We have a recording session for the EmacsConf 2026 panel on community tomorrow. I want to get my thoughts together so that I can answer concisely, saving the details for this post so that people can dig into it before or after the conversation. So here are some rough notes:

1. What made you start using Emacs, and what kept you using it?
   • I came to Emacs for the customizability, and the community is icing on the cake.
   • Transcript for my chat with Linkarzu about the Neovim and Emacs communities, voice control, and other topics
   • How I got hooked
2. What took you from using Emacs to actively contributing to the community - participating in forums, writing Elisp, organizing meetups, answering questions?
   • I tend to respond well to specific people's specific needs/requests/suggestions rather than abstract ideas.
     • The main things I do all started out as someone else's suggestion. Aside from my blog, that is; that I do because otherwise I'll forget. But John Wiegley asked me to do Emacs News, so I did. Amin Bandali suggested reviving EmacsConf, so here we are. Tess O'Connor's planet.emacsen.org server went down, so now I run planet.emacslife.com. I don't take everything on, just the things that suit me well, but suggestions are welcome.
     • It's a lot easier for me to help when someone else is concretely involved. For example:
       • scheduling a conversation with someone and making it open to other people to join is easier for me than just talking out loud by myself
       • "have an IRC channel for my livestream" is a bit abstract; it's hard to pay attention to it when it's empty. "Sacha, can we use this channel to discuss the current livestream" works better for me because there is a specific person who's already there.
       • It's hard to make my code more generic, but it's more motivating when someone reaches out in the process of trying to get my code to work for them.
     • Sometimes in the process of putting together Emacs News, I'll come across people's questions on Mastodon, and I will write some Emacs Lisp for their question because I think it's a good idea and I'm curious too.
   • Tinkering keeps me going. Ex: building lots of automations for EmacsConf because I'm curious about what's possible.
     • I'm not a starter, I'm not a finisher, I just like tinkering and making things better.
   • Takeaway: suggest things to me and figure out time so we can get the ball rolling together. Things are more likely to happen if there's another person on the other end of the line. Don't take it personally if I pick something else to focus on instead; there's only so much time at the moment. =)
3. How does Emacs show up for you in real life - colleagues, meetups, friends? How did those connections form?
   • I'm busy with family stuff and we still keep COVID precautions, so I don't go to tech meetups and conferences like I used to. I prefer connecting with people virtually. I like reading people's blog posts, watching their videos, attending virtual meetups, chatting with people during my livestreams, and organizing this conference. This gives me a sense of other people working in this space.
   • I feel warm and fuzzy about many people in the community. There are a lot of people I appreciate. Positive when I see people helping out and sharing, negative when people are being grumpy.
4. If you know other software communities, what's one thing Emacs could learn from them?
   • The Neovim community does the YouTube/Twitch thing very well. I want to learn from their community cultivation and production processes. If we have more conversations and videos, maybe that will help people learn by looking over other people's shoulders. If we have more cool demos, that might draw more people in.
   • Python and Debian do really cool things in terms of mentorship, community, and outreach. They're a lot bigger than we are, though. I wonder how we can do those things on a much smaller scale without burning people out.
   • The communities around large language models and AI are also dealing with the Lisp curse (ease of making your own solution means less sharing), so it might be interesting to see what evolves from them. Right now it's a bit of a mess; there's even more cargo-culting there.
5. What's one concrete thing you wish existed in the Emacs community a year from now?
   • Hah, I don't necessarily want to add to someone else's TODOs. Here's what's on my list:
     • Maybe an OrgModeConf for outside-Emacs collaboration, depending on whether we're at the point of being able to share workflow ideas with other people? More cross-pollination, maybe?
     • I want to get better at connecting with subcommunities so that people can bump into each other. Maybe that looks like checking the mailing lists / chats myself, or maybe someone can blog updates once in a while.
     • I'd like to experiment with office hours and video calls so that people can share their screen if they want help with something. This could be an additional meetup. I might start with speech recognition / speech synthesis, since that's what I'm interested in these days.
     • I also want to work on my clipping/transcription workflow to more easily share videos. This looks like more videos and blog posts.

If you want to reflect on the questions, please feel free to do so and to share your responses with me or on your blog. (You don't have to be one of the panelists. =) )