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 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.

Attendance at the Quantified Self Toronto meetup has been low lately, and it's a good time to think about revitalizing or even redesigning the community.

The way it is now works okay for newcomers. I imagine the experience for newcomers is mostly like: Wow, I'm not alone! I'm not weird! There are other people who track stuff! (I know, I get that feeling each time I go too. =) ) If they work up the courage to share what they've been learning, they often pick up plenty of tips and ideas, and they can connect with other people tracking similar things.

From regulars, it's great to hear updates or find out about other things they're tracking.

The talks do tend to be a little repetitive. Often it's about people sharing data collected using apps or devices with predefined visualizations, and the occasional self-promotional bit. Sometimes we get new analyses or unconventional experiments, and those are the kinds of talks I enjoy the most.

The repetition is understandable – good, even. I think that's mostly because each person has to go through an individual journey. Even if two people present the same topic and have similar conclusions, it's good to recognize each of their experiences.

Still, it might be interesting to think about how we can increase the value for regulars and long-time trackers…

Mmm. If I could selfishly redesign this community to be even better-suited to my interests, what would it be like?

I go to Quantified Self Toronto meetups because I like the kind of people who use data to make better decisions about their lives. I particularly like it when someone's curious about something off the beaten track, whether they're collecting data on paper or they've built their own tools. Experimental manipulation is also interesting for me. I also like having the occasional nudge to design, conduct, and report on my little experiments. I've talked about a lot of odd things over the years (like cat litter box use, and more recently, sewing), and I like resonating with people in an unexpected way.

If I were to tilt Quantified Self Toronto to be something more personally useful for me, I might focus on:

• Getting more people to the point of being able to explore and analyze their own data instead of relying on apps
  • Learning to notice when you're confused, and thinking of ways to explore that uncertainty
  • Tracking on paper
  • Analyzing with spreadsheets and graphs
• Connecting with other toolmakers so that we can bounce ideas around
• Developing my own skills in data collection, analysis, and visualization
  • Android programming or scripting?
  • Electronics?
  • R?
• Trying out other people's experiments so that I can share my experiences and notes with them
• Researching unconventional experiments/measurements using QuantifiedSelf.com and similar blogs, and drawing inspiration from those

At the Quantified Self Conference I went to in 2012, I gravitated towards people who tracked their own questions or even built their own tools. I don't expect the majority of Quantified Self Toronto to be creatively technical, but it might be interesting to attract and retain a core of people like that. What would make 2-3 hours worth it for them, and what would make it more worthwhile for me? Alternatively, what are other ways I could build that kind of tribe? I think education, inspiration, and shared experiments might be interesting to play with. Hmm… The same combination could help encourage newcomers to develop along those lines, too. Might be worth looking into.

After RJ's recent party, I realized that my perception of and approach to small talk had shifted quite a bit from what it was a few years ago. In the past, I used to feel annoyed with how small talk conversations tend to cover the same ground repeatedly ("So, what do you do?") and how they didn't often result in follow-up actions or connections. Now I see small talk as a way to explore and appreciate other people's stories (especially since few people blog) and discover which aspects of myself might resonate with other people (and vice versa). It's also a lot of fun to play with the mental models that other people build up, which is why I've been experimenting with introducing myself as a housewife and then letting the conversations bring out other weird aspects. ;)

2015-04-19f Small talk shifts – index card #small-talk #growth

It's also fun building up little chains of stories with the kinds of hooks that make people say, "Wait, what?" Some examples of things that are incongruous or that provoke curiosity: semi-retirement, step-parenting a 17-year-old, combining laser-cutting and sewing, disassembling a washer/dryer, wearing a vest with an unusual number of pockets.

Weirdness is useful. Ideally, this weirdness brings out disclosures of other people's weirdness, or prompts them to connect me with someone else they know, or demystifies something and encourages them to explore it. As for me, I like finding out if someone is the kind of person I might want to get to know further – perhaps collaborate with or mentally model. I look for people with shared values, interesting experiments, and a sense of growth.

2015-04-19e Different worldviews – index card #small-talk

Experiments are good because we learn from the divergences. That said, sometimes I can be too weird – when something I do or something I experiment with is just too far from someone's worldview to relate to or understand. For example, sometimes I talk to people who just don't get Stoicism, simple living, homebody-ness, tech customization (especially Emacs), quantified/experimental thinking, or blogging.

That's cool. I don't need other people to validate me and I don't need to convert other people to my perspective, so it's really more of an opportunity to explore.

When people ask questions about one of my experiments, I've been leaving it up to them to drive the conversation since I'm happy to answer questions. Sometimes these end up in unproductive loops. It occurred to me that it might be fun to take a more sociological/anthropological approach to this: to deliberately explore other people's perspectives and dig into why they think the way they do, possibly from the position that I make perfect sense to myself and it's other people who are odd and deserving of study. ;)

2015-04-19d On talking to non-Stoics about preferences and value judgments – index card #stoicism

Here's a more detailed example. I talk about value judgments surprisingly often because people often press for information on whether I'd like to have kids, which I suppose is a standard small-talk question for women around this age. Harumph. They usually have strong opinions one way or the other. This is one of the things that I'm careful to not have strong value judgments around or be attached to specific outcomes for. Sometimes I use this as an opportunity to prod people to be more considerate about things by considering a wider range of scenarios. Sometimes I frame my response in terms of being happy either way. It's pretty rare to find people for whom this position makes sense. Many people are quite boggled by it. But I talk about equanimity anyway in case that resonates with someone who's been looking for that concept, and even if it doesn't sink in, I can rest in the knowledge that it makes sense to me.

On the other hand, my favourite kinds of conversations are with people who have deliberately cultivated their own differences from the mainstream and who can reflect on those experiments. Then our conversations become a high-bandwidth sort of brainstorming and swapping of notes. =) We might be doing different experiments, but we can understand and learn from each other's perspectives.

So, small talk. It's an opportunity to discover interesting things about people (captured in quick notes after the party, because who knows), play with sharing aspects of myself and messing up people's mental models, and learn more about things I do differently. Even when I'm talking to people who find it difficult to understand external perspectives or whose conversational skills are somewhat impaired by alcohol, I can pick up useful information about other people and myself. As I meet more interesting people and as those people grow through their own experiences, I trust that small talk will become even more fun. =)