Seeking feedback: Tentative timeline for EmacsConf 2022

[Amin Bandali]

Hi all,

Several EmacsConf organizers recently met to discuss and draft a
timeline for the upcoming EmacsConf 2022, which we are sharing below.
Please have a look at this proposed tentative timeline for the months
leading up to the conference, as well as the conference event itself,
and let us know whether or not the proposed dates look good to you,
or if you anticipate any issues with any of the dates or with the
proposed timeline overall.

  CFP opens              June 13, 2022
  CFP closes             August 31, 2022
  Speaker notifications  September 30, 2022
  Schedule published     October 31, 2022
  EmacsConf 2022!        December 3 and 4, 2022

And here are some of the feedback and questions raised about the
proposed timeline during the recent organizers meeting, in case
you would like to chime in about them as well and/or share your
own thoughts on them:

- The Call for Participation falls largely in summer time in the
  Northern Hemisphere, when people may be out and about and not have
  much time to dedicate to putting together and submitting proposals
  for EmacsConf.

  Suggested counter-arguments and solutions:

  1. the proposed CFP duration is long enough (~2.5 months) to help
     accommodate this, by giving a reasonably large time frame for
     writing and submitting proposals;

  2. as we have done in the recent years, we could extend the CFP
     by pushing the CFP closure date back by one week or two weeks,
     to help further accommodate people interested in submitting a
     proposal; and

  3. we may be able to squeeze in last-minute proposal submissions in
     lightning talk prerecording format, that we may be able to add to
     the schedule as fillers in between other talks where possible.
     This could for instance be useful for inclusion of quick talks
     about new package releases or other breaking news that might
     happen after the CFP closing and closer to the conference event.

- We are allocating more time after the CFP closes, to help give the
  organizers more time to carry out the pre-conference tasks such as
  preparing a schedule that works for as many speakers as possible,
  and captioning and re-encoding the submitted prerecorded videos to
  fit our criteria (e.g. use free software-friendly codecs).

  There was a concern/question as to whether this extended time
  between the closure of the CFP and the conference days might lead
  to a larger number of talks being shared by speakers elsewhere
  in advance of the event, thus lowering the surprise/newness factor,
  in a way.

  Suggested counter-argument: it's cool if people share their talk
  elsewhere (such as their site or blog) before the conference,
  especially if they give a shout out to the conference, helping to
  spread the word about it and potentially bring more people into the
  conference and our community who may have otherwise not heard of it.

Thanks, and looking forward to hearing from you!

-- 
https://kelar.org/~bandali