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[[!meta title="Panel: Improving the Emacs Community: Onboarding, Participation, and Growth"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2026 Participants"]]
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# [Panel] Improving the Emacs Community: Onboarding, Participation, and Growth
Participants
- Amin Bandali [FSF volunteer]
- Bart Bunting [Emacspeak user]
- Bashbunni [YouTube blogger]
- Jeff Trull [Emacs SF organizer]
- Protesilaos (Prot) [Prose & Youtube blogger]
- Qifan Wang (LdBeth) [Emacs China moderator]
- Sacha Chua [EmacsConf organizer]
- Tilmann Singer [Emacs Berlin organizer]
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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?
**Note that you can ask other questions not limited to the above
during public Q&A session after the panel discussion**
Related: <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacsconf-org/2026-08/msg00006.html>
**Responses in written form**:
We invite all the Emacs users to participate in the discussion
asynchronously, in addition to the live Q&A session. Both before and
after the conference. The written answers will be collected below.
- <https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/11/emacsconf-thinking-about-the-community-panel/>
**About speakers**:
*Amin Bandali*: Amin is an Emacs developer and a long-time GNU & FSF
volunteer and EmacsConf organizer among other things. He reads and
writes a number of computer and human languages in Emacs, including
his mother tongue, Persian, thanks to Emacs' excellent support for
bidirectional text editing.
*Bart Bunting*: Bart Bunting is a long-term Emacspeak user who
casually develops a fork that works on Windows - Emacsvox. He depends
on speech access, encountered barriers that took them away from Emacs
(had to use Windows), and found a way back and into contributing.
*Bashbunni*: Bashbunni is a coder; free/libre software lover; breaker
of things; and, of course, (Doom) Emacs user. And she has a youtube
channel.
*Jeff Trull*: Jeff is organizing Emacs SF meetup and often hangs out
across various online Emacs meetups. He is an embedded C++
consultant, and likes math and electronic circuits.
*Protesilaos (Prot)*: I am pretty sure that most of us heard about
Prot. An Emacs user, philosopher, hermit, Outstanding New Free
Software Contributor (as of 2021, awarded by FSF).
*Qifan Wang (LdBeth)*: Qifan Wang (or LdBeth) is a moderator of Emacs
China. He is interested in array programming languages, computer
typesetting and history of computing.
*Sacha Chua*: Sacha Chua puts together the weekly Emacs News, helps
run EmacsConf and the Planet Emacslife aggregator, and has been
blogging about Emacs for more than twenty-five years.
*Tilmann Singer*: Tilmann is an organizer of Emacs Berlin meetups -
one of the most active meetups we have across the globe.
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