[[!sidebar content=""]] This file is automatically exported from [/2023/organizers-notebook/index.org](/2023/organizers-notebook/index.org). You might prefer to navigate this as an Org file instead. To do so, [clone the wiki repository](https://emacsconf.org/edit/). # Table of Contents - [Timeline](#timeline) - [Dry run](#dry-run) - [Phases](#phases) - [Draft CFP](#cfp) - [Distribute CFP](#distrib-cfp) - [Process submissions](#submission-process) - [Draft schedule](#draft-schedule) - [Archive](#archive) # Timeline
CFP [2023-06-26 Mon]
CFP deadline [2023-09-14 Thu]
Speaker notifications [2023-09-25 Mon]
Publish schedule [2023-10-30 Mon]
Video submission deadline [2023-11-03 Fri]
EmacsConf [2023-12-02 Sat], [2023-12-03 Sun]
Last year, these were the actual dates: - July 17: CFP sent - Sept 18: Original CFP deadline - Sept 30: CFP closed after extension - Oct 1: acceptances sent ## TODO Dry run # Phases ## Draft CFP ### How to mark pages as drafts Put inside double square brackets: `!template id=pagedraft` ### Considerations We could see if there are parts of the CFP that we can remove or postpone. Here are some thoughts: - We might not need the 10+20+40 structure in the proposal. We did that before because people tend to propose longer talks, and we had to do lots of e-mail coordination in order to squeeze everything into one track. If we’re doing multiple streams, there’s less time pressure, so we might not need to confuse people with those requirements. I think it would still be good to nudge people towards 20 minutes for their prerecorded presentations (separate time for Q&A) instead of 40 minutes, because it’s good for people’s attention spans. As an incentive to consider a 5-10 minute talk, we can say that 5-10 minute videos can be played extra times during the conference to fill gaps. - Choices: - Keep the 10+20+40 structure so that people who want to propose longer talks are nudged to think about shorter versions - Strongly nudge people towards 20-minute talks, with repeats as the incentive for shorter talks and extra coordination/waiting needed for longer talks. People propose just the talk length they want (and can optionally propose other talk lengths if they want to be considered for them). - We added emergency contact info, public contact info, pronouns, and introduction to the submission form because we ended up going back and forth with people in previous years, and sometimes we had incomplete info and were panicking about how to reach people during the conference. We could drop this from the submission form and do a separate speaker information form. - Choices: - Talk submission, then speaker information form: less intimidating for speakers - Everything in one: easier for organizers ### Previous years - Ask for public e-mail or contact information, IRC handle in CFP - Added to submit page. - Be even more stringent about the 10/20/40-min splits. A lot of speakers still default to the 20- or 40-min formats without providing us shorter formats, and that puts strain on our schedule and requires us to use a different template for the notification (which can be confusing). We need to stress that not respecting the format makes it harder not only for the organizers, but also for the speakers themselves (since they will have to rethink their presentation). Maybe we can have an e-mail template for a quick reply that says something like “Just in case we need to squeeze talks into shorter times, could you please also propose an outline for a possible 10-minute talk that could get people interested in your topic and point them to where they can find out more?” - sachac: I’d love to experiment with rolling acceptances. If people have a good 10-20 minute version of their talk and we want to accept it in the program, it would be nice to be able to say yes early so that they can start working on it. We can work with any duplication of content in later proposals. - Two people is the sweet number of reviewers to have for the proposals before sending the notifications, and there’d be diminishing returns with more. Two is enough to release the pressure on SCHED, verify the metadata (esp. speaker availability), and suggest a different ordering where appropriate. It can take a long time to comb through the proposals (roughly 10 proposals per hour), and whilst it’d be difficult to justify more in-depth reviewers, other orgas can do a shallow-pass to catch red-flags or discuss the submissions as they come in. Other organizers can always chime in on topics they particularly care about so that their encouraging comments or suggestions can be included in the acceptance e-mail. - sachac: Who wants to help me with this? - We extended CFP-end by two weeks this year, but that made it coincide with speaker-notifs, and that’s awkward. Next time, we should only extend the CFP by one week to avoid having to scramble with the schedule until the very last day. - Proposed dates in have similar spacing, so yeah, we’ll want to extend by only one week. - Some people assume that they have to suggest longer formats even if they intend their talks to be 10′ or 20′. We should change the wording on the CFP to ask them to only provide alternatives for shorter formats, not longer. - Added a brief note to CFP. - It was hard to squeeze all the org/hyperbole talk on day-1. Generally, the people who submit these kinds of talk come from all over the world, and US mornings are more accommodating than US evenings when it comes to timezones. We might consider having two org **mornings** rather than an org **day**; it would give us more flexibility with those talks. - Let’s see if we can do two streams again. That was fun. - We’re starting to reach critical mass on the org-talks. We might want to consider splitting the org-talks and the dev-talks into two distinct events to allow them to grow independently. - Let’s see if we can do two streams again. That was fun. - We should associate time-of-day with CFP-deadline; otherwise, the scheduler has to be on edge until the very end of the day. It’s worse this year because we made CFP-end coincide with speaker-notif, so this might not be as much of a problem next year. - If we do rolling acceptances and we extend by at most one week instead of two, this should be fine. - It’s easier for us to extend beyond 5pm than to go before 9am (especially for the West coast). Extending beyond 5pm puts strain on European organizers and volunteers, though. - Time pressure should be alleviated with multiple streams. - Sometimes, ikiwiki on front0 took a lot of time to process the new commits. sachac assumed this is due to a faulty regex parsing. We should be able to find out more by looking at the logs from ikiwiki after a slow commit. - Seems speedy at the moment. - Ask for preferred timezone in CFP - Added to availability. - Check with John Wiegley re: schedule - we always happen to coincide with his work trips - I checked with him and the people at his work don’t have a schedule yet, so we should go ahead and plan ### Lessons learned for next year - Maybe incentivize proper timezone specification by saying we can translate times to their local time? - Make sure to include cfp.org as an attachment instead of inline ### Other thoughts - sachac: bandali likes having the commitment to freedom section in the CFP as a form of activism - sachac: I thought about pulling the deadline back to Sept 1, but it might be good to keep it at Sept 14 so that anyone who tends to work with the schoolyear can still have a little time to work on it. ## Distribute CFP ### DONE Add proposal review volunteers to emacsconf-submit - - Ask volunteers to e-mail an SSH public key so they can be added via the gitolite-admin repo to the conf.org repo for the year ### First announcement #### TODO Remove draft tags :sachac: #### TODO Post on emacsconf-discuss, emacs-tangents :bandali: #### TODO Sticky on reddit.com/r/emacs :zaeph: #### TODO Post in Emacs News :sachac: (link to wiki) ### Reminder ## Process submissions - Proposal received: sachac adds it to this document with status of PROPOSED - Fields: EMERGENCY, Q_AND_A, AVAILABILITY, NAME, PRONOUNS, TIME, MIN_TIME, MAX_TIME, SLUG, EMAIL, NAME_SHORT, CUSTOM_ID, TRACK, TIMEZONE, CATEGORY, DATE_SUBMITTED - jc doublechecks that the data has been correctly captured (especially EMAIL and AVAILABILITY) - People review it (sachac, jc, etc.) and weigh in - Proposal accepted: sachac e-mails the speaker and sets status to WAITING\_FOR\_EMAIL\_CONFIRM - E-mail confirmation received: log it in the logbook - Schedule set: sachac e-mails the speaker and sets status to WAITING\_FOR\_SCHED\_CONFIRM ### EmacsConf 2023 CFP progress report (8 talks accepted so far, 1 to review, 6 todo) The end of the EmacsConf 2023 call for participation is one month away (Sept 14; ). Whee! So far, we’ve sent early acceptances to the following talks and added them to the program on the wiki ():
Duration Title Speaker
10 An Org-Mode based text adventure game for learning the basics of Emacs, inside Emacs, written in Emacs Lisp Chung-hong Chan
20 Authoring and presenting university courses with Emacs and a full libre software stack James Howell
20 Org-Mode workflow: informal reference tracking Christopher Howard
20 GNU Emacs for electronics, note-taking, and as lightweight IDE Anand Tamariya
10 A modern Emacs look-and-feel without pain Pedro A. Aranda
10 Writing a language server in OCaml for Emacs, fun, and profit Austin Theriault
20 LLM clients in Emacs, functionality and standardization Andrew Hyatt
10 The many ways to browse Hacker News from Emacs Mickael Kerjean
We sent the speakers in case anyone wants to get started on their presentations. There’s one talk that’s waiting for feedback on the emacsconf-submit before we send the early acceptance in about a week:
Duration Title Speaker
20 one.el: the static site generator for Emacs Lisp Programmers Tony Aldon
There are several talk proposals that are in progress (need to coordinate, don’t have speaker releases / full details / etc.):
Title Speaker
Emacs MultiMedia System (EMMS) Yoni Rabkin
Emacs development updates John Wiegley
Watch Over Our Folders Bastien Guerry
Emacs community information sharing? Jake B
Emacs saves the Web Yuchen Pei
How to build an Emacs 2: Revenge of the Lem Fermin
This time last year, we had 2 proposals, with most of the proposals coming in at the end of the CFP. This was usually when we started panicking about not having lots of proposals, but I think we can skip stressing about it this year. Even with the program as it is now, we’d already have a pretty fun EmacsConf. Can’t wait to see what it’ll look like when more people get their proposals in! bandali, maybe we can do a 1-month and/or 2-week reminder about the CFP deadline? I’d like to see if we can get away without officially extending the CFP this time. Sacha ## Draft schedule Graphical view of the schedule Schedule for Saturday Saturday 9:00- 9:10 Saturday opening remarks sat-open 9:10- 9:20 An Org-Mode based text adventure game for learning the basics of Emacs, inside Emacs, written in Emacs Lisp adventure 9:30- 9:50 Authoring and presenting university courses with Emacs and a full libre software stack uni 10:10-10:20 Who need Excel? Managing your students qualifications with org-table. table 10:40-10:50 Taming things with Org Mode taming 11:10-11:30 one.el: the static site generator for Emacs Lisp Programmers one 12:50- 1:00 Emacs Turbo-Charges My Writing writing 1:20- 1:30 Why Nabokov would use Org-Mode if he were writing today nabokov 1:50- 2:10 How I play TTRPGs in Emacs solo 2:30- 2:50 Collaborative data processing and documenting using org-babel collab 3:00- 3:20 Org-Mode workflow: informal reference tracking ref 3:30- 4:10 Emacs MultiMedia System (EMMS) emms 4:30- 4:40 Emacs development updates devel 5:00- 5:10 Saturday closing remarks sat-close 10:00-10:10 MatplotLLM, iterative natural language data visualization in org-babel matplotllm 10:20-10:40 Improving access to AI-assisted literate programming with voice control voice 11:00-11:20 LLM clients in Emacs, functionality and standardization llm 12:50- 1:00 Editor Integrated REPL Driven Development for all languages eval 1:20- 2:00 REPLs in strange places: Lua, LaTeX, LPeg, LPegRex, TikZ repl 2:10- 2:30 The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp emacsen 2:40- 3:00 Watch Over Our Folders woof 9 AM 10 AM 11 AM 12 PM 1 PM 2 PM 3 PM 4 PM 5 PM Schedule for Sunday Sunday 9:00- 9:05 Sunday opening remarks sun-open 9:05- 9:25 Top 10 Ways Hyperbole Amps Up Emacs hyperamp 9:45-10:05 Using Koutline for stream of thought journaling koutline 10:15-10:35 GNU Emacs for electronics, note-taking, and as lightweight IDE extending 10:55-11:15 Speedcubing in Emacs cubing 11:25-11:45 Programming at 200 wpm steno 12:50- 1:02 Eat and Eat powered Eshell, fast featureful terminal inside Emacs eat 1:22- 2:02 hyperdrive.el: Peer-to-peer filesystem in Emacs hyperdrive 2:22- 2:32 Mentoring VS-Coders as an Emacsian (or How to show not tell people about the wonders of Emacs) mentor 2:52- 3:02 The many ways to browse Hacker News from Emacs hn 3:12- 3:52 Emacs saves the Web web 4:12- 4:32 Sharing Emacs is Caring Emacs: Emacs education and why I embraced video sharing 4:52- 5:02 Sunday closing remarks sun-close 9:30- 9:50 Bringing joy to Scheme programming scheme 10:10-10:20 Writing a language server in OCaml for Emacs, fun, and profit lspocaml 10:40-11:00 What I learned by writing test cases for GNU Hyperbole test 12:50- 1:10 emacs-gc-stats: Does garbage collection actually slow down Emacs? gc 1:30- 1:40 A modern Emacs look-and-feel without pain flat 2:00- 2:40 Windows into Freedom windows 3:00- 3:20 EmacsConf.org: How we use Org Mode and TRAMP to organize and run a multi-track conference emacsconf 9 AM 10 AM 11 AM 12 PM 1 PM 2 PM 3 PM 4 PM 5 PM Schedule notes: - Saturday on the General track: Org day - [adventure](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/adventure "An Org-Mode based text adventure game for learning the basics of Emacs, inside Emacs, written in Emacs Lisp") is the first talk because of availability constraints; would be nice to connect it to [solo](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/solo "How I play TTRPGs in Emacs") - [uni](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/uni "Authoring and presenting university courses with Emacs and a full libre software stack") for teaching, table for grading - [taming](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/taming "Taming things with Org Mode") and [one](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/one "one.el: the static site generator for Emacs Lisp Programmers") both deal with exports in some way - [writing](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/writing "Emacs Turbo-Charges My Writing") is connected to [nabokov](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/nabokov "Why Nabokov would use Org-Mode if he were writing today") - [solo](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/solo "How I play TTRPGs in Emacs") and [collab](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/collab "Collaborative data processing and documenting using org-babel") are amusing to pair together - Saturday morning Development track: large language models, AI. Has to be morning because of [matplotllm](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/matplotllm "MatplotLLM, iterative natural language data visualization in org-babel"). [llm](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/llm "LLM clients in Emacs, functionality and standardization") is about general interfaces, so we can put that last. - Saturday afternoon, developer track: REPLs (+ woof because it’s Org-related, so we can put it on Org day next to a non-live Q&A) [eval](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/eval "Editor Integrated REPL Driven Development for all languages") and [repl](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/repl "REPLs in strange places: Lua, LaTeX, LPeg, LPegRex, TikZ") are related - if [woof](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/woof "Watch Over Our Folders") happens, it could be nice to have the Q&A go into Org devel brainstorming - Sunday morning: Hyperbole (gen track, then crossing over to dev for testing) - morning because [test](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/test "What I learned by writing test cases for GNU Hyperbole") has to be in the morning; [hyperamp](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/hyperamp "Top 10 Ways Hyperbole Amps Up Emacs") and [koutline](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/koutline "Using Koutline for stream of thought journaling") go before it, try to avoid conflicts so they can attend each other’s talks - Sunday morning after [test](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/test "What I learned by writing test cases for GNU Hyperbole") could be a fun extended “let’s write tests together” session if someone wants to lead it - Sunday afternoon: mentor to sharing: community, with an aside on [web](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/web "Emacs saves the Web") (using Emacs as a client for stuff). [sharing](https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/sharing "Sharing Emacs is Caring Emacs: Emacs education and why I embraced video") is possible closing keynote - encourage people to go out and explore/share all year? - if the gray talks don’t materialize or if talks get cancelled, we can have an open meetup possibly with breakout rooms # Archive