A plan for 2022

A new year has started, and with it some resolutions!

I’m continuing an amazing work that Mark Dawson started two years ago! Unfortunately, Mark cannot commit this year to be as present in our small community, but he will still be around (👋 Mark!).

Some of us met last Friday to discuss what kind of things we would like to do in this year, and we’ve come up with a plan. First thing to notice is the change of times of our regular meetings! We will be meeting on Tuesdays between 16’00 and 17’00 UK time. Read below to know more about our future plans!

During the meeting we used a hakmd document to keep notes of our wonderful ideas. Some of these ideas will be converted into issues on our our repository and hopefully we can have a successful year as the previous years.

We will keep meeting twice a month, with a similar format as we had before. In principle, we will try to have the first of these a more formal session when someone talks about some particular topic, whereas the second meeting may be a more informal one. This is our aim, but it will depend very much on the speakers and the community.

What activities can we do?

This list is some of the things we discussed based on the interests of the people participating on the call or on Slack. If you have new ideas, don’t hesitate to mentioned to us on the channel or open an issue with it!

• Starting with emacs - Journal club like. Maybe point to some material to do asynchronously in a time frame and then have a discussion.
• elisp programming codeclub
  • February - the only Functional month (get your 1-a-day of functional code)
    • We could use elisp exercises from exercism
    • try the advent of code on elisp
    • propose problems on the slack channel
  • discuss the anatomy of an emacs package
  • Review how to submit a package to MELPA
• Manage multiple programming projects
  • Project setup - what do you need to work with X programming language
  • Demonstrate how to integrate workflow with GitHub repos.
  • Review current workflows to solicit advice on how to improve them.
  • LSP - language servers usage and development
• Work with others (who doesn’t use emacs?)
  • Work collaboratively (VSCode has liveshare, what does emacs have?)
• Reference management with emacs
  • How to use the new [cite:@reference] syntax
  • try to invite John Kitchin as a guest speaker
• Manuscript preparation with Emacs
  • Working with (La)TeX
• Management of multiple writing projects
• Org it all!
  • Literate programming in Org and other packages.
  • How to manage your time with Org agenda
  • Review the use of org-roam in knowledge management
  • Making presentations with org (or other things)
    • reveal, pdf, …
  • Showcase your favourite org-related package
• Emacs discoverability
  • Pre-fixed key bindings. How people aggregates their preferred commands.
• Book Club for the small number of emacs books (or online equivalents / guides) out there
  • Hahn’s Emacs Field Guide (SB could cover it)
• Special event: Group hack

What roles should we have?

To keep the community vibrant in a world where everyone is busy, we need to share responsibility across different people. We’ve suggested some roles, as with the topics, if you would like to volunteer to any of these or think of new roles we could have, let us know by creating a new issue.

So far we’ve got:

• session chair - David
• talk organiser - David
• zoom controller - Ed (But we may need Ed’s backup or a different tool - e.g, jitsi)
• website updater - ? (Maybe Sadie)

What actions were decided?

• Add people to github organisation (Mark Dawson)

  David has been added, others will be added soon.

• Add wiki to the m-x Research repo? (to keep copies of meeting notes and similar)

  Done and saved a copy of this meeting notes.

• Update Calendar

  David has got access to edit the google calendar and updated it to the new schedule

• Test with jitsi.

  Can save recordings to dropbox, live streaming to youtube, and protect the room with password (but the first person to join each day creates that password). It doesn’t provide “host” powers (everyone has the same powers). Probably we could do the champ in the near future.

Beyond that in the last week we’ve also created a community page on Mobilizon which may be a good platform to advertise our events.