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# Table of Contents

-   [Timeline](#timeline)
-   [Phases](#phases)
-   [Archive](#archive)


<a id="timeline"></a>

# Timeline

<table>


<colgroup>
<col  class="org-left">

<col  class="org-left">
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="org-left"><b>CFP</b></td>
<td class="org-left"><span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-06-26 Mon]</span></span></td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td class="org-left">CFP deadline</td>
<td class="org-left"><span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-09-14 Thu]</span></span></td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td class="org-left">Speaker notifications</td>
<td class="org-left"><span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-09-25 Mon]</span></span></td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td class="org-left">Publish schedule</td>
<td class="org-left"><span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-10-30 Mon]</span></span></td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td class="org-left">Video submission deadline</td>
<td class="org-left"><span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-11-03 Fri]</span></span></td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td class="org-left">EmacsConf</td>
<td class="org-left"><span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-12-02 Sat]</span></span>, <span class="timestamp-wrapper"><span class="timestamp">[2023-12-03 Sun]</span></span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

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


<a id="phases"></a>

# 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&rsquo;re doing multiple streams, there&rsquo;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&rsquo;s good for people&rsquo;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 &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
    -   sachac: I&rsquo;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 <https://emacsconf.org/2023/cfp/> have similar
        spacing, so yeah, we&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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

-   <https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admin/emacsconf-submit/members/add>
-   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


<a id="archive"></a>

# Archive