The IndieWeb Carnival prompt for May is small web communities. I've been exploring some thoughts on how a little effort goes a long way to connecting a community. Sometimes I think of it as working on the plumbing so that ideas can flow more smoothly. It feels a little different from the direct contribution of knowledge or ideas. I also want to connect with other people who do this kind of thing.

Emacs is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It's highly programmable, so people have come up with all sorts of ways to modify it to do what they want. It's not just for programmers. My favourite examples include novelists and bakers and musicians who use Emacs in unexpected ways. Because Emacs is so flexible, community is important. The source code and documentation don't show all the possible workflows. As people figure things out by themselves and together, more possibilities open up.

I love tweaking Emacs to help me with different things I want to do, and I love learning about how other people use it too. I've been sharing my notes on Emacs on this blog since 2001 or so. In 2015, as I was getting ready to become a parent, I knew I was going to have much less time and focused attention, which meant less time playing with Emacs. Fortunately, around that time, John Wiegley (who was one of the maintainers of Emacs at the time) suggested that it would be helpful if I could keep an eye on community updates and summarize them. This worked well with the fragmentation of my time, since I could still speed-read updates and roughly categorize them.

Text from sketch

Community plumbing

You don't have to fill the pipes all by yourself. Just help things flow.

I want to share some of the things we're doing in the Emacs community so that I can convince you that building plumbing for your community can be fun, easy, and awesome. This is great because enthusiasm spreads.

virtuous cycle

• Other places: YouTube, Reddit, HN, lobste.rs, Mastodon, PeerTube, mailing lists….
• Blog aggregator
  • Planet Emacs Life (uses Planet Venus) - update: [2025-05-31 Sat] I wrote my own RSS feed aggregator instead.
• Newsletter: Emacs News, 1-2 hours a week
  • summarize & group
  • announce calendar events
• User groups
  • [often use Emacs News to get conversations going]
• iCal & Org files: Emacs Calendar
• Conference
  • EmacsConf: < USD 50 hosting costs + donated server + volunteer time

Tips:

• Make it fun for yourself.
• Build processes and tools.
• Let people help

2024-01-31-05

Some more notes on the regular flows built up by this kind of community plumbing:

Daily: Lots of people post on reddit.com/r/emacs and on Mastodon with the #emacs hashtag. I also aggregate Emacs-related blog posts at planet.emacslife.com, taking over from planet.emacsen.org when Tess had DNS issues. There are a number of active channels on YouTube and occasionally some on PeerTube instances as well. I don't need to do much work to keep this flowing, just occasionally adding feeds to the aggregator for planet.emacslife.com.

Weekly: I collect posts from different sources, remove duplicates, combine links talking about the same thing, categorize the links, put them roughly in order, and post Emacs News to a website, an RSS feed, and a mailing list. This takes me maybe 1.5 hours each week. It's one of the highlights of my week. I get to learn about all sorts of cool things.

Weekly seems like a good rhythm for me considering how active the Emacs community is. Daily would be too much time. Monthly would lead to either too long of a post or too much lost in curation, and the conversations would be delayed.

Sometimes I feel a twinge of envy when I check out other people's newsletter posts with commentary or screenshots or synthesis. (So cool!) But hey, I'm still here posting Emacs News after almost ten years, so that's something. =) A long list of categorized links fits the time I've got and the way my mind works, and other people can put their own spin on things.

Monthly: There are a number of Emacs user groups, both virtual and in-person. Quite a few of them use Emacs News to get the discussion rolling or fill in gaps in conversation, which is wonderful.

Some meetups use meet.jit.si, Zoom, or Google Meet, but some are more comfortable on a self-hosted service using free software. I help by running a BigBlueButton web conferencing server that I can now automatically scale up and down on a schedule, so the base cost is about 60 USD/year. Scaling it up for each meetup costs about USD 0.43 for a 6-hour span. It's pretty automated now, which is good because I tend to forget things that are scheduled for specific dates. My schedule still hasn't settled down enough for me to host meetups, but I like to drop by once in a while.

Yearly: EmacsConf is the one big project I like to work on. It's completely online. It's more of a friendly get-together than a formal conference. I have fun trying to fit as many proposed talks as possible into the schedule. We nudge speakers to send us recorded presentations of 5-20 minutes (sometimes longer), although they can share live if they want to. A number of volunteers help us caption the videos. Each presentation is followed by Q&A over web conference, text chat, and/or collaborative document. Other volunteers handle checking in speakers and hosting the Q&A sessions.

It's a lot of fun for surprisingly little money. For the two-day conference itself, the website hosting cost for EmacsConf 2024 was about USD 56 and our setup was able to handle 400 viewers online (107 max simultaneous users in various web conferences).

EmacsConf takes more time. For me, it's about 1.5 hours a day for 4 months, but I think mostly that's because I have so much fun figuring out how to automate things and because I help with the captions. Lots of other people put time into preparing presentations, hosting Q&A, participating, etc. It's worth it, though.

I like doing this because it's a great excuse to nudge people to get cool stuff out of their head and into something they can share with other people, and it helps people connect with other people who are interested in the same things. Some Q&A sessions have run for hours and turned into ongoing collaborations. I like turning videos into captions and searchable text because I still don't have the time/patience to actually watch videos, so it's nice to be able to search. And it's wonderful gathering lots of people into the same virtual room and seeing the kind of enthusiasm and energy they share.

So yeah, community plumbing turns out to be pretty enjoyable. If this resonates with you, maybe you might want to see if your small web community could use a blog aggregator or a newsletter. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. You could start with a list of interesting links you've come across. I'm curious about what other people do in their communities to get ideas flowing!

Related: the community plumbing section of my blog post / livestream braindump.

Text from sketch

Mentoring https://sach.ac/2025-05-01-01

Sometimes people ask me for career advice or mentorship. I'm comfortable admitting I know very little.

• I don't know what it's like to study coding because I've always loved it. I've been focusing things that come easily to me.
• I don't know about the current industry, or getting a job, or advancing in your career. My experience at IBM from 2007 to 2012 was unusual:
  • met lots of people through my internal blog
  • they helped me find a well-suited position for consulting + code
  • blogging & presenting gave me unexpected reach, so I got to help with fun stuff
  • free/open source experience let me work on charity projects
  • I decided I wanted even more time and self-determination
• So I started my experiment with semi-retirement, which hit the ground running because people read my blog & helped.
• I have no recipes. So much of it is other people's kindness.
• I guess I can say that this particular path exists and that I like it so far, but n=1 and it's not even a trail that people can follow.
• Maybe it's okay to illuminate this tiny part of the space of possibilities. Then people can decide for themselves which aspects look intriguing and which don't, as they experiment with their own paths.
• (Also, I tend to be slow at e-mail.)
• Things I'm currently figuring out:
  • Fun
  • Experiment
  • Parenting
  • Life
• ? can't really mentor people on those either, but I can try to share my notes
• Even the way I use Emacs is pretty idiosyncratic.

• I suppose, if there are things I want to encourage more people to try, they'd be:

  • Explore your curiosity
  • Be kind to yourself
  • Take notes

  … but all that is pretty basic, so… maybe share your questions and we can see what resonates?

I like good questions, especially ones that bounce around in my head and nudge me to write or draw or code. Occasionally I end up pointing people in the rough direction of somewhere they can find their own answers. I'm pleasantly surprised when I can actually answer a question, or when I can make sense of something in the process of putting into words. It can take a while for me to go from the initial stimulus to a post, though. Sometimes it takes a while to link up all the thoughts I want to connect. Sometimes it takes even longer to get around to my e-mail. This particular post evolved from an e-mail I received on April 22, which is relatively fast for me.

I like the side-by-side learning I see in both Emacs meetups and parenting conversations at the playground. It's not so much "This is the right way to do things," it's more like "this is what I've been thinking about lately…" "Oh! Me too! I've been trying …?" "Mmm, what did you think about it?" Learning together, knowing no one's gotten anything fully figured out.

Playground conversations are particularly apt, I think. We're all used to stopping and starting again as our respective kids need cuddles or a snack, and we're used to the way conversations drift and reform.

I also like how blogs work for this because we can muse out loud. There's no pressure on a specific person to reply. It's okay if it takes a while for an idea to bounce back and forth between blogs in conversation. Sometimes other people get drawn into it too. E-mail is a little lower on my priority list. E-mail feels contained and private. It's easily forgotten and lost. At least with blogs, there is that tiny chance someone might stumble across it again and learn more. Might even be me. I've forgotten and re-found a lot of posts.

At 41, I am not very old. I think I know less than I did when I was 30. I have fewer answers. I've traded them for questions, and I like that. I have notes, maybe, and I'm happy to share them. I used to speak at conferences and events, but I don't think that's for me at the moment.

I'm open to other people's questions, like the way someone might look over someone's shoulder and point out this cool thing that the speaker has completely forgotten to explain because they've taken it for granted. If you point something out, I may or may not be able to explain it. But I don't know enough yet to say, "Learn this, and then do this, and then do this, and you'll get to your goal." I am still preoccupied with my tiny life and don't know about much beyond its bounds, but it can be fun to explore its quirks and adjacencies.

The Internet is full of people who will give advice. I've been working on learning how to not give advice. It will be an important skill as A+ grows in independence. It is hard to learn and I want to keep other situations consistent so that I don't get confused. I'd like to eventually get better at active, reflective listening, and then wondering out loud about good questions someone might ask themselves, or sharing observations in a declarative but not didactic sort of way. I don't have the time right now to schedule conversations or be more responsive when it comes to e-mail, as there are other things I want to make time for.

I will probably not make a very good mentor, but maybe people can still wonder out loud somewhere within hearing, and maybe some of those questions will roll around in my brain, pick up related thoughts, and come out as a katamari of ideas.

Text and links from sketch

Through blogging, we discover our thoughts and other people.

Henrik Karlsson's "Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog" nudged me to explore two threads of thought:

Writing helps you refine your thoughts:

• This reminds me of Sonke Ahrens's How to Take Smart Notes and David Bessis's Mathematica.
  • Everything drives toward writing; writing is how to clarify your thoughts
  • Writing helps you improve your intuition, which feeds your writing.
• I want to understand:
  • What's possible?
  • What's easier? what's harder (for now?)
  • How can we make things. easier? How can we make more things doable?
• and also:
  • What am I thinking?
  • what do I want to try?
• I want to get better at this through practice.

Writing helps you find your tribe:

• Definitely - and the more idiosyncratic my posts are, the more amazing it is when someone resonates with it, even years later.
• (I was amused to see him trace his tweet's flow through Stian Håklev, who reached out for a conversation in 2010 about peer-to-peer education because he read my blog.)
• I deliberately boost my tribe's information flow:
  • Emacs Calendar
  • Emacs News
  • EmacsConf
  • Emacs.tv
• I want to get better at this by
  • following my curiosity
  • improving search and serendipity
  • connecting people & ideas with community infrastructure and resources

Both sides: Because it's fun and leads to more awesomeness.

We had been at the Ontario Science Centre for two and a half hours, and A- had done most of her favourite activities already. When she saw H- together with Melissa (H-‘s mom), though, she hopped up and down with excitement. She even took H-‘s hand for a bit. Then the pair chased each other around the kids’ area while I scrambled to keep eyes on both of them. After that, there was the usual dance of separate activities and joint ones. Melissa and I waved hello in passing, carried on fragmented conversations, and texted location updates whenever our kiddos looked like they were going to be in one place for a short while.

There was even one segment of extended playing together. H- pretended to be a doctor, A- pretended to be a nurse, and I was their poor beleaguered patient who was not allowed to get well. (“Thank you for the medicine. I feel all better now.” “No, you’re still sick.” “Oh no! I’m so sick.”) We kept at it for quite a while.

We stayed all the way until the science centre closed. A- slept soundly on the way home, all tired out from six hours of fun. I like going to the science centre with friends. A- seems to enjoy it too. The science centre is an hour away, but conversation makes the trip shorter. It’s fun to see the kids interact, too, and I’m learning to enjoy interacting as well.

I’ve been making an effort to be more social by inviting people for field trips or food. A- will learn about social interaction from how I interact with other people, and she’ll develop her own friendships. I hope that when she goes to school, we’ll already be on good terms with a few of her classmates’ families. I can see how friendships have contributed to my sister’s happiness, and I see how I’m slowly getting the hang of things. Not that I feel that friendships are instrumentally good, mind you. One of the things I like about people I consider friends is that it’s nice that they exist. I like that there are people like them. But it does sometimes help to remind myself of the good things about friendships when I’m feeling all homebody-ish or when I’m talking myself out of worrying about rejection.

A- will probably turn out all right no matter what I do. I might as well take advantage of this opportunity to learn a few things that parenting can help me with. Cooking makes sense because I feel strongly motivated to help A- develop good eating habits. Social interaction is another big area that makes perfect sense, since parenting introduces me to lots of people with lots of common ground. Early childhood education is a natural fit, too. So much to learn for both of us!

It's much easier to hang out with other parents and their kids than with child-free friends. Parents are used to pausing and resuming conversations as we follow our kids' interests. They know scheduling is super-flexible and it might take three times longer to walk a short distance than Google Maps estimates. The actions and recent developments of our kids give us many things to talk about. It's great to be able to share snacks and baby wipes, and to watch out for each other. They usually have memberships to the same sort of kid-friendly places A- and I like: reasonably quiet, with lots of things to explore.

But my friends are my friends because I like who they are as people. I learn from their lives, and I appreciate that people like them exist. I don't want to move out of their orbits permanently, or even wait until A- is old enough for me to leave her for an afternoon or an evening. They're also grown-ups who can make the most of the moments when A- pulls me away. A- generally takes one nap these days, and I can usually get away without napping along with her. She doesn't have a particular schedule. If we have company, I might be able to get her to sleep in the carrier.

The ideal situation is when child-free friends are also good friends with parent friends. Then we can all hang out, and despite divided attention and fragmented conversations, we can usually manage to talk about interesting things.

Home is the best place. A- is comfortable. We've got space to spread out and let her do things on her own whenever she wants to. I'm a little intimidated by the thought of hosting with food, since it's still a bit hard to get groceries or cook with A-. But maybe I can find a few forgiving, freezable recipes that I can make ahead (zucchini muffins!), and I can ask people to bring things they might enjoy. Afternoons are best because A- is awake and we can keep our evening routines smooth. Most people aren't available during the week, though, so maybe I can see about setting up a Sunday afternoon thing once a month.

I'm still looking for places in Toronto and Manila that can serve as a good base for grown-up socializing. During good weather, the parks in Toronto are great for picnics and walks, so maybe I should see if there are parks/playgrounds like that in Manila too. (And what time to go, considering the heat.) She's a bit too small to play independently in public playplaces like those occasionally found in fast food restaurants. Big, uncrowded spaces work better for us, so she can explore while I remain close by. The Mind Museum in Manila and the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto are among our favourites.

Meals are another possibility: restaurants with high chairs, food that A- likes, and my own grab-bag of crayons, paper, and other things for kid entertainment. I prefer to not have her confined to a chair for a long time – and she usually clambers out of it quickly anyway – so that's more for 30-minute charts. I'm mostly distracted by feeding her and keeping things from spilling, though, so I'm not much of a conversationalist.

Hmm. That gives me a few things to experiment with:

• I can continue seeing Jen and E- weekly, since we've got a good rhythm for field trips. I can invite Eric whenever it makes sense, since he's a mutual friend who has a flexible schedule.
• I can work on setting up a similar rhythm with Joy and J-, maybe on Tuesdays, or introduce them to Jen and E- for more fun.
• I can see if flexible, low-expectation planning works for having people over on Sunday afternoon. It can always be a supermarket rotisserie chicken dinner thing, I can ask people to bring stuff, or we can have stuff delivered.
• When W- wants more focus time, I can plan to see friends at a park, restaurant, or something like that. This might be good for getting back in touch with both parent and non-parent friends.

Hmm. Reviving my social life also ties in with helping A- get to know and interact with more people. I think it would be a good use of my opportunity fund. I like the things I've been learning from friends' lives. Since people generally don't write as much as I do, it's good to talk to people more regularly. The limiting factor is probably me more than other people or A-, so if I rejig my thoughts (yes, people can bring stuff, I can pay for delivery, people can be flexible, and I can trust that I'll hold up my end of the conversation), that might open up more possibilities. Let's give it a try.

I’ve been going to a workshop on parent advocacy skills. One of the sessions was about assertive communication: giving yourself permission to express your feelings and ask for what you want in a respectful, confident, and specific way. I’m familiar with the techniques (I statements, active listening), but it’s always good to practice and to see how other people might handle a situation. It also got me thinking about what I do want to learn when it comes to advocating for A-, and how to make the most of my strengths and work around my weaknesses.

I think there’s often a lot of leeway in how to solve a problem, especially if you try changing perspectives. Just like in tech, some ways are much easier and some ways are much harder. It’s easier to work with a system than against it. Asking different questions opens up other possibilities. That’s been my experience with tech. Human-centric fields are even more fungible. If you can get people to want to help you, they can bring their creativity and resourcefulness to the table. Conversely, if you get on someone’s bad side, they might drag their feet, or they might follow the letter of the law but not the spirit of it. And you can’t just keep testing until something works!

To make assertive communication easier, I like doing my homework. I research the possibilities and the trade-offs so that I can make better decisions and ask for specific things. I like knowing alternatives and having backup plans, because that takes the pressure off. I like reading policy manuals or getting the inside scoop from people because that gives me an idea of the structures that people work in, what tools are available to them, how they’re evaluated, what makes their day better, what makes them look good to their boss. I find systems fascinating, even when they don’t work perfectly well. We’re going a little outside the mainstream for a number of things, so it helps to know what’s out there and how to support any exceptions we want.

I’m working on getting better at dealing with different communication styles. Fortunately, this is rarely a problem. I minimize encounters with aggressive people, and I’m pretty comfortable disengaging from things I don’t like. I’ll dig into conflict resolution a bit more when I run into things I don’t want to work around, but in the meantime, there’s so much potential in yes-es that I don’t have to chase after any no-es.

Rather than conflict resolution, I mostly want to focus on understanding the systems here. What resources can I draw on? What’s easier and what’s harder? How can I work around any bumps? How can I give back and make things easier?

For A-, here’s what I anticipate needing:

• tools to help me catch any developmental delays or learning difficulties, since early intervention pays off
• minor accommodations in school: how to deal with the prosthesis if it’s out of her eye, seating adjustments, not sharing reading materials, eye protection and other safety precautions, possibly alternatives to ball sports (or realistic expectations for performance), help with social integration, and so on
• good relationships with doctors, nurses, teachers, librarians, and other professionals

Based on the stories of other people in the microphthalmia/anophthalmia support group, it’s possible that she’ll enjoy school and develop a great sense of humour about her eye, but it’s also possible that she might have to deal with rejection or even bullying. I’m looking forward to learning how to work with or around whatever I can.

J-'s final exams were last week. We'd been helping her review physics, since she was okay with her other subjects. She solved many of the review questions on her own, and then asked us for help with the ones she didn't know how to do. I was surprised to discover that I remembered enough of kinematics and other topics to be helpful (and to enjoy helping). Yay! =)

We walked her through solving the problems that stumped her. Lots of math and science problem solving is about pattern recognition: seeing how the problem you're working on is similar to other things you've already done (possibly with help), and adapting your experience to the current situation. Having someone sketch out a map and provide quick feedback can make studying a much more productive and less frustrating experience.

Here are some notes on the sub-skills involved:

2015-06-15b Notes from helping with physics – index card #physics #math #tutoring #j- #family #science #teaching #school

Algebra's a big one. I'm not sure how you can develop fluency in that aside from practice and different ways of exploring it. Practising this seems pretty low on the priority list once homework's finished and even lower priority during vacations. On the other hand, it's hard to cram understanding when the pressure's on. I think either John Mighton's The End of Ignorance or The Myth of Ability had some tips on helping people develop a more intuitive understanding of algebra.

On a related note, there's also the challenge of translating a word problem into the appropriate math, especially when multiple parts or equations are involved. Maybe we can think out loud more often, modeling the real-world applications of this skill.

There are the usual small mistakes related to doublechecking one's work or getting the units straight, but she'll get the hang of that.

J- will be taking more physics, chemistry, and biology next term, so it might be good to do a bit of this review during the summer. In general, I get the impression that she's doing pretty well, especially compared with the rest of her class.