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# [Panel] Improving the Emacs Community: Onboarding, Participation, and Growth

Participants

 **Panel members are being finalized**

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The discussion idea was born from perpetual Sacha's interest in
making Emacs community a better place.

GNU Emacs and the community around it has no shortage of history.
However, different groups of Emacs users prefer using different media
to communicate - between the traditional mailing lists to newer
international platforms like YouTube, or country-specific forums.
Here, we would like to bring Emacs users representing various
sub-communities together, so that we can learn from each other and
hopefully come up with new ideas.

Questions:

1. What made you start using Emacs, and what kept you using it?

2. What took you from using Emacs to actively contributing to the
   community - participating in forums, writing Elisp, organizing
   meetups, answering questions?

3. How does Emacs show up for you in real life - colleagues, meetups,
   friends? How did those connections form?

4. If you know other software communities, what's one thing Emacs could
   learn from them?

5. What's one concrete thing you wish existed in the Emacs community a
   year from now?


Related: <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacsconf-org/2026-08/msg00006.html>



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