November 8th & 9th, 2024
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News

Unintended emails being sent
August 23, 2021

Hello SeaGL community,

Some of you might be getting multiple emails from us. We want to apologize for the unintended mailings. Some changes were made to past conference schedules as part of a general clean up. We were working on an archive page that was disconnected from OSEM, our conference software. Unfortunately, there were no notifications from OSEM that emails were being sent to the community.

We are currently working on a shim to stop any emails from going out until all updates are done. Thank you so much for your patience. You can reach out to us on our usual communication channels.

SeaGL 2021 CfP extended
August 05, 2021

Need a little more time to get your proposal together for SeaGL 2021? Good news! We’ve extended the submission deadline to August 19. This gives you two more weeks to submit a talk proposal about free software, security, tech culture, community, and more! If you need some ideas, check out our suggested topic categories.

If you have questions about the Call for Proposals process or want feedback on your talk proposal, we have one more office hours session. Join us in chat or on video at seagl.org/meet at 3:00 PM Pacific on Saturday, August 7. If you can’t make the office hours, email your questions to cfp-help@seagl.org any time.

When you’re ready to submit, our CfP portal is ready for you!

Office Hours for SeaGL CFP 2021
July 30, 2021

One of the ways SeaGL supports first-time speakers is by holding CfP office hours. If you have questions about the Call for Proposals process or want feedback on your talk proposal, you can join us in chat at seagl.org/meet or on video on:

  • Sun Aug 1, 3pm PDT
  • Tues Aug 3, 5:30pm PDT
  • Sat Aug 7, 3pm PDT

We’d love to see you, whether you’re making your first conference proposal or you’re an experienced speaker! Whether you need topic ideas or want help wrangling the central argument of your talk, we’re here to help. We’ll also have some prepared topics for each session.

If you can’t make the office hours, email your questions to cfp-help@seagl.org any time.

And many of us are on the channel much of the time besides, so come say hi! We’re in #SeaGL on Libera.Chat and #SeaGL:seattlematrix.org on Matrix. The rooms are bridged, so join us on the network and client of your choice. If you haven’t used IRC before, no sweat. Join in the browser chat version of the channel, choose a nickname, and you’ll be in!

SeaGL 2021 Call For Proposals
June 24, 2021

Welcome to the 2021 SeaGL Call For Proposals! Every year, we want to hear from YOU, and we’re always looking for speakers who are traditionally underrepresented in tech, and people with perspectives uncommonly heard, as well as first-time speakers. Because we’re virtual for the second year in a row, there is opportunity for speakers anywhere in the world to submit talks! In 2020, we had talks from four continents!! So let’s take advantage of our virtual closeness for another year.

Details

CfP Open: Thursday 24 June 2021

CfP Close: Thursday 5 August 2021Thursday 19 August 2021

Acceptances: Early September 2021

Finalized Speakers: Mid September 2021

Program Published: Late September 2021

CONFERENCE: Friday 5 November and Saturday 6 November 2021!

Submit at: OSEM

Committee and Code of Practice

The Program Committee is the group responsible for choosing and scheduling all of the great talks you enjoy at SeaGL. This year the committee steering the Program consists of:

  • Nathan Handler (co-chair)
  • Rachel Kelly (co-chair)
  • Monica Ayhens-Madon
  • Remy DeCausemaker
  • Megan Guiney
  • Sri Ramkrishna
  • Alison Yu

As in prior years, we agree to abide by the SeaGL Program Committee Code of Practice.

Code of Conduct

The SeaGL Code of Conduct applies to all staff, all volunteers, all speakers and keynotes, all attendees and viewers, and all sponsors. SeaGL is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone; regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, nationality, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference staff, volunteers, presenters, attendees, and participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference, without a refund, at the discretion of the conference organizers.

These are more than words, they are a framework that we have used and will use in the future when the situation calls for it. We encourage you to become familiar with the contents of the SeaGL Code of Conduct, as you indicate your strong agreement to these principles in submitting a talk, attending the conference, volunteering, sponsoring, or otherwise participating in the conference.

Talk Topics/Labels

We encourage almost any topic related to open source that you have a personal engagement with. We have created a list of topic labels you might choose to use — these might give you some ideas.

  • Security: Security Practices (Personal and Industry) and Security Career
  • Hardware: Free and Open hardware projects
  • Leaving the Walled Garden: Owning Your Own Data
  • Tools: Command line, databases, web tools, accessibility, open graphics tooling, and more
  • Tech Culture: FLOSS for EveryOne: how can FLOSS be of help to those outside our immediate community?
  • Community: Community building, labor rights, & advocacy
  • Virtual meetings & “meatspace”
  • DevOps: Open source DevOps, containers, continuous integration/continuous deployment, & monitoring
  • Licensing & Legal
  • Career Development in FLOSS software and hardware
  • Performance Art! Seriously :)
  • Misc: Have a great talk that doesn’t fit these categories? Submit it!

Talk categories and “vibe”

SeaGL is a very special conference. We’re a community-focused Free/Libre Open Source Software annual event in Seattle, and since last year, all over the world virtually! We’re looking for technical talks from folks who usually give community talks, and activism talks from folks who usually give coding deep dives, and so forth. We would love to see you out of your comfort zone. The categories we used last year were, loosely: Security, Community, Career Development, Tech Culture, Tools, Virtual Life & Work, DevOps, Performance Art! and Miscellaneous, and we had amazing submissions as a result, like Devops Standup and several talks on labor organizing! We’re an independent bunch but we still like to take care of each other.

We are not looking for sponsored talks, however we’d love to welcome you over at our Sponsorship Prospectus and give you an opportunity to reach our attendees in other ways. As a small community event, our attendees tend to be university students, open source hobbyists and engineers, security professionals, technical writers, and more, skewing toward community rather than a corporate feel.

We’re not very likely to accept broad introductory talks, but specific, scoped introductions to a discrete part of the Operations or Network/Sysadmin world are very sought after, and we also love talks on the broad theme of “hacking for good”, and personal security as well. Are you making choices for your personal technology outside of Amazon/Google/Apple/other giants? We would love to hear about that too!

We welcome talks you have given elsewhere, but if you have, please indicate so in the abstract (a link would be great) and let us know how this talk will be different.

Talk structure

Talks will be presented remotely. Speakers may give their session live, or pre-record their session for the room moderator to play while they are in the chat session with the attendees.

Talk length is 20 minutes, with another 10 minutes allowed for questions, for 30m total.

We do not have longer time slots available at SeaGL 2021 because the online medium makes it more critical to present yourself concisely. Please do not propose talks that cannot be presented well within the allotted time. If you have a topic that absolutely needs more time, consider breaking your proposal into two talks: an introductory talk and a more “advanced” talk.

Office Hours

SeaGL pioneered the idea of CfP Office Hours, so stay tuned for details, and if you need help in the meantime, please email us at cfp-help@seagl.org, and we’d love to help you work through a good proposal.

How To Submit

FINALLY, let’s talk about how to submit! First, you’ll go to SeaGL’s OSEM and either create an account or log in to an account you have previously used. For those of you who have submitted before, this is the same system as the last several years.

Scroll down to the Call For Papers section, and “Submit your paper now” for your proposal, and then New Proposal. There you’ll input the Title, Talk Type (there is only one - 20m talk), and the Abstract, up to 500 words. Do not put your name or biography in your proposal. Repeated, do not put your name or your bio in your proposal. It is part of our Code of Practice that our initial review is unaware of who the submitter is, therefore any proposal which includes biographical information will be rejected. Your bio will be asked for later.

When you have submitted, you will be taken to a page called Proposals for SeaGL 2021, and you will see your own talk(s) listed there. This is where you will add your bio and the talk label (“track”). Please note, you will not receive an email confirming your proposed submission.

Finally, please find the plaintext link to our submission software here: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2021

Thank you!

Thank you!! Please email us or tweet at us with any questions! And don’t forget to Submit Early, Submit Often!

SeaGL 2021 stays virtual
June 08, 2021

Like many other conferences, the SeaGL staff has given a lot of thought to the format. After much discussion and consideration of the general landscape, we have decided that SeaGL 2021 will be a virtual event.

Last year’s first-ever virtual SeaGL was a great success, and we’re confident that we can deliver another delightful virtual experience this year! We loved how the remote format brought SeaGL to a wider audience, although we absolutely miss flocking together.

Seagulls are not particularly known for clairvoyance, and we didn’t feel as though we could predict what the pandemic situation will look like in early November. We are encouraged by the progress being made on vaccinations, but we understand that many people will still be hesitant to attend in-person events. We’re still holding open the idea of doing an in-person meetup for those of you in the Seattle area, but the conference proper will remain online in 2021.

Join us on the Internet, Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 2021!

We will be announcing the Call for Participation soon. In the meantime, we’re always looking for more help with planning the conference. Please reach out to participate@seagl.org if you’d like to help with a well-defined, well-supported volunteer role as we ramp up to this year’s conference organization. Many of our volunteers have been helping with the conference for years, so you’ll be joining an established team of people who care deeply about free software and community in equal measure!

SeaGL 2021: Year Nine!
March 29, 2021

Thank you so much for sticking with us through SeaGL 2020! We’ll be announcing more with videos and other content from last year soon, but the big announcement here is that we are gearing up for year NINE of SeaGL! SeaGL 2021 will be Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 2021!

We are very close to decided on doing another fully virtual conference, which genuinely exceeded the highest of any of our expectations, but depending on how vaccinations go, there may be some kind of hybrid option. This is undecided, but we are working on setting a date to decide by, not later than by summer 2021.

Please reach out if you’d like to help with a well-defined, well-supported volunteer role as we ramp up to this year’s conference, at participate@seagl.org. Many of the volunteers have been helping with the conference for many years, so you’ll be joining an established team of people who care about free software and community in equal measure!

Thank you & stay tuned!

SeaGL 2020: DAY 2!
November 14, 2020

Today is our second and FINAL day of SeaGL 2020! Here is the full SeaGL 2020 program, and please read on for today’s schedule, for Friday, November 13, 2020. As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual. SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.

You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.

Normal talk blocks are 30m - 20m for the talk, 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There are 15 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.

Please note that as of 6:30pm PST Friday Nov 13, a few of these have changed. Last minute schedule changes - it’s a wild world out there this year, but we can accommodate :)

All times are listed in Pacific Standard Time, which is UTC -08:00

  • 9:20am Opening announcements by Wm Salt Hale, Nathan Handler, and Rachel Kelly
  • 9:35am Keynote by Kathy Giori

10:00am-10:45am block

  • Cameron Bielstein - Building Free CI/CD with GitHub Actions
  • Elizabeth K. Joseph - Open Source on the Mainframe in 1960, 1999, and Today
  • Aeva Black - Crossing the Gender Divide

10:45am-11:30am block

  • Molly deBlanc - Introduction to Ethics from an Ethicist-in-Training
  • Justin W. Flory and Bhagyashree (Bee) - Time for Action: How to Build D&I in your Project
  • Bri Hatch - 10 Vim Tricks

11:30am-12:15pm block

  • Ask Me Anything (AMA) about Kubernetes with Elana Hashman!
  • Kara Sowles - Alcohol and Inclusivity in Tech

12:15pm-1:15pm block - go eat some lunch, come back at 1:15pm PST :)

1:15pm-2:00pm block

  • Deb Nicholson - Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other
  • Ian Kelling - When does a Service Take Away your Freedom?
  • Wm Salt Hale - Contacts to Connections: CRM Funneling for Projects and People

2:00pm-2:45pm block

  • Amanda Sopkin - The United States’ History with Free Software and what we can do to improve the Future
  • Aaron Wolf - Software Freedom through Collective Action
  • Lisha Sterling - Building Alternative Networks for Fun and Resistance

2:45pm-3:30pm is TeaGL! Bring the tea your TeaGL buddy sent you, and come enjoy the company of tea lovers even if you didn’t sign up for the Tea Swap!

3:30pm-4:15pm block

  • Paris Buttfield-Addison and Tim Nugent - First Steps with Swift for TensorFlow
  • Ben Cotton - Scheduling your Open Source Project
  • Nočnica Fee - Data Liberation: Open Source Observability

4:30pm Closing Keynote by VM Brasseur

6:00pm Closing Virtual Party!

If you have any questions about any of these, please pop into attend.seagl.org and we’ll get you set right up!

SeaGL 2020: DAY 1!
November 13, 2020

Today is the day! Day 1 of SeaGL begins today! Here is the full SeaGL 2020 program, and please read on for today’s schedule, for Friday, November 13, 2020. As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual. SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.

You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.

Normal talk blocks are 30m - 20m for the talk, 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There are 15 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.

All times are listed in Pacific Standard Time, which is UTC -08:00

  • 9:00am Opening announcements by Wm Salt Hale
  • 9:10am Keynote by Máirín Duffy
  • 9:35am Keynote by Daniel Takamori

10:00am-10:45am block

  • Mariatta Wijaya - Oops! I Became an Open Source Maintainer!
  • Mariah Villarreal - Rise Up for Free Software in Schools!
  • Neil McGovern - Patently Obvious

10:45am-11:30am block

  • Ruth Ikegah - A Beginner-Inclusive Approach to Open Source
  • Stephen Wilson - The Open Digital Photography Workflow
  • Nočnica Fee - Data Liberation: Open Source Observability

11:30am-12:15pm block

  • der.hans - FLOSS and you
  • Suraj Kumar Mahto - Introducing FOSS Culture at Universities
  • Gareth Greenaway - Open Source Secrets Management

12:15pm-1:15pm block - go eat some lunch, come back at 1:15pm PST :)

1:15pm-2:00pm block

  • Megan Guiney - Democratizing Documentation
  • Josh Boykin - Gaming for Good: Using Passions and Technology for Social Change
  • Mike Hamrick - Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator

2:00pm-2:45pm block

  • Jill Rouleau - Demystifying Contributor Culture: IRC, Mailing Lists, and Netiquette for the 21st Century
  • Elijah C. Voigt - Let’s Make Games with Rust

2:45pm-3:30pm is TeaGL! Bring the tea your TeaGL buddy sent you, and come enjoy the company of tea lovers even if you didn’t sign up for the Tea Swap!

3:30pm-4:15pm block

  • Sumana Harihareswara - Stand-up comedy about FLOSS
  • Kaylea Champion - How to build a zombie detector: Identifying software quality problems
  • Rowin Andruscavage - Overclocking for your Mind and Body

4:30pm and on - Cocktails and Mocktails Evening Social, as presented by Benjamin Mako Hill

If you have any questions about any of these, please pop into attend.seagl.org and we’ll get you set right up!

How To Attend Virtual SeaGL 2020
November 12, 2020

We are SO excited for the conference which begins TOMORROW! Since we’re fully online this year, let’s talk about actually HOW to get online to watch talks and have a super social experience in your conference-going.

The tl;dr here is that you can go to attend.seagl.org and enter your name. You will be added to the broader SeaGL hallway chat and be sent instructions for how to join specific chat rooms. To view a talk, enter one of the three track channels and click on the watch button to open an embedded live stream.

Description of how talks will be delivered

The speaker will be delivering their talk in a private video conference. They will be alone in the “room” aside from the volunteer moderator. Our tech team will direct that feed to a publicly facing URL when the talk begins. Attendees can chat with each other and watch the video at attend.seagl.org. At the conclusion of the talk, if the speaker wants a Question and Answer period, the room moderator will read questions from the audience in that track’s attend.seagl.org chat room, which the speaker will be able to answer. There will also be a volunteer chat moderator for each talk to monitor the space for potential problems. Our Code of Conduct applies in all of these virtual conference spaces, throughout the duration of the conference, and in all of our IRC channels before and after the conference. You can read more details about our tech stack in the blog post: The SeaGL Experience, Virtually Speaking!

How to view a talk

First, go to attend.seagl.org. Enter a name and/or handle that you are comfortable with. No registration is required, because we believe that people should not have to opt-out to anything resembling tracking to attend SeaGL. If the name you select is not available, another name will be automatically assigned. For users who already have their own IRC setups, you can log onto #seagl on irc.freenode.net, however, you do not need to be familiar with IRC in the least to attend SeaGL!

HTA attend.seagl.org

You’ll begin in a chat room called #seagl-hallway, a space where you can read announcements about upcoming talks and interact with other attendees. You will see a number of other channels which you can join, such as #seagl-track-1, 2, and 3, #seagl-helpdesk, and others. It will look something like this!

HTA attend.seagl.org

In the Track rooms, e.g. #seagl-track-1, #seagl-track-2, and #seagl-track-3, there will be a feed available throughout both days, playing a live stream of the talks. You can pull up the embedded video by hitting the yellow “watch” button at the top right. You will not be joining the video conference room itself, but your interaction and participation encouraged in the track chat room.

At the end of the talk, if the speaker chooses to take questions (some will not, and that is ok!), please add your question to the queue in chat. The moderator will relay questions on the video feed to the speaker. Please remember to form your question in such a way that it requires a question mark at the end - in other words, we want genuine questions asked in good faith, and are hoping to avoid “story time”-style announcements from the audience. Stories and anecdotes are for the talks, and questions are for answering by the speaker! The moderators have been trained to facilitate this, and will be very excited to pass on your real questions!

Each talk is 20 minutes. The speaker optionally has an additional 10 minutes for Q&A. That makes 30 minutes total, and adding fifteen minutes between talks, each slot lasts 45 minutes. After 30 minutes, the talk is entirely over and we will be depending on our amazing tech team to move the feeds around to the next speaker - each speaker has their own “room.” Please be aware that this means that after the time is up, it is truly up, unlike a physical space where a little dallying is part of the talks!

We know this is a lot of information! Remember, you can go to attend.seagl.org, enter your name, and get started - we’ll help you when you arrive! We cannot WAIT to see you. And remember, you can view the whole schedule here: SeaGL 2020 Schedule

SeaGL 2020 Social Soirees
November 11, 2020

This year, our theme is “OSI Layer 8: freeing the people” and we intend to provide an open and free space, despite being online. To that end, we’ve been working diligently to bring the strong social aspect our attendees expect to SeaGL in 2020.

As previously mentioned, our tech team has put together a website that features streaming video from the talks alongside Kiwi IRC, providing a web interface to our numerous text chat channels. They’ve also created a bot which helps orchestrate all of the potential social interactions we hope you help start.

A key feature we’ve tried to emulate is the “hallway track”. By asking the bot to create a channel, you can make visible spaces for like-minded folk to join you. Whatsmore, these rooms have a one-click on-demand video/voice option fully integrated utilizing Jitsi. Please feel encouraged to hop around, find your friends, and make some new connections.

Speaking of the hallway track, SeaGL depends on our sponsors to put on the conference. Make sure to drop by their “tables” and say thanks, especially to our platinum sponsors: Indeed, Amazon, and the Free Software Foundation.

Finally, below are a few of our scheduled social events. Please attend them, remembering that SeaGL’s primary focus and drive is on facilitating community interactions. We look forward to hearing whether our platform has taken a positive step in the direction of facilitating those interactions remotely!

Afternoon TeaGL Time

Friday & Saturday @ 14:45-15:15 PT (22:45-23:15 UTC)

While we don’t have an exhibitor hall to wander, there will still be afternoon #TeaGL! This year, as with everything else, we took our tea swap virtual. Missed the sign-up? Not to worry! Everyone will still be flocking together during the afternoon break. Bring along some miniature treats and a beverage to warm your beak before returning to the final talk block of the day of this Free as in Tea conference. (and psst, the bot may have a special surprise for sharing virtual tea…)

New to this year’s tea time: #TeaGLtoasts. Record a video beginning with your mug to the camera; pull back, take a sip, and cheers software freedom, then bring your mug back to the camera. We will be stitching all of the videos together and overlaying a variety of freely licensed tunes to send around the socials!

Friday Evening Cocktails and Mocktails Social

Friday, November 13th @ 16:30-18:00 PT (00:30-02:00 UTC)

One of last year’s keynotes, Benjamin Mako Hill will be re-mixing up a series of GNU/Linux themed cocktails. “The good news is that the source for the cocktails is available! The bad news is that you’ll have to compile these drinks yourself.”

Take a peak at the program listing and pick up the recommended ingredients to shake alongside. Non-alcoholic? No problem! An EtOH-free option is available. Either way, join in the Friday fun with your fellow feathered folk!

Saturday Night Participant Party

Saturday, November 14th @ 18:00-22:00 PT (02:00-06:00 UTC)

After the talks have ended, and we’ve all taken a bit of a break from the screen glow, an evening of fun is ahead. Our IRC Bot will be helping along the mixing and mingling. Start up a special interest “table” to talk around, utilizing the embedded on-demand Jitsi rooms. Join in on a scavenger hunt, kicking yourself for all of the quarantine cleaning that means not having that perfect find. Then, at 8pm PT, we will be splitting into randomly assigned teams for trivia hosted by none other than Bri Hatch, an every-year SeaGL supporter.

Grab your favorite beverages and finger foods, sign-in to attend.seagl.org, and join the #seagl-party!