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[[!meta title="Call for Proposals - DRAFT"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2020, 2021 Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, David Bremner"]]

**This document is a draft.**

**EmacsConf 2021 | November 27 and 28, 2021 | Online Conference**

The Call for Proposals for EmacsConf 2021 is now open, until
**September 30, 2021**.

After a successful [[EmacsConf 2020|2020]], we are back again this
year and are once again calling for your participation!

EmacsConf is the conference about the joy of [Emacs][emacs], Emacs
Lisp, and memorizing key sequences.

We are holding EmacsConf 2021 as a virtual (online) conference again
this year.  We remain fully committed to freedom, and we will continue
using our infrastructure and streaming setup consisting entirely of
[free software][freesw], much like previous EmacsConf conferences.

We welcome speakers of **all backgrounds** and **all levels of
experience**, including newcomers submitting a proposal to give their
first talk!  This year, we are doing more to help bring more people on
board -- as speakers *and* potentially as new EmacsConf organizers,
for those interested in gaining hands-on experience with organizing a
volunteer-run fully online conference alongside other EmacsConf
organizers (keep on reading for more on this!) -- and would love to
have you along as well.

## Important dates

Mark your calendars: EmacsConf 2021 will take place on November 27-28!
We're planning for 9am to 5pm Toronto/EST (2pm-10pm UTC, 3pm-11pm
Zurich/CET).  Depending on people's availability, it might be two
half-days.

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left">CFP opens</td>
<td colspan="2" align="right">August 2, 2021</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left">CFP closes</td>
<td colspan="2" align="right">September 30, 2021</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left">Speaker notifications</td>
<td colspan="2" align="right">October 15, 2021</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left">Schedule published</td>
<td colspan="2" align="right">October 31, 2021</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left">EmacsConf 2021!</td>
<td colspan="2" align="right">November 27 and 28, 2021</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Please note that although we will try our best to stick to the above
dates in the coming months, given the current state of the world, we
may have to move things around a bit in case of unforeseen events.
Thank you for bearing with us as we all navigate these trying times.

<a name="formats"></a>
## Talk formats

The following are the main formats for EmacsConf 2021 talks:

- **10 minutes** (Lightning talk): Quickly present a cool project,
  concept, or trick in 10 minutes or less!

- **20 minutes** (Standard talk): Introduce the audience to a new
  Emacs mode, concept, or just talk about something not necessarily
  shiny and new but that you find really neat nonetheless.

- **50 minutes** (Extended talk): Take your time going more in depth,
  and/or do a demo!  Extended talks are a great way of really
  educating the audience about something you enjoy.

We hope to have lots of great submissions this year, just like last
years.  In order that as many people as possible can present, it helps
if presenters can be flexible about their time slots.  So, for
non-lightning talk submissions, please let us know besides your main
preferred format if a shorter format would also work for your talk.

Q&A time is **included** in the Standard and Extended time slots;
please time your presentation accordingly.  If you would like to take
questions live, we recommend aiming for a 15-minute presentation for
the Standard time slot, and for 40-45 minutes for the Extended time
slot.  However, as the speaker, the exact allocation of your time is
up to you, so long as it does not exceed the allocated time slot.

Other session formats such as tutorials, workshops, and hangouts are
welcome as well, especially considering all that is going on around
the world, in case you would find those other formats preferable to a
traditional talk format.  If you are interested in these or other
session types, please get in touch with us publicly or privately; we
will be happy to work something out with you.

To help minimize disruptions in case of potential technical issues
that may arise during the conference, we ask that our speakers either
schedule a short tech-check with us, or submit a prerecording of their
talk (especially for lightning talks, where the allotted time slot is
rather small and any issues that cannot be resolved quickly will
greatly detract from the presentation).  We will send an email about
this with more details further down the line.

Keynote speaker(s) for EmacsConf 2021 will be introduced in a future
announcement.

## Office hours

TODO

## Topic ideas

Not sure what to talk about?  You might find some neat ideas on the
[[ideas]] page.  Feel free to add yours there too!  If you're still
not sure, come by our IRC channel `#emacsconf` on `irc.libera.chat`
and say hi.  You can join the chat using
[your favourite IRC client][libera-emacsconf], or by pointing your
web browser to [chat.emacsconf.org][chat] which runs our self-hosted
instance of [The Lounge][thelounge] free software web IRC client.

A great way to get started with writing a proposal is to start by
exploring the programs from previous years: [[2020|2020/schedule]],
[[2019|2019/schedule]], [[2015|2015/schedule]], [[2013|2013#program]].

## Submission

Once you're ready to submit your proposal, the [[submit]] page has the
instructions on how to submit your talk.

All kinds of people use Emacs for all kinds of things.  We would love
it if EmacsConf 2021 could highlight interesting perspectives and
reflect the diversity of our community.  If you know someone who might
have a good idea for a talk, please reach out to them and encourage
them to submit a proposal.  Many people (especially from
underrepresented groups such as women, people of colour, and
non-developers) might not consider themselves expert enough to share
their thoughts.  If you let them know that you value their knowledge
and maybe even suggest something that you think others would like to
hear more about, they may realize that they have something worth
sharing and that we would love to hear from them.

This year, we are experimenting with an anonymized submission process.
Identifying information will be removed from submissions by a
conference organizer who will not participate in talk selection.  The
anonymized submissions will then be reviewed by a selection committee.
We hope this will help reduce bias and encourage contribution.  We
look forward to hearing from you (and the people you want to nudge to
speak)!

## Getting involved

We are very happy and humbled that EmacsConf has been received so well
by Emacsians all around the world and it's been growing!  Last year
EmacsConf 2020 saw a ~30% increase in number of talks and had more
than double the participants and viewers compared to EmacsConf 2019,
and we are hopeful that it keeps on growing and reaching more Emacs
users and enthusiasts.

As EmacsConf keeps on growing, it would need more volunteers and
organizers to help make it the awesome conference that it is and make
it even better each year, and we would love to have your help for
that!

### Help review EmacsConf proposal submissions

This year, we are inviting interested community members to help review
talk proposal submissions as part of the selection committee
previously consisting only of EmacsConf organizers.  If you are
interested in helping review this year's session proposals, please
write to one of the [emacsconf-org][emacsconf-org] or
[emacsconf-org-private][emacsconf-org-private] mailing lists and/or
come say hi to us at `#emacsconf-org` on `irc.libera.chat`.

### Help with planning, organizing, and other aspects of EmacsConf

If you would like to get involved with the various aspects of
organizing the conference, such as planning the sessions and helping
with the infrastructure, see our [[planning]] page and come say hi to
us at `#emacsconf` on `irc.libera.chat`.

As we strive to make EmacsConf more and more accessible each year, we
would love to have help from stenographers and/or any volunteers who
would be so kind to help transcribe and/or describe what is happening
during each talk in the `#emacsconf-accessible` IRC channel.  We could
later gather these logs and post them on the EmacsConf website for
each talk where applicable.

Last but not least, please don't forget to subscribe to our mailing
list, [emacsconf-discuss][emacsconf-discuss], for discussion and
announcements about the EmacsConf conference.

We look forward to your ideas and submissions!


[emacs]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
[freesw]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[chat]: https://chat.emacsconf.org
[thelounge]: https://thelounge.chat
[libera-emacsconf]: ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/emacsconf
[emacsconf-discuss]: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss
[emacsconf-org]: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org
[emacsconf-org-private]: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org-private