Time-wise, I did Emacs-related things for 36 hours in Sept, 40 hours in Oct, and 52 hours in Nov. That included about an hour a week for Emacs News. To be fair, it's really more like hobby/fun time... :)

We've been experimenting with sending tokens of appreciation (evil plan: stickers/pins might get other people to talk to speakers about Emacs), but Corwin's treating that as a personal experiment and not including it in the conference budgeting.

And of course, there's a lot of stuff that isn't counted in monetary costs, like the time that speakers put into their talks or the servers that people have shared with us.

But yeah, it's surprising what you can do on a shoestring budget and with casual volunteers. Definitely worth considering if people have been thinking about running their own conference. :)

There was an interesting discussion on Reddit after NeovimConf 2024 (https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV) People were happy about the talks. Some seemed a little frustrated by interruptions from ads, getting off schedule, and a chat that might sometimes get a little distracted by meme potential. EmacsConf is a lot smaller than NeovimConf in terms of viewers - twitchtracker says NeovimConf got 3640 (plus more on YouTube) and we got about 400. We're, like, an order of magnitude smaller. That might be why self-hosting via Icecast is manageable for us. We started automating scheduling a few years ago because I wanted to accept more talks than could comfortably fit in a day, and since I was figuring out that infrastructure close to the conference, I needed something that I could handle by myself without going crazy. Even though my co-organizers are now more familiar with the fallback scripts for manual control, they prefer the automatic schedule. And community is a gift beyond anything I can code. I remember watching the IRC logs scroll past and feeling deeply appreciative of how wonderful and thoughtful people are, even during some of the tougher sessions we've had in the past.

Also we like doing captions and transcripts and putting up the videos as soon as possible. :) Text makes things easier to search and skim, especially from within Emacs. And videos, well, we've got them, we might as well have a little bit of code to publish them right away.

I reached out to teej_dv and ThePrimeagen on X to see if I could learn from their NeovimConf notes or in case any of our notes might be helpful. TJ said they don't really write things down. Makes sense because they're more video people. I hope they'll consider doing a postmortem braindump and maybe even sharing that publicly. I think that would be really cool.

For me, I lean heavily on automation, documentation, and incremental improvements partly because it's fun, partly because it helps me make the most of what little time I can squeeze in between interruptions, and partly because it ripples out and helps other people who often end up paying it forward. Emacs is very well-suited to this, of course. Every time we get to do EmacsConf, I learn even more and build up more tools along the way.

I think Vim and Neovim have a way bigger userbase than Emacs does, and I'm glad to see Neovim talks sharing workflows beyond the usual software development things. I do think there's something wonderful about the multiplicity of things that people use Emacs for, and how we've got this culture of both figuring out how to tailor Emacs to yourself and sharing those ideas with other people. I'd love to see what happens as Neovim and other editors build that critical mass of user configuration and community sharing, when people can figure out something for themselves by cobbling together stuff from other people. I think it's kinda cool how people shift from one editor to another, even. If they bring ideas from Emacs to somewhere else, or they bring ideas from somewhere else back to Emacs, things get better.

I'd love it if NeovimConf could also be a smoothly-running way to get stuff out of people's heads, connect people with other people, and inspire more awesomeness. I'd love it if people could do that sort of stuff with all sorts of other mini-conferences about their interests. Could be fun!

You know how it is... It's fun to write Emacs Lisp to automate things, smoothen my workflow, reduce the risk of mistakes. 15 minutes here, 5 minutes there... Micro-improvements add up!

Actually, can I convince you to share your experience and submit a talk proposal? User stories were a well-received part of EmacsConf last year, and lots of people liked Pierce Wang's talk on learning Emacs as a high school student who's passionate about music. I think people would love to hear about how you wandered in, how you climbed up that learning curve, and how you've been tweaking things to fit you. =)

One of the things I like about Emacs is its versatility. Do you think the people you're talking to might be curious about some examples of how people have used Emacs? I think it's awesome that people who are blind or have low-vision have Emacspeak, that people use Org Mode to work around the limitations of their brain, that people use Emacs for all sorts of non-coding things... I started trying to organize some links at https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDiversity to give a sense of the breadth of different things people use Emacs for. It's totally not comprehensive, but I hope you can add more resources as you come across them.

One of the most fun ways to grow Emacs' appeal outside the user/developer base is to use Emacs for your other interests and talk about how. I've seen lots of posts related to Org and cooking, exercising, and so on. I had fun using Emacs Lisp to help me figure out a quilt pattern.

As for making it easier for other people to get into Emacs, some people find it effective to make a customized interface for the workflows people need, especially if they can tweak it to fit people's preferences.

Gotta run (kiddo's woken up), but hope that helps!