[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]

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2026-12-12. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Format: 83-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2026/current/bbb-community.html
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-community
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Processing uploaded video

Description

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/
• https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-11-08-emacsconf-community-panel-comments/

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.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org