Re: Draft call for participation (maybe June 26?), lessons learned from last year

[jc@tlo]

> On Jun 20, 2023, at 11:16, Sacha Chua <sacha@sachachua.com> wrote:
> 
>    - 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).

Nice idea.

> - 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

Let's try easier for the organizers.

> I don't have a lot of e-mail time (mostly just squeezing in things on my
> phone or when the kiddo is otherwise occupied), so I tend to prefer to
> have things documented on a page instead of relying on copying and
> pasting into e-mail.

Indeed.

> We could put them in collapsible headings or a FAQ
> or something. But if people want to help with speaker coordination and
> would like to take care of those e-mails, that could work too!

+1


Here below is a proposal for (slightly) shortening/reorganizing the page, with 
a *big* nudge toward 20 minutes proposals:

--------------

**About EmacsConf 2023**

EmacsConf 2023 is about the joy of [Emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) 
and Emacs Lisp. Come share your experiments and adventures with the Emacs text 
editor / operating system / way of life! We welcome speakers of **all 
backgrounds** and **all levels of experience**, including newcomers giving 
their first talk. What have you found exciting about Emacs lately? What do you 
wish someone had told you when you were starting out? What part of your 
workflow might inspire someone to get into Emacs or go deeper?

All kinds of people use Emacs for all kinds of things. We\'d love it if 
EmacsConf 2023 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, non-developers, etc.) might not consider themselves proficient enough 
to share their thoughts. If you let them know that you value their knowledge 
and experiences, and maybe even suggest something that you think others would 
like to hear about, they may realize that they do have something worth sharing 
and that we would love to hear from them.

**Call for Participation**

[EmacsConf 2023](https://emacsconf.org/2023/) will be a virtual conference on 
**December 2 and 3, 2023 (Sat-Sun)**. If you\'d like to present at the 
conference, please [[submit your 
proposal]{.underline}](https://emacsconf.org/2023/cfp/) by **September 14, 2023 
(Friday)**.

A great way to get started with writing a proposal is to start by exploring the 
programs from previous years: [2022](https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/), 
[2021](https://emacsconf.org/2021/schedule/), 
[2020](https://emacsconf.org/2020/schedule/), 
[2019](https://emacsconf.org/2019/schedule/), 
[2015](https://emacsconf.org/2015/schedule/), 
[2013](https://emacsconf.org/2013/#program). You might also find some neat 
ideas on the [ideas](https://emacsconf.org/2023/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]{.underline}](ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/emacsconf), or by visiting 
[chat.emacsconf.org](https://chat.emacsconf.org/) in your web browser.

This year, we\'d like to experiment with accepting proposals throughout the CFP 
process. If there are similar proposals, we\'ll work with people so that the 
talks can cover different facets.

**Important dates**

For EmacsConf 2023, we are planning for 9am to 5pm Toronto/EST (2pm-10pm UTC) 
on December 2 and 3.

  ----------------------------------- -----------------------------------
  CFP opens                           June 26, 2023 (Monday)

  CFP closes                          September 14, 2023 (Friday)

  Speaker notifications               September 30, 2023

  Schedule published                  October 31, 2023

  EmacsConf 2023!                     December 2 and 3, 2023   
----------------------------------- -----------------------------------

**Talk formats**

We\'d like EmacsConf 2023 to inspire lots of different people to explore lots 
of different things in Emacs. We hope to put together a stream of quick ideas 
followed by lots of conversation over IRC and/or Q&A sessions, with occasional 
deep dives into topics that many people might find interesting or useful.

There will be time for questions and answers after your talk, so you don\'t 
need to include that in your talk timing.

Because scheduling can be time consuming and tricky, we\'d rather have you 
target **20 minutes** for your presentation. 20 minutes seems to be the best 
length for a presentation: short enough to keep people\'s attention, long 
enough to get into some details. If you feel uncomfortable with presenting that 
much, consider a **10 minutes** presentation.

Think of 20-minutes presentation as extensions of a barebones 10-minute 
presentation. If you are aiming at the 10-minute presentation, just write an 
outline of what you plan to talk about if you have 5-10 minutes. If you'd like 
to propose a longer talk, add an outline of what you might add to the first 
part if you had more time to present.

-   **Up to 20 minutes total:** You have a core idea. What do you want     
people to do or remember? Consider what is important to get people     
interested, flesh out the points that you think are the most     crucial, show 
how the pieces work together, etc.

-   **Up to 10 minutes total:** Limit yourself to the core idea and what     do 
you want people to do or remember. Show just enough to get people     
interested and then point them to where they can learn more     afterwards. You 
can answer questions over IRC, the pad, or the wiki,     and there\'s no limit 
to how long that conversation can go.

Other session formats such as tutorials, workshops, and hangouts are welcome as 
well, in case you would find those other formats preferable to a traditional 
talk format. If you\'re interested in these or other session types, please let 
us know [publicly](https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org) or 
[privately](https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org-private). 
We\'ll be happy to work something out with you.

**Preparing and submitting your proposal**

We\'re aware that it can be challenging and intimidating to prepare and submit 
a proposal to a conference, and we want to help make it less so. Come say hi to 
us on our IRC channel #emacsconf on irc.libera.chat, and we\'d be happy to try 
and answer any questions or concerns you may have about writing your proposal 
or submitting it. We\'d also love to receive suggestions on how we can best 
help you and other prospective speakers interested in giving a talk at 
EmacsConf.

Once you\'re ready to submit your proposal, the 
[submit](https://emacsconf.org/2023/submit/) page has the instructions on how 
to submit your talk. The submissions will then be reviewed by a selection 
committee (please [[let us know]{.underline}](https://emacsconf.org/contact/) 
if you would like to help review submissions as part of this committee).

If your talk is approved, we\'d love it if you could help us make sure the 
conference runs smoothly. After we email you with the time allotted for your 
talk, we\'ll ask you to

-   prepare a prerecording of your talk, or record it with our help if     
that\'d be easier for you; and

-   schedule a short tech-check if you\'d like to be able to answer     
questions in a live session.

Don\'t forget to subscribe to our main mailing list, 
[emacsconf-discuss](https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss), 
for discussion and announcements about the EmacsConf conference.

If you\'d like to propose something other than a talk, like restreaming the 
conference, you can also use this CFP to share your ideas with us.

We look forward to your ideas and submissions!

**Getting involved**

If you would like to help with the conference (planning the sessions, reviewing 
proposals, helping with infrastructure, making sessions more accessible, 
editing video transcripts, etc.), see our 
[planning](https://emacsconf.org/2023/planning/) page and come say hi to us at 
#emacsconf on irc.libera.chat.

If you are not available during the conference itself but you have a neat idea 
that you\'d like to share, please propose it anyway! You can always handle 
questions after the conference, and we might even be able to coordinate with 
other Emacs meetups for regional events (if you\'re an Emacs meetup organizer 
and would like to make this happen let\'s [get in 
touch](https://emacsconf.org/contact/)!).

Importantly, as EmacsConf continues to grow and receive increasingly more 
talk/session proposal submissions each year, we have thought about adding 
multiple parallel tracks during the conference days to accommodate the large 
number of sessions. However, we\'re currently a very small team and we would 
need your help to do it! If you\'re interested in helping stream a parallel 
EmacsConf track and have a reliable internet connection with decent speed and 
bandwidth, please [get in touch](https://emacsconf.org/contact/) with us so we 
can help get you set up for streaming. We\'d also likely need more volunteers 
still for each track, for example a host for that track to announce the next 
talk (this can also be done by the streamer if the streamer is interested and 
able to) and another volunteer to help check in speakers of upcoming live 
sessions.

If you are interested and able to help with any of the above, please reach out 
to us; we\'d love to have your help!

In addition to the 
[emacsconf-discuss](https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss) 
list, feel free to subscribe to 
[emacsconf-org](https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-org) as well, 
for discussions related to organizing the conference by the EmacsConf 
organizers and volunteers.

We\'d really appreciate your help in making EmacsConf 2023 the best one so far! 


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @jchelary@emacs.ch
https://traductaire-libre.org
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/