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[[!meta title="EmacsConf 2025 Report"]]
[[!date "2026-01-02"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright &copy; 2025 Sacha Chua"]]
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#+TOC: headlines 1

* COMMENT About this document
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: comment-about-this-document
:END:

Goal for this document:

- summarize results of EmacsConf into something that we can pull
  relevant excerpts from depending on the audience
  - fundraising, FSF

Examples:

- https://emacsconf.org/2024/report/
- https://emacsconf.org/2023/report/

* COMMENT Generating stats
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: generating-stats
:END:

Other notes from
https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/01/emacsconf-2025-notes/

** Presentation and Q&A stats
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: generating-stats-presentation-and-q-a-stats
:END:

| Presentations                 |   25 |
| Presentation duration (hours) | 11.3 |
| Q&A web conferences           |   11 |
| Q&A duration (hours)          |  5.2 |

** Stream Stats
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: generating-stats-stream-stats
:END:

#+RESULTS:
:results:
| 107 | Icecast peak (Gen Sat)  |
|  97 | Icecast peak (Dev Sat)  |
| ~70 | Icecast peak (Sunday)   |
|  28 | YouTube peak (Gen Sat)  |
:end:

* Overview
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: overview
:END:

EmacsConf 2025 was held on December 6 and 7 as an online conference. We had 25 talks across two tracks on Saturday and one track on Sunday, with a total of 11.3 hours of presentations (including 5 live talks), 5.2 hours of Q&A via web conference, and lots of lively discussions across IRC and Etherpad. There were around a hundred viewers each on the General track and the Development.

We posted videos and transcripts on talk pages shortly after they started streaming, and the recordings of live talks and Q&A sessions are now also available. We've also archived questions and commetns from IRC and Etherpad onto the talk pages. You can find the talk pages at https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks . The videos are also available on [[https://media.emacsconf.org/2025][media.emacsconf.org]], [[https://www.youtube.com/@emacsconf][YouTube]], and [[https://toobnix.org/c/emacsconf/videos][Toobnix]].

Overall, people said:

- Awesome conference as always
- It was very fun participating
- This is one of the most organized conferences I have attended and it is like that every year
- Excellent weekend. It went by so fast 😊
- thanks all for this nice Emacs weekend

You can find the talk pages and videos at [[https://emacsconf.org/2025/talks]].

* Technical details
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: technical-details
:END:

EmacsConf is committed to software freedom. We used the following tools
for this year's conference:

- [[https://orgmode.org/][Org Mode]], [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/][Emacs]]: organization and collaboration
- [[https://mpv.io][MPV]]: video player
- [[https://bigbluebutton.org/][BigBlueButton]]: web conference
- [[https://obsproject.com/][OBS Studio]]: streaming
- [[https://tigervnc.org/][TigerVNC]]: controlling the remote server
- [[https://icecast.org/][Icecast]]: streaming WEBM
- [[https://libera.chat/][Internet Relay Chat via Libera.chat]], [[https://thelounge.chat/][The Lounge]], and [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/erc.html][ERC]]: conversation
- [[https://www.mumble.info/][Mumble]]: audio conferencing for coordination
- [[https://etherpad.org/][Etherpad]]: questions and notes
- [[https://ikiwiki.info/][Ikiwiki]]: website
- [[https://github.com/psi-4ward/psitransfer][PsiTransfer]]: uploads
- [[https://ffmpeg.org][FFmpeg]]: video and audio processing
- [[https://www.audacityteam.org/][Audacity]]: audio editing
- [[https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX][WhisperX]]: captioning
- [[https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/][Aeneas]]: forced alignment to get timestamps
- [[https://gitlab.com/jun8git/sub-seg][sub-seg]]: subtitle segmentation into more logical phrases
- [[https://codeberg.org/sachac/subed][subed-mode]]: captioning
- [[https://git-scm.com/][Git]]: version control
- [[https://list.org/][Mailman]]: mailing lists; service provided by the Free Software Foundation
- [[https://www.nginx.com/][Nginx]]: web server; server provided by the Free Software Foundation
- [[https://www.ansible.com/][Ansible]]: system configuration

You can find out more about our infrastructure at
[[https://emacsconf.org/infra]] .

* Process improvements
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: process-improvements
:END:

This year, we tried out the following experiments:

- We used our own BigBlueButton 3.0 server to host Emacs meetups throughout the year in addition to EmacsConf.
- We upgraded Etherpad to version 2.5 for security fixes.
- We added [[https://gitlab.com/jun8git/sub-seg][sub-seg]] and various [[https://github.com/sachac/subed][subed]] improvements to our captioning workflow.
- We resumed restreaming to Toobnix in addition to YouTube and Icecast.
- We adapted to host availability by asking speakers to read their own questions as needed.
- We modified our [[https://emacsconf.org/mpv/][mpv.conf]] to display the time remaining in the lower right-hand corner. This helped with time-keeping.
- We wrote more code to simplify updating YouTube, Toobnix, and other places.

  For in-depth notes, see [[https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/01/emacsconf-2025-notes/][behind the scenes]].

* Finances
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: finances
:END:

Costs (USD), including tax where applicable:

| Node   |  Jan |  Feb |  Mar |  Apr |  May |  Jun |  Jul |  Aug |  Sep |  Oct |  Nov |   Dec | Total |
|--------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------|
| meet   | 2.17 | 7.55 | 6.78 | 6.74 | 7.13 | 6.95 | 7.19 | 7.27 | 6.75 | 7.19 | 7.56 | 14.02 | 87.30 |
| front0 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 18.79 | 73.79 |
| live0  | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 32.89 | 87.89 |
:end:

Grand total for 2025: USD 248.98, covered by people's donations through [[https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=70][the Free Software Foundation's Working Together program]].

* Acknowledgements
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: acknowledgements
:END:

We would like to thank the following:
    -   Thank you to all the speakers, volunteers, and participants, and
        to all those other people in our lives who make it possible
        through time and support.
    -   Thanks to other volunteers: 
        -   Corwin and Amin for helping with the organization
        -   JC Helary, Triko, and James Endres Howell for help reviewing
            CFPs
        -   Amitav Krishna, Rodion Goritskov, jay_bird, and indra for
            captions
        -   yang3 for the EU mirror we're setting up
        -   Bhavin Gandhi, Michael Kokosenski, Iain Young, Jamie Cullen,
            Ihor Radchenko (yantar92), FlowyCoder for other help
    -   Thanks to the Free Software Foundation for the mailing lists,
        the media server, and of course, GNU Emacs.
    -   Thanks to Ry P for the server that we're using for OBS
        streaming and processing videos.
    -   Thanks to the many users and contributers and project teams that
        create all the awesome free software we use, especially:
        -   [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/][Emacs]], [[https://orgmode.org/][Org Mode]], [[https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/erc.html][ERC]], [[https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/][TRAMP]], [[https://magit.vc/][Magit]], [[https://bigbluebutton.org][BigBlueButton]], [[https://etherpad.org/][Etherpad]],
            [[https://ikiwiki.info/][Ikiwiki]], [[http://icecast.org/][Icecast]], [[https://obsproject.com/][OBS]], [[https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge][TheLounge]], [[https://libera.chat/][libera.chat]], [[https://www.ffmpeg.org/][ffmpeg]],
            [[https://github.com/openai/whisper][OpenAI Whisper]], [[https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX][WhisperX]], the [[https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas][aeneas]] forced alignment tool,
            [[https://github.com/psi-4ward/psitransfer][PsiTransfer]], [[https://github.com/sachac/subed][subed]], [[https://gitlab.com/jun8git/sub-seg][sub-seg]], [[https://www.firefox.com/][Mozilla Firefox]], [[https://mpv.io/][mpv]],
            [[https://www.tampermonkey.net/][Tampermonkey]]
        -   And many, many other tools and services we used to prepare
            and host this years conference
    -   Thanks to [[https://cicadas.surf/~shoshin/][shoshin]] for the music.
    -   Thanks to people who donated via the [[https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=70][FSF Working Together program]] (Scott Ranby, Jonathan Mitchell, and 8 other anonymous donors), the costs are covered for this year.

* Updates
:PROPERTIES:
:CUSTOM_ID: updates
:END:

If you would like to get updates and announcements, you can sign up at
[[https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss]] .

Please keep an eye out for interesting things that
might be fun to present at next year's EmacsConf.
We'd love to get talks at all levels of experience
and about lots of different kinds of interests.
Previous speakers wrote:

- "I always got the feeling of being heard and
  welcome in spite of the vast distances and
  cultures separating us. This community always
  feels like it is open to new members any time.
  With regards to the conference process also, it
  was a microcosm of the bigger community and
  hence I got the same feeling. You didn't have to
  be an expert or a person who's been using emacs
  for a long time to talk about something useful
  for the community. Even the struggles of a noob
  may be useful for someone else in the
  community."
- "I can honestly say though that I had a great
  time putting my talk together. I hope people
  will have a good time listening to it. Now that
  the work is over, I can say it was worth it. so
  I recommend it warmly"
- "This has been an all-around fantastic
  experience, both as a first-time attendee and
  speaker. many thanks to the volunteers who make
  emacsconf possible, and the other speakers for
  their wonderful talks (many of which i'll be
  reviewing now that i'm not so busy preparing)"

If you'd like to volunteer for EmacsConf, check
out https://emacsconf.org/volunteer/ to see if
anything resonates with you, and e-mail us at
mailto:emacsconf-org@gnu.org. We'd love to have
you on board.

Hope to see you next year!

- Sacha Chua