do so much at the Emojis
Conference, so I'm just here like from
Friday. At first, I was looking at the
website, which talks we're having,
So it's all fine. So maybe next year or the
coming year, I can do a little bit more
privacy.
[Speaker 4]: A little more, like again,
like with Amin, Flowy's definition of doing,
not having done much is hosting 1 of many of
the Dev talks. So you could be kind of
worried about it. All right,
folks, considering the question that we have
right now, we still see people adding
questions, but I think we are all pretty
tired and we need to get on with the rest of
our weekends or nights.
So do I go into parting words now everyone?
Are we okay with this?
I'll take this for a yes.
I'll ask Sasha, yeah?
[Speaker 0]: Oh I think I basically have until the kiddo
yells at me to come for dinner so I can hang
out with people after.
and do the wrapping up.
[Speaker 3]: But I
[Speaker 4]: All right, splendid. Go ahead know,
right, I'll do the wrapping up for the
perhaps the stream. We might leave it up
because there's no impetus for us to close
it. But at least to officially close while
we're still there, EmacsConf 2023,
I will have again to thank everyone,
all the speakers, all my co-organizers for
making this possible. You've seen all the
care that we put into it,
and we are glad every year that all this work
is doing something in terms of community
building, in terms of leading more people to
join us every year as speakers,
or just join us as a user of Emacs.
And it's always a pleasure to organize the
conference, to host it,
and to work with everyone in the room
currently. Corwin and I are constantly joking
when we are backstage making jokes.
I think it's Corwin we said last year during
the closing remarks that there was no other
place they'd rather be than in the backstage.
And for me, even though many things have
changed in my life over the last year,
many good things have happened,
it's good to come back to Emacs Cons as this
milestone and say, oh yeah,
I'm exactly where I want to be,
with the people I want to be with,
and I see myself and I cannot wait to see
myself again in the situation next year.
So thank you so much everyone.
If you want to join us,
ask questions, we'll still be here for a
while. Floey might drop out,
I might drop out, Sasha might drop out,
but we'll be here to answer as many questions
as you want for as long as we can.
Bye bye everyone and let's get started with
the after show now.
[Speaker 0]: Bye Leo, bye Chloe! I'll drop out eventually
when the kiddo yells at me.
[Speaker 3]: I can't tell you how much fun this is,
yeah. The way to remember what I said,
Leo, it's 100% true. Oh man,
turning off your lights,
I'm doing it. I'm doing it too.
Sorry y'all. Oh, yeah,
bye-bye lights
[Speaker 4]: Yeah, that's every year that's how we finish
we just turn off the the big lights that we
have in our faces all the day especially the
hosts
[Speaker 3]: and Tell me if there's too much back chatter
[Speaker 5]: get off my headphones,
too, so I can
[Speaker 3]: when I hear you in the room.
Can I hear you now? Yeah.
Is it feeding back pretty bad?
[Speaker 1]: Hello? there is some echo.
[Speaker 4]: Yeah, there is some echo.
[Speaker 3]: I think Okay. Fine. I can live with my
headset a little longer.
I give 1 ear a break at a time.
[Speaker 1]: Thanks for your sacrifice.
[Speaker 3]: Oh, well, you know, it's a small,
small, small price to pay to get to smooth
with y'all. Yeah, I was just looking at that
chart and I was thinking about all of those
meetings that we had like 18 months we were
just on this death march to organize this and
it's just such an amazing accomplishment that
you you have here Sasha like I'm sorry to
pick on you personally but the work that you
put in keep being able to keep it the whole
technical project in your mind,
all the way down to presenting it at this
year's conference and like kind of spoon
feeding it to people that want to run off in
their own damn direction and then handing
them an org is the 1 that people keep bugging
us about. So if you're looking for a project,
here it is. Just really well done.
I no longer feel like we wasted a lot of time
there. I mean, you remember I enjoyed so much
all of our check ins and all of that stuff.
But we had so many ideas,
you can imagine that I wondered,
you know, I wondered if we should have had
more focused meetings and all that.
And I was glad when we stopped having like
weekly meetings, because you know what I mean
To keep this much power in the room once a
week, it feels creepy.
This much intellectual power.
Anyway, that's it. I think that's it for me.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, and I'll say, I mean,
I can't obviously speak for Sash or anyone
else. Yeah, the regular meetings were a
little bit intense than we had the year
before, but I'm kind of also super glad that
we did do them. And, you know,
in a way, it did help us sort of connect and
get to know each other much more regularly or
much more which is great and I see thumbs up
from Leo and Corwin so yeah happy we did
them. Might want to have some kind of
actually irregular ones every once in a while
if we have to decide on something.
But if like this year,
everything can be worked out pretty much ad
hoc, whenever needs be,
like over asynchronous communications.
I see Sasha nodding very excitedly.
This also works. So yeah.
And I also see some questions coming in here
in BBB. If other folks want to join,
please feel free to do that as well.
Yeah, I don't think we have an issue tracker
right now, but our whole website is a wiki.
So if you wanna like create a new page or
there might be a page,
I don't know. You can of course go in and
edit it to your heart's content.
[Speaker 3]: Yeah. Hilarious, I couldn't,
like I almost managed to type that as fast as
you could say it, you know.
That's fine. I get the same answer in the
chat. Yep. Our website's a wiki and we
definitely use ideas here.
If you want to implement them or you know
document them enough that even Corwin can
code it then you know I'll do that.
[Speaker 0]: Also I'll go through all the etherpads at
some point to harvest them and I think I have
yeah I have an Emacs list function that does
this for me. So that I can go through that
thing and include that in our organizers
notebooks, lessons learned and ideas for next
year.
[Speaker 3]: Yeah.
[Speaker 4]: Yeah, because something that you know,
We were talking about the different models
between having many, many meetings and how it
paid off eventually. The thing is,
this year we had no meetings.
We met Friday morning on Mumble and we were
ready to go. We did chat things up a little
bit on ISE, obviously,
but no meeting this year.
So I'm tempted to say that,
yes, we could have off-hand meetings,
but I think it's mostly because we want to
see 1 another, not because we need
necessarily for those meetings to prepare
Emacs cons. But what I wanted to say as well
is that I think it's a testament to the bets
that Sasha took last year to automatize a lot
of things. I mean, we'd already been
automatizing a lot of stuff,
like writing scripts for every single thing
in ESPire, but last year we made a big bet to
say, what if we had OBS in the cloud?
What if we had a streaming platform that was
running on a machine? And this is what
allowed us to very smoothly have 2 tracks,
the general track and the dev track.
And I think the beauty of this system is
that, obviously, because we get more and more
speakers submitting talks,
we are starting to think maybe we actually
need a third track or something and no 1 is
stressed in the room when Sasha says this.
You know, there's not the reaction that's
like, oh no it's gonna be tough,
we're gonna need more hosts,
organizers, it's just a calm...
[Speaker 3]: Now, point of order, Now Flowy is stressed
when Sasha says this.
[Speaker 4]: That was just a-
[Speaker 0]: I didn't know, Colin, we could put you in the
spot next year. You'd be like,
you know, hey, Colin, what do you feel about
hosting?
[Speaker 3]: You know, I'm happy to do it.
And I feel, I mean, just to jump in there and
say, yes, exactly. No,
there's no concern on the part of the
organizer committee that we could expand
this. If you said we needed to expand to 4
tracks, I think we would gulp and consider
it, you know, from there,
it gets a little crazy,
but strictly because there aren't that many
people that we know want to commit.
What did we see there?
80 hours of potential work that,
you know, that could go into organizing next
year's conference if you find that it's a
rabbit hole for you and being a streamer
means you want to read every email and
respond to every, as Sasha has done this last
year, right? So when I look at her numbers
for total participation,
that's really a high watermark.
Sasha really took care of this convention,
you know, like a producer might.
And the fact that what used to take 200 hours
before, I mean, I can't harp enough on the
story that that's telling you,
right? And as I think about it with a project
manager hat on, right?
I'm saying, okay, well,
that's, you know, that work can potentially
be amplified to many thousands of hours of
work, considering the automation and the
potential for bringing people in.
So if you thought about it as a money-making
thing, If we were trying to make money by
having these conventions,
you would think we have a very profitable
business here because we can amplify the
talent that walks in the door really
effectively, if that makes sense,
through the tools and the training.
[Speaker 0]: So we should clarify that if anyone wants to
volunteer as a host or just check in,
let's just talk host. It's really just a
matter of showing up, making sure your BVB
works so you can talk.
If you want to share your webcam,
you can. You can skip it if you don't want
to. You can share the screen with the pad.
And then you just sit there and you chat with
a speaker and you read the questions off the
pad in case they don't read the questions off
themselves. So it can be a very low effort,
low stress way to get into it and just there
kind of helping the speaker have somebody to
talk to. It doesn't have to take 80 hours.
It can take 2 hours and that's cool.
[Speaker 3]: And the same, and that's just like the
transcription task. Yeah,
sorry, I probably missed the lead there,
right? Every individual part of this is
really easy. So it's an open-ended commitment
to come and kind of meet a part of the
committee, a part of the community,
right? To come in and say,
maybe you're really excited about org,
you could review talks and just review the
org ones. There's not an obligation that says
you're going to look at every talk that's
submitted, right? Share your thoughts on the
talks that you have a chance to review the
proposals. That's the submissions review
part, right? So there's a way to help with
almost any appetite for I'd like a little
extra work in the Emacs department here like
if you want to feel like you're part of the
team this this team is really easy to get
[Speaker 7]: think that's
[Speaker 3]: involved with. I I mean,
please. Go ahead,
[Speaker 4]: No, no, please. I've talked enough.
[Speaker 1]: sort of the... Leo. Well,
I don't get tired of hearing you talk,
but yeah, I was going to say,
Yeah, I feel like that's the general message
here is that we're all just a bunch of people
who are interested in this.
And of course, being humans,
each of us have different kinds of lives and
different kinds of availabilities and
different kinds of interests.
And there is something for everybody,
both in terms of the kinds of tasks that you
need doing, but also in terms of the amount
of time that you want or are able to put in.
So yes, if you do think this is something
that you might be interested in helping with
for future additions and such,
or even some of the post-conference work that
needs doing after this year.
Please reach out there's something for
everybody and I would love to have
[Speaker 6]: you. I can confirm there was an easy access
so I came here last year just doing some
checking in and the process of getting,
it's called a trained in was really,
really short. There was a lot of
documentation how to do something.
I mean, there's a pad that gets sent and what
to do, when to do, and what to ask is like
really incredible. So thank you for that.
Just come here, write an email,
join us. It's really, really cool.
And it's a great experience to be honest.
[Speaker 4]: Thank you. And while Sasha is speaking about
the update of the wiki,
oh Coleman did you want to say something?
[Speaker 3]: No I was just I was just gonna embarrass
Floey Coder further but you go ahead.
I was just gonna say I think you're pretty
quick, you're pretty quick,
you took to it really quickly or you show
just kind of a reflexive calm.
Like you know how to not talk over people.
You're already better at it than I am.
Now, you know, I think,
yeah, I hope you're enjoying the new stuff
that you're starting to take on because you
seem to be doing great with it.
And yeah, I hope you're not sitting there
thinking that you're taking,
you know, that you're coming on,
that you're not taking on enough
responsibility or anything like that,
or I don't know, maybe.
I picked up like a little undercurrent of
like, I don't do that much,
and I hope you don't feel that way because I
just enjoyed really having your help the last
couple of years. Thank you very much.
[Speaker 4]: Yeah, that's how they get you,
you know, they just tell you,
oh, could you do check-ins?
Like I showed up for 4 years ago saying,
oh, I'd like to help and look at me now.
I think I did I host on the first year?
I'm pretty sure I did.
Like it took 2 months basically of onboarding
to convince me to do some of the hosting and
back then oh it was so tough for us to do the
hosting because we didn't have all the fancy
setup we have this year and we were
struggling with OBS with bid rates with
sharing scenes I'm glad we are where we are
today, where I don't have to worry as much
about this. But it's also nice,
it's also 1 thing, we do have a culture of
documentation as Sasha exemplified,
and like Flo mentioned,
documentation on the roles.
Yes, We did do this to help people join us.
But really, I'm the host of General,
but it could be just anyone else because we
have so much documentation on how to do
things. Obviously, when a co-organizer is
doing a role, we tend to have an eye on how
the infrastructure is going.
But really, if you want to join us,
we will make sure that the jobs that you
have, first, you like them and it's something
that interests you, and we will also make
sure that on our end, everything goes well
for you. Like we'll be monitoring the streams
and every time we have a new person join us,
it is as much energy and mental availability
to invest into, oh, maybe we could do this.
Oh, 0, we have a fire going out because the
speaker hasn't checked in yet.
So it's all about sharing expertise,
it's all about making people level up in
terms of skills that are really useful.
I will attribute a lot of my success in
public speaking to the work I do with
EmacsConf, and I'm sure plenty of people
would gain from joining us and learning these
skills. All right, It's about 30 minutes past
the official time. Do we want to go a little
longer? Are we still available to go?
All right, well, let's keep going.
I don't see any more people joining us on the
[Speaker 1]: We have Bob,
[Speaker 4]: Blue Button. who was 1 of the speakers today
in the room. Bob, do you want to maybe unmute
yourself and ask us some questions?
Or just thank us. I mean,
I'm just begging for something.
But I know you've been very helpful.
[Speaker 5]: Yes. How are you? No, I've really had fun.
No, I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted for you,
I think. So I learned something.
Everybody wants to record their videos,
which of course, is great,
and then you have the subtitles and
everything. But I saved a lot of time by
doing it live this year and not going in and
tweaking and doing all the editing and
spending all the time that we do.
And it was kind of fun to do it that way too.
So just a little note there.
But I look forward to seeing 1 of my talks
subtitled someday. So no,
I love what you do. It's fun.
I've only seen part of Sasha's talk,
so I'll go and review that about how you're
automating all this. You know,
it's a little sad for me personally that of
course, Org gets all the attention,
but you know, we're exposing hyperbole more
now and There's definitely a growing interest
on Reddit and you know,
I think it's kind of like EmacsConf.
Give it a few years. We went away for a long
time and then we came back.
We'll start to see it permeate the Emacs
first. But I was thinking that,
you know, I think people who like Emacs and
stuff, they read things online,
they come to this conference,
but we're always hearing about,
well, the next generation.
We have to deal with that.
And I think a lot of people get exposed to
Emacs in college. Now a professor turns them
on to it and makes them use it,
and then they go out into the real world,
and there's no encouragement anymore,
and they just drop it.
And with all of what you're putting together
here, it seems like if there was some reach
out to universities and college students,
You know, we might get a whole new big crowd
of people coming in. You know,
just as I think OREG has really attracted a
lot of people in the sciences,
since that's what it was originally developed
for. So just a thought,
you know, maybe if you get any volunteers who
can help in the reach out or just,
you know, sending things around to
universities that might really extend who
gets exposed to this stuff.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, I think that's a great and very
interesting idea. And it sort of touches on a
couple of different things.
Sort of like you mentioned,
well, with org, it sort of really drew into
sciences, folks. It would be interesting to
see other parts of Emacs doing that for other
kinds of communities, but also specifically,
I guess, for colleges and universities.
Yeah, it would be cool if we had local groups
or local meetups, because so far right now,
I think the most common ones are like by city
like for example a Toronto Emacs meetup or
something like that yeah if you could maybe
encourage or help foster a university level
type of thing you know University of blah
blah Emacs group or something like that and
you know seeing what their needs would be or
trying to think also what features of Emacs
would be very useful in an academic slash
educational setting. Yeah,
lots of food for thought there.
So thank you for mentioning this.
[Speaker 5]: Sure. And I guess, yeah,
OBS is coming up here.
I worked with that a bit,
yes, last year. You know,
another powerful piece of software with a
sort of, I think, a weak user interface,
you know, for the newbies coming along on it.
And maybe, you know, if there's,
if that's kind of what people use,
figuring out or putting some information in
the wiki about how to do that,
you know, work with it or...
[Speaker 4]: Oh, good idea.
[Speaker 3]: I can comment. It is definitely the
preeminent streamer software out there,
well beyond the free software community.
It's used by most streamers on Twitch and
other like commercial for-profit things but
of course those companies are making money
off people trying to give money to the
streamers. Those streamers aren't getting any
software help. So actually most of them are
dependent for their income on free software
like OBS and OBS in specific or by some kind
of forked brand name is the primary tool.
[Speaker 4]: If I'm not mistaken I believe Stefan has
joined us right now in the room.
I'm putting you on the spot,
if you want to stay muted you can.
Oh, you have unmuted yourself.
[Speaker 7]: I managed to click the unmute button.
Yes, I'm here. How are you guys doing?
[Speaker 4]: Doing good, surviving here.
[Speaker 1]: Congratulations.
[Speaker 4]: Late in your time.
[Speaker 7]: Really amazing work organizing the
conference. I really have to congratulate
everyone. So I just hopped on here to sort of
say that I'm extremely impressed.
And I think this is an example to follow for
other conferences and for Emacs in general.
I think we need more of this community-type
organizing and just getting people interested
and involved on all kinds of levels can only
help Emacs. Because we are in this for the
long haul. That's it.
[Speaker 3]: Oh, what a great point.
If I can comment, that's 1 of the things that
drew me to trying to contribute to free
software when I was a kid,
like we're talking now 30 plus years ago,
the idea like, and I recognized it from
Stallman's initial manifestos on the topic,
right? He was clearly in this for the long
haul. Like I am building the library of
Alexandria here and like linking the work
that we're trying to do to community that I
don't know how you could touch my heart you
know more surely because that's that's
exactly what we want to do not necessarily
any given talk or comment but the idea that
we have to get together and share our ideas
and the place that we do that has to be just
has to be a buffet and not a crucible.
[Speaker 7]: And look, we're standing on the shoulders of
giants, really, when we're looking at Emacs
and sort of what we have achieved.
And the galaxy of talent that exists in the
Emacs community is also like truly
impressive, I think. So There's a lot of work
to be done, but we've also achieved some
pretty impressive things so far.
So let's just keep at it.
I'm sure we'll have a fantastic future for
Emacs.
[Speaker 5]: You know, I'm kind of interested in what
Stefan's here. You know,
just the common tropes that go around.
I just hear it so much on the net,
you know, is Emacs still alive?
Do people still use it?
You know, and of course,
it's like you have an older piece of software
that started so long ago,
people don't realize that it's still up,
but it's also because of the trends,
right? You know, we've got the electron-based
development and Visual Studio is slick out of
the box. So what's in the core Emacs
developers realm, obviously you guys are
taking this longer term perspective,
which makes sense, but what do you think
about this issue, the shorter term and how to
alleviate those concerns that some people
represent?
[Speaker 7]: Of course, yes. I mean,
this is something that,
I mean, clearly people are discussing and as
you say, It's almost like a trope at this
point. And it's been discussed on EmacsDevil,
what can we do to promote Emacs more and to
what extent should we care about that?
And I mean, my reply to that is usually just,
the rumors of my death are very accurate.
And I think this is true also for Emacs.
So we are very much here.
I think what has happened also is reflective
of basically that there are just more
programmers on the planet,
[Speaker 3]: And we
[Speaker 7]: right? haven't been able to sort of catch
that segment as it's been growing,
but also we have more Emacs users I think
today than probably ever before.
We have more packages,
we have more stuff going on.
So I think it's a challenge as well,
like to what extent do we wanna be like a
niche and to what extent do we wanna be the
text editor for programmers.
And I think there's a tension there because
we want to stay true to what Emacs is and to
its sort of core values of what makes Emacs
great, but can we still make some changes to
sort of stay relevant.
And I think that's a huge win.
And clearly these discussions are going on on
the Emacs level and in the minds of core
developers, I think, every day.
Even though, I mean, most of our work is just
trying to keep adding new features,
make sure that we have that sort of core
infrastructure in place,
which is part of the reason why I gave the
talk I did yesterday, to invite more people
to come on board. Because I see a lot of
people have opinions about Emacs,
which is amazing, and we need more of that.
But I think, let's say,
patches speak louder than words.
Software. And it's definitely true in Emacs
development.
[Speaker 3]: I want to just piggyback on,
like attack the premise of the question a
little bit, right? Remember that we are sort
of in a trench warfare with commercial
interests that are dependent on dominating
software ecosystems in order to exploit users
for money. Like that is a necessary thing to
a lot of people's business model.
And so we live in a world where software is
more than tools. It is clothing.
And so when I put on my Mac and I put on my
UI skin, I'm not just choosing whether I like
sliders or radio buttons or check boxes or
the other UI mechanics that give that
heuristic and make it make me think it's easy
to use, easy to learn to use,
right? I'm also choosing a whole line of
implementation detail that I'm being actively
trained not to try to understand by,
you know, kind of the dark side of the force
over here. So when I think about,
you know, make Emacs more like Toaster,
[Speaker 1]: you know,
[Speaker 3]: I, 1 of my responses is every time that
question asks, you know,
an angel grows, gets asked,
an angel grows its wings.
A developer submits a patch,
a bug gets opened that we can,
you know, with enough information to actually
do something about it,
the ecosystem gets better,
right? Whether a new user comes or not,
like somebody's actually asking a question
that's going to lead them someday to pick a
better tool.
[Speaker 7]: Yeah, it's true. I mean,
we have powerful enemies and they are not
working for us. And when they are working on
improving VS code, you can't be under any
illusion that they are doing that in the
interest of the users.
They're doing that in their interest of the
corporate owners. So this is the reality that
we have to face and Emacs is just not like
that. And this is of course part of the
reason why it's so important that we continue
this work for the future of being able to do
computing in a free way and in a way that is
actually, you know, supports the types of
workflows that we know and love.
[Speaker 4]: Something that I'd like to add to this is
that, you know, you've mentioned we need more
programmers in the world.
And in light of what we're doing with
EmacsConf, perhaps we need more people to be
at EmacsConf talking, not necessarily
programmers, but just people apprehending
Emacs and talking about it.
It feels like we've got different missions
that we're trying to accomplish with this.
We are... Okay, you...
Go ahead, Colin.
[Speaker 3]: I can't leave that alone.
I almost came in there on the previous point.
Yeah, I actually Completely agree with that
Leo. That's something that and I mean to be
fair. I owe a good I owe dev al a good email
on this topic, but we desperately need more
project managers, more solutions architect,
more business process analysts,
more systems analysts,
more, you know, and the best tech,
you know, some of the best threads start with
quite a bit of an analytical work done on the
part of an engineer who's come along.
But actually, Larry Wall has this quote,
right? Where he says, consider 3 solutions
and build 1. And I think we struggle with
that as a community because getting a patch
is a lot of work and a lot to ask for
somebody. So asking 3 people to submit a
patch means you're saying no to a lot of
blood, sweat and tears on the part of like 2
people, maybe 2 teams of people.
[Speaker 5]: And 1 thing I think is a big expansion is
usability and user experience design.
I think, and not in the sense like,
you know, CUA mode or,
you know, people don't realize that Emacs key
bindings are actually ergonomic,
but more, you know, like for myself,
I did a lot of work in sort of bringing out
Emacs features and did a lot of things
creating this info doc,
you know, which is sort of like Space Max or
something in the old days.
But the process, yeah,
kept a lot of that from ever making it into
CoreDMX and, you know,
just a lack of time on my part to follow up.
But if you had somebody,
you know, who sort of coalesced all the
technical work on like,
here's how we can put it together and make it
more accessible, I've seen that go a long way
in certain environments.
And I imagine, you know,
it's just not the experience of,
you know, most people on the core team.
[Speaker 7]: Yeah, for sure. I mean,
We don't have, I mean,
we're mostly a bunch, we're a bunch of
programmers. That's what we are,
right? We don't have graphical signers or any
of the stuff that you're talking about.
So we don't have really any UX experts on
board. So perhaps that would be welcome.
But then again, how do you even fit the EMAX
paradigm into what is typically taught and
discussed in UX? I mean,
maybe there is a way. I'm sure there are
general principles and a lot that we could
learn, But then there is also like this,
we have to stay true to what Emacs is to some
extent and what does that look like
concretely. There are discussions to be had
for sure, but we would definitely benefit
from that type of specific input.
[Speaker 3]: Well, I
[Speaker 5]: mean, like a simple example today is I looked
at the conference guidelines I always stay in
dark mode and it said well use light mode for
your presentation so okay I'll switch to
light mode let me load a theme so I go into
all the default themes and,
you know, start going through the light ones
and then I check all the faces and,
you know, there are at least 3 to 5 faces
that have nearly invisible text as a result
of the background highlighting on them.
And I'm like, you know,
so there's low hanging fruit like that where
people would deal with the structure of the
menus, the actual faces,
the themes, that don't have to do anything
affecting core Emacs except make the
presentation much better.
[Speaker 7]: Yeah, definitely. If people want to send such
polishing patches for various aspects,
I spent some time making a new help screen.
I don't know if you noticed,
I don't know how many people press Control H,
Control H on their keyboards,
But it's like with new sections and it's
sorted a little bit better.
It didn't take much. I mean,
it took a time obviously,
but it's not like it required some fantastic
technical knowledge or deep expertise in
Emacs Lisp to do that.
It's Basically anyone can do stuff like that.
So definitely if you're interested in doing
that type of work, start discussing with us.
Let's talk about what we can do and get doing
it, really.
[Speaker 4]: Yeah, this is exactly in line with your
presentation from yesterday,
Stefan, as well, because you were just
inviting people who are not contributing to
the core of Emacs to do so.
You were talking to package developer on
MailPub, but you were also talking just about
the average Joe or Jane just doing their own
things or encountering a problem.
Now, yes, we talked about,
oh, you need to build master and all this,
but at the end of the day,
low-hanging fruits like the ones Bob just
described. If everyone does this at the end,
you end up with something that is extremely
polished. Perhaps you do not need to have a
UX specialist to tell you that,
oh, those 2 colors are actually very close to
1 another. I think it's kind of a discussion
about same defaults as well that you had
yesterday. Ultimately,
we do not need... Yes,
we need more programmers in the world.
We want more people to use Emacs.
But you don't know. Like,
is it going to be someone in computer science
that's going to be the next giant on whose
shoulders we're going to stand?
[Speaker 3]: computer science? Is it going to be someone
in computer science that's going to be the
next giant
[Speaker 1]: on whose shoulders we're going to stand?
Is it someone who did not
[Speaker 4]: Is it someone who did not study study
computer science? Is it going to be someone
who did something completely different?
We do not know the prototypical user of
Emacs. We have some idea about the fact that
they might be using you know,
Emacs for their programming,
but more and more, and as is evidenced by the
talks we received with EmacsConf,
it's just people doing writing or taking
notes for their classes.
So it's really interesting to see how and to
explore for us how we can give back to the
core of Emacs in a way that is mutually
constructive because again,
to go back to the philosophy or the political
agenda that we have is for more people to use
software that is not the liberties.
Exactly.
[Speaker 3]: So right. Yeah. I mean,
that's a good spot for me to come right back
in. And that's exactly where I do.
Right. Because that's that's what it's all
about. In the In terms of a tool user,
you know, the evolution of using tools as,
you know, these creatures have fought,
Emacs is fire. Emacs is the ability to learn
languages, the ability to manipulate other
tools. I mean, it's almost like,
you know, God Emperor of Dune level,
you know, some Frank Herbert type of powers
that you have over your computer and you are
not required to understand how all those
things work. So from a support standpoint
that puts us in a challenging position,
right? I spend a lot of time on Pound Emacs
and the questions that go by there,
I feel bad for people that feel like they
have to answer every question that goes by in
the channel because no 1 could.
No 1 can give an intelligent answer to the,
you know, everything from,
Hey, how do I change my default font on this
operating system? You've never heard of to,
you know, how do you know this list code?
That's 40 lines long doesn't work.
And I think it was a recent change that was
made to the P case macro.
Do you agree? Right? And as deep as that,
well is, if you turn it 90 degrees,
the Emacs is that kind of tool to the
operating system level.
It's letting me walk across to other systems,
multi-hop, become the super user,
right? And, you know, the just the power,
the amplification of power there,
it's like the lever combined with the magnet,
etc, etc. I mean, just,
yeah, I don't know. So I guess where we kind
of jump off, where that gets stuck,
right, is trying to change something like the
defaults in the user experience.
So I imagine, you know,
we don't get 1 great idea about user
experience, we'll get 3,
right? And then Once again,
we have to send our brave developers off to
build 1 to 3 patches, some of which won't see
the light of day. I think that's where the
breakthrough is needed.
Another evolution in the packaging thought,
or maybe it's not packaging.
Maybe it's the compilation step.
Maybe it's the distribution step.
Maybe we want the Debians of the world to
deliver Emacs as 2 different pieces now.
And there's a UX piece that we want you to
package each 1 that you package,
each 1 per window manager that you support or
at the intersection of each window manager
and display manager you port.
And the other one's just the server and you
don't even have to package that if I'm only
offering the CLI or there's a you know like
I'm making all this up and I can't code a
single thing like what I just said,
but I think that there's a technical
opportunity. Pretty high level for technical
there of just thinking about a way to accept
contributions of experience with maybe a
little less rigor and a little less ground
into the marble.
[Speaker 5]: Yeah it makes me think of somebody at work
just brought up pair programming and he's in
love with it. He wants to pair up and do it,
which is not true of all programmers.
But I said, okay, so you spearhead that.
If we, I think it is a very high barrier to
get your patches in because of course they
need to meet the quality standard of Emacs.
So if people who are doing day-to-day
understand that process and can do it well,
could work with some of the people who can't
quite contribute at that level,
but have ideas that are on the level that
should go in, pairing them up could really
move a lot of that forward.
Like Lars, I don't know what his,
I get the feeling maybe he's retired.
So, you know, maybe he has some time,
you know, and he's really good at going back
in and saying, you know,
these areas haven't gotten attention in a
while, so I'm going to go kill some bugs and
look at them and fix them up.
So I would think he would be good to do that
with someone. But you know,
Again, I've got years of code that would just
require somebody to work through it to update
to the latest code base and diff against it.
But it does things like,
I mean, like if anybody used RMAIL anymore,
I made the summary mode of RMAIL exactly
compatible key-wise with the main buffer,
which it never was, and fixed a number of
other features. Dured made operations
reversible, where you mark something and you
unmark it, and you can go up and down.
And there are all these little
incompatibilities that kind of add up across
time, and they never seem to get addressed.
We could just fix them and people would start
to say, oh, this is smoother and they are
getting more of that experience because it
feels like the systems maybe 80,
85% of the way there in a lot of thoughtful
design. But that last 15% could be the
difference between an iPhone and an Android
phone of usability-wise.
So that's a thought. That's a
[Speaker 3]: brilliant idea, and it probably can be
applied far wider than emacs.
That's something that that FSF should
consider suggesting across,
you know, GNU packages,
for example, like a matchmaking project seems
like something that FSF community teams
should think about. Yeah,
I was going
[Speaker 1]: That's so... to say also,
I noticed that the name Debian came up a
while ago and now we were talking about
programming and such and Mentoring maybe and
Debian has this service or part of their site
or community called Mentors.
They have a website, mentors.debian.net,
where the idea is that people who want to get
into contributing to Debian,
for example, to package things,
but obviously don't have upload rights right
away. This is where they can go to,
and this is separate from their mailing list
or bug trackers. They can basically build
their changed packages and upload them here,
and then Debian developers who have commit or
upload rights to the Debian archive can go
and review and give them feedback or ask them
to change something or if it's good,
then just easily upload the package right
from there. And I wonder if it might make
sense to have something kind of like that in
like the context of Emacs or the GNU project
as a whole, where we have like some kind of
a, like loosely defined mentoring thing,
where we could pair up people who are more
experienced, who, for example,
have commit rights in the Emacs core
repository to match them up with someone who
is just making your very first patches or
contributions to Emacs or whatever other GNU
package. Just some food for thought,
[Speaker 5]: Yeah, sounds good.
[Speaker 1]: I guess. Yeah, and then I guess 1 feature of
such a system which would be nice is that it,
at least in terms of, you know,
the mentors that Debbie and that,
that it has a web UI, which,
is nice because mailing lists might be
intimidating for someone who is just getting
started, like in these communities.
Or, you know, just making patches like that,
or just have a series of concrete
instructions. Like with mentors at
Devian.net, I feel like you can't go wrong in
terms of finding the steps of figuring out
what you need to do to put together some
change. Which I think the same idea could
apply to Emacs, for example,
as well.
[Speaker 7]: I think this is a good point about lowering
barriers, and how email is a barrier to
people. I mean, so on the 1 hand,
you have us guys on Emacs level,
we're very used to the email workflow.
Like we're not just using it for fun.
You know what I mean? Like this is a
workhorse. It really is.
And it's tried, it's battled,
tested. It has some quirks,
but we know them extremely well on the other
hand. So, but still we want more people
involved, right? And we realized that,
you know, times are changing as well.
And people are more used to doing stuff from
the web browser, perhaps.
So we do want to move to a forge,
or at least start looking into that.
But there are some obstacles.
So we are looking for volunteers to do that
work. I'm not just saying it,
like we are very serious.
I'm very seriously asking people in the
community to consider,
hey, could you dedicate some time?
I mean, it will take some dedication for sure
it will take some time and it will take some
describe probably even you know Be prepared
to be frustrated at times right,
but if you're serious about doing that type
of work, okay now
[Speaker 3]: I believe you Well, I'm just I'm just teasing
but but but yes exactly any I mean it's it's
not even a joke right Any serious undertaking
having to do with any free software project,
just because we are open to the entire world
and we pride ourselves on trying to take
seriously all input. And if it's a logical
argument, then we'll go ahead and take the
time to combat with you,
even though the maintainer has 300 other
things to do. Like, man,
this
[Speaker 7]: is just the way it is,
right? It just, It's not like Emacs is way
harder to change than any other project of
its longevity and size.
It's just these things take time.
Try getting a change into Debian.
That's an uphill battle.
I don't even know where to start with that.
That's huge, right? And I have tremendous
respect for the people doing that type of
work because it takes dedication,
it takes effort. So we really need someone to
step up from the community,
I think, to be a champion for something like
this and work together with us on Emacs Devil
and off Emacs Devil, probably with me and Eli
and perhaps some other people that could be
in the mail thread, and we could coordinate
this type of work. I would be super excited
if someone wanted to get the ball rolling.
I can't do everything.
I wish I could. Like, I thought about it.
Should I just put everything to the side and
do this? But then, I mean,
there are some, there are other
responsibilities as well.
So we need someone to step up.
We need help here.
[Speaker 3]: you're gonna speak. I was totally gonna pick
on you. Go ahead.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, so. Oh, good, Thanks,
yeah, I was just gonna say,
yeah, I echo Stefan's sentiments.
And that, yeah, in terms of like maybe
experimenting with a different Forge or a
better Forge and like,
you know, supplementing Savannah.
And supplementing Savannah.
I actually did some initial work a couple of
months ago to get a SourceFed instance
installed for the new project.
And I've done some work on and off,
but then life happens,
especially from September onwards.
But even from earlier in the year,
the project has been semi-dormant,
but I have been meaning to get to that.
So I'm like 1 such person who's interested in
that type of work and driving it forward and
I would love you know if anyone's and anyone
else has the kind of time and energy and the
interest to help with something like that.
Yes, please reach out to all of us,
to Emacs core developers,
of course, and to myself.
This is something that could be very useful,
not just for GNU Emacs and Emacs developers,
but also for any other GNU package as well.
So yeah, that's 1 area of potential
contribution and 1 thing that we sort of,
I guess, regularly meet with the FSF
sysadmins to discuss these kinds of projects
and things as Corwin would know.
[Speaker 3]: Yeah, that's kind of, I mean,
you knew exactly where I was going to,
and I'm glad that you volunteered yourself
personally because that's the best choice.
If you're hearing this and you're thinking,
you know, maybe I should do some sysop stuff,
literally reach out to Amin.
And because it's complicated,
there are a lot of projects to volunteer for.
They're all very worthy.
And it's sort of political to figure out what
we're gonna try to change for whom first to
demonstrate we can do all the things we wanna
do to make it better without losing all the
things that are important about how it is
today. And we'll do it in a measured way like
everybody's just like room full of rocking
chairs everybody's got a long tail it's a
hard project but you will do something that
just a lot like as a Savannah hacker which I
am with Amin So that's how I know about his
work on that project. We worked together on
the Savannah Forge. I'm aware of his work
piloting SourceHut recently and just with a
working group there to look at the next
generation of forges for GNU.
Emacs of course as a GNU package could go do
its own thing. FFS would most likely give
cash to go do its own thing,
even if it didn't like it.
We know, you know, as a,
like if I put on, I'm not FSF,
but if I put on that hat,
I imagine that we must know.
Emacs is a flagship thing that people in the
real world depend on. If I get this ancient
computer, I get a working Linux distribution
and Emacs. Maybe it's not Microsoft Word as a
word processor, but you guys,
you can learn a language on it for sure,
you know And you can do your homework on it
and you know It's it makes your you can edit
things and then you can edit your system
files and teach yourself how to manage a GNU
system and you can You know so Emacs is
really powerful as a practical tool.
Like I keep coming back to that point when I
think about Emacs, like I really put it as
like, it's an important tool on the like
humans inventing tools level just because it
lets me make this editor into whatever I need
it to be to get my actual work done.
Whether that's getting the length,
maybe that's making the font big enough that
I can see it, or making it easy enough to
change from this font to that font,
changing the background colors,
like your basic vision,
accessibility issues, right?
All, you know, solved,
I can bake that customization in and I can
pretty much depend on,
no matter what we change in Emacs,
I'm gonna accept the new version,
it's gonna be on the next computer I get,
I'm going to install the package and my
configuration that sets all that up will be
there for me. Right? It's like back to
Stefan's point, what, 6 and a half hours ago,
I mean, you know, 20 minutes ago about
just... Oh gosh, I lost it.
Boy, I really thought I had handed that
neatly back to you.
[Speaker 1]: No problem, Yeah, I think we're in general in
agreement.
[Speaker 4]: If we are now in the realm of Concord,
of harmony, and the realm of midnight in
Europe, Should we bring this discussion to a
close or we could go all night,
but I'll need to explain to my employer why
my eyes are barely open tomorrow.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, I think that's probably a good idea.
I see some folks starting to slowly sign off.
[Speaker 0]: Yeah, also, you know, Leo,
you could leave and just miss out.
What?
[Speaker 7]: Hey, Sasha, can I say something like what an
amazing job with everything you're doing in
the community over the years?
I'm so impressed with Emacs News.
What a great resource to stay up to date in
Emacs. Just really hats off to you for a
whole lot.
[Speaker 3]: Thank you
[Speaker 0]: very much. It actually turned out to be quite
timely that John Wheatley had suggested it
back when he was maintainer because when I
had the kiddo, I suddenly had 0 time to
actually write new things.
But reading things is fine.
I can just speed read all the Reddit things
and put the links together.
So I'm very glad that Emacs news is helpful.
[Speaker 7]: it really is, yeah.
[Speaker 3]: It is, So, okay, now let's try to go for our
closing thoughts here while Leo's still here.
And then if we wanna keep rolling,
even after Leo drops, we won't tell him,
we'll tell him we're stuck.
[Speaker 4]: I guess that was a beacon to me to perhaps go
for the second close of the day I've already
done it I can do it again But I will prove
Sasha wrong this time.
I will miss out if need be because really,
I have been very impressed with the sleep
record that you had and I am very envious
right now of your past ability to sleep more
than 9 hours per night.
And I wish I would be able to go back to
this. But anyway, folks,
I'm going to drop out.
People might hang out for a little while
longer. Bear in mind that Sasha might get
called at any point to go take care of Kido.
So this might wrap up very fast afterwards.
But at any rate, it was my pleasure to be the
host today. Stefan, thank you for joining.
Bob, thank you for joining and interacting
with us and making this a little more
interactive and more plural than just the
co-organizers. And on that note,
I will be leaving. So have a wonderful night,
everyone. And we'll see you next year for the
next edition, potentially.
[Speaker 3]: Thank you, Leo. You're my hero.
I take everything I said on mumble back.
You're amazing.
[Speaker 4]: bye everyone.
[Speaker 1]: All right, Thank you all.
Take care. Bye. I will
[Speaker 6]: also say bye bye. I also need to go to bed.
Thank you all for this cool conference and
hopefully we're here through the year and at
least in 1 year.
[Speaker 3]: You've probably made the rest of the rest of
the victorious. You really stepped up.
[Speaker 5]: your contributions.
[Speaker 3]: Thanks so much for Yeah,
[Speaker 1]: thanks so much for being a part of it,
specifically you, Floey,
and just everyone. Thank you all.
[Speaker 6]: Have a nice day or night and we'll hear each
other. Bye!
[Speaker 1]: See you. Okay, well,
[Speaker 3]: Thanks, Zen. I'll go next.
I'm the next newest, I think.
Well, I want to say also,
you know, Bob and Stefan,
thank you so much for jumping in and
participating in the closing remarks.
I too think it's a lot of,
like, it's fun to just,
like, share the buzz after the convention.
We've got all these millions of ideas and
then to have a group, a little group think
about what we're walking away from that with.
What is the temperature of the fire in your
belly? And it's just...
I mean, this is 1 of the highlights of my
year in a way that it's just...
I don't think other people...
I don't think I dare explain it to other
people. I think my wife understands and I
will do. So thank you very much for this
conference and the opportunity to participate
in it. You know, just the conversation,
how vibrant the chat is on IRC,
how the variety of talks,
some of the talks that look like television
content to me and others that look a lot like
my talk. And working through your slides and
doing it live and you know I appreciate that
we make a place for all those levels and and
show people how to improve our craft as well.
I'm not actually dropping or going anywhere.
I'll continue to talk about eMAX until I get
the dinner time bell. I've probably got an
hour here. I'll tell you what will happen
though is I'm guaranteed to light a
cigarette. You can already see me kind of
hovering about my room because I'm trying to
avoid like smoking on camera.
I don't know where that came from.
I'm giving it up in approximately 5 seconds.
[Speaker 7]: Yeah I'm gonna hop off.
It's possibly right here.
I'll work tomorrow.
[Speaker 3]: I took the next 2 days off.
I'm actually going camping,
Stefan. I know I've learned that this
conference leaves me completely emotionally
exhausted. I just like,
I don't know, I watch all,
I feel like I just connect with all the,
like it's this time where I connect with all
these people that spend as much time thinking
about Emacs as I do.
[Speaker 0]: All right, so maybe we should wrap up before
you have like, you know,
that overflow error and just...
[Speaker 3]: In buster thrill, okay.
Thank you
[Speaker 0]: so much, everyone. Let us actually wrap up
then. Everyone can find the recordings if you
want to keep the conversation going.
There are meetups, there are people's blog
posts and video channels and mailing lists
and all those other things.
I often I list a lot of meetups in Emacs news
so that's another great way to stay connected
through the year and we hope to see everybody
next year at EmacsConf 2024.
[Speaker 4]: Thanks Sasha for the send off and goodbye to
everyone. Oh Sasha I think you were muted but
yes I was still there I assume that's what
you just said. I lied.
I was staying around like Corwin was.
I just said goodbye, but then I wait in the
bushes, waiting for the ambush.
[Speaker 3]: Well I'm personally surprised,
speaking for myself. I wouldn't have guessed
that would happen. All right,
[Speaker 4]: The perfect moment. well,
I guess that's a wrap then.
Thank you, everyone, and see you next year.
[Speaker 3]: I thought we were clear like 10 minutes ago.
Are we not? We are, right?
We're definitely clear.
[Speaker 5]: OK, I'm
[Speaker 3]: hanging up now. Good night.
It was wonderful to meet you.
[Speaker 7]: Take care Corwin
[Speaker 4]: Bye Stefan. Bye. Bye all