Call for SeaGL Committee Volunteers

Hello FLO (free/libre/open) friends! With a goal of hosting both in-person and remote activities this year, we are looking to expand our all-volunteer conference committees with new helpers and coordinators for SeaGL 2024. Think you might be a good fit or have a friend to put forward? Please keep reading!

How does SeaGL come together?

Starting around mid-January or early-February a kick-off meeting is scheduled, previous volunteers and interested parties are invited to attend. During this meeting we set a general timeline, see what area(s) folks are interested in spending their time, and review notes from the previous year’s retrospective.

After the kick-off meeting, committees figure out their meeting cadence and create an initial timeline for themselves. We also gather every other week as all-staff to go over outstanding tasks and keep everyone abreast of the progress committees are making. Meetings increase frequency to weekly approximately two months before the event.

What are these committees?

There are a lot of tasks that come together to make a successful conference. If enough tasks are similar, they get bundled together and a committee is formed to focus on them. Our current list of committees can be found on the Get Involved page, they are also listed here:

Attendee Experience: Focusing on and prioritizing the SeaGL community.
A/V & DevOps: Central nest for SeaGL technical operations.
Finance: Keeping an eye on the SeaGL books and issuing reimbursements.
IDEA: Promoting inclusion, diversity, equity, and access at SeaGL and beyond.
Partnerships: Connecting SeaGL with other groups, organizations, and sponsors.
Policy & Protocol: Making sure there are rules place keep SeaGL a safer space.
Programming & Flow: Packing the SeaGL program with amazing content.
Promotion & Outreach: Spreading the word about SeaGL world wide.
Volunteers: Keeping the SeaGL staff happy and recruiting new volunteers to the flock.

Committees are usually pretty flexible, and many folks find themselves on more than one, depending on where their interests lie. Ideally, each committee has two coordinators to share some responsibilities, provide redundancy, and enhance knowledge transfer during transitions.

And what about these coordinators? What do they do??

A coordinator essentially takes on the stewardship for one of SeaGL’s committees. This includes the following core responsibilities:

Organizing committee meetings
Recruiting committee volunteers
Providing updates to, and receiving updates from the all-staff meetings
And ideally, creating or improving committee documentation

A coordinator isn’t necessarily experienced in their committee’s specific area of responsibility, and they are not expected to do all of their committee’s work. Their primary responsibility is to make sure everything in their committee’s purview is being kept on-track and accomplished in a timely manner. Ideally, coordinators will serve for two years, and either create or improve a handover plan to give their successors a strong start.

Sounds great! How do I get involved???

First, check the Get Involved page. We do our best to keep it up to date, and it’ll let you know where the need for people is greatest. Now that we’re back in-person, we especially need coordinators on the Attendee Experience, IDEA and Volunteers committees. We are also currently looking for co-coordinators on the A/V & DevOps, Partnerships, and Finance committees.

If you have questions, we’d love to answer them! Reach out to us on Matrix or send an e-mail to participate@seagl.org. We also welcome you to fill out this volunteer application form. However you get ahold of us, we’ll try to respond within 48 hours.

Thank you for reading this, and we hope that you consider becoming an important part of one of the best FLO community conferences!