While I am a vim user, I love seeing people having conferences to promote editors that aren't IDEs. Don't get me wrong, Eclipse and Visual Studio are great tools but nothing beats being able to open vim (or emacs in your case) and going to town on some code. Good luck guys!
This is awesome! I'm excited for a chance to nerd out with fellow Emacs users and increase my (pathetic) Emacs-fu.
On the subject of text editor conferences, I know some people who put together one about Notepad: http://notepadconf.com/ I think it was mostly about drinking beer, though.
I don't use emacs, but have you considered something like Discourse (usable/postable as a mailing list + a proper modern forum for the less email liking)? Posts can also be made 'community wikis' and have revision history.
We'll actually be switching to Discourse soon :) Believe me, I am no fan of Google Groups.
I didn't know that Discourse had community wikis. Then we can switch off of GitHub too (plus, git is a bit heavyweight for what is essentially a wiki doc :) )
I always encourage writers to use Emacs and I write in it too. So to have a successful author who uses it to its full potential would be really interesting.
The real killer feature for writers (especially novelists) would be an OS that booted into Emacs and didn't offer any distractions whatsoever. The ironically named selfcontrolapp.com is probably the biggest tech thing to affect the literary scene in a long time...but as a developer I know how to disable the iptables rules in the Linux version. And I have no actual self-control.
No one at my 3-person company besides me uses Emacs, so it would be great to share workflows and ideas with others.
Also, what a great way to advertise Emacs: use a public org-mode document stored on Github that is exported to HTML to plan the conference.