IDEA Feedback and Participation
October 08, 2024

Our twelfth annual conference is just a few weeks away! This year, we are continuing with the hybrid in-person/virtual format, offering remote participation options throughout the event.

Last year, we reached out to our community through the post, IDEA Sharing at SeaGL, seeking insights on how to make our event more inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible (IDEA). We extend our heartfelt thanks to all who responded, participated, and contributed to making the conference more welcoming to everyone.

One significant change we have made this year is the promotion of pronoun visibility within our community. We have incorporated a pronoun field into our speaker proposals, which has been well-received. From the responses we discovered, 12.5% of our speakers identify as they/them, 15% as she/her, 37.5% as he/him and 35% preferred not to disclose. This is a small but meaningful step toward ensuring that all voices are heard and respected.

We recognize that fostering an inclusive environment is an ongoing process. Your feedback is important in helping us make continuous improvements. If you have suggestions on how we can further enhance inclusivity and accessibility, especially for underrepresented groups, we encourage you to share your suggestions in our anonymous feedback form. If you would like to discuss your feedback in more detail, there is an option to provide your contact information, and we would be happy to follow up with you.

Our goal is to make this event not only accommodating for those already established in the tech community, but to also welcome and provide space for those individuals who feel they are on the outside looking in. If you know someone who could benefit from attending or participating, we encourage you to share this opportunity with them. Personal invitations often have a profound impact, and can reach a wider audience.

Some ways to get involved include:

• Attend the conference on November 8th and 9th, either in-person or remotely.
• Share the event with your networks and encourage others to participate.
• Volunteer to help shape the event and its programming by signing up at https://seagl.org/get_involved.

For those attending in person, please be advised that our Code of Conduct and Health & Safety Policy will be in effect to ensure a safe environment for all.

Last but certainly not least, cheers to Google for joining our IDEA sponsors this year, we’re so grateful for your support!

Regards,
The SeaGL 2024 IDEA committee

Announcing Keynote speakers for SeaGL2024!
October 03, 2024

We are very pleased to announce our 2024 Seattle GNU/Linux conference keynote speakers:

Christopher Neugebauer

Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organizer, who presently lives in the United States.

He serves as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, and is co-organizer of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in unusual venues — include an old vaudeville theater, and more recently a barn on a farm — in Petaluma, California.

Christopher is also a contributor on the open source Pants build system, helping make Python’s testing, correctness, and style tools accessible and fast for developers, no matter how big their codebase.

Find more about Christopher on:

• Website: https://chrisjrn.com/
• Fediverse/Mastodon: @chrisjrn@social.coop

Duane O’Brien

Duane is the Director of Collaborative Engineering at Capital One. His organization focuses on developing internal and external collaborative development practices through open source and InnerSource. He is the creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund framework, and loves helping organizations get involved in funding and sustaining their open source dependencies. Duane is a force of chaotic good using his high stats in intelligence and charisma to advocate for the open source community. If you encounter him in forested areas, he will share his fire, drink, and philosophy.

Find more about Duane on:

• Website: https://www.duaneobrien.com/
• Fediverse/Mastodon: @duane@hachyderm.io

Aaron Wolf

First time keynote speaker, Aaron is a community music teacher, co-founder of Snowdrift.coop (a long-struggling and principled platform working to solve economic coordination dilemmas around FLO public goods), and an activist and volunteer in many other areas. Originally from Ann Arbor, MI; he now lives in Oregon City with his wife, dog, and two kids.

Find more about Aaron on:

• Website: https://wolftune.com
• Fediverse/Mastodon: @wolftune@social.coop

Rachel Kelly

Rachel is a long-time nerd and denizen of the internet, learning to form community without social media! A proud career-switcher, she has worked for tech companies small and large since 2014 and has been happily plugging away at Fastly for the last several years as an SRE on the Certificate Authority project. A staunch advocate of community and locality, Rachel now uses skills learned from many years of co-organizing Portland’s PyLadies chapter and participating in many community-oriented technology user groups toward something completely different. She and her partner live in Portland, OR, going to too many Burning Man events (not possible) and training for simply too many races of all kinds (also not possible). You can reach Rachel at her email, rkrk@rkode.com.

Find more about Rachel on:

• Website: https://rkode.com/

SeaGL 2024 Call For Proposals
June 03, 2024

The awaited time has arrived, the SeaGL 2024 Call-for-Presentations is now open!

How to submit

Firstly, we’ve migrated to a new CfP system this year, from OSEM to Pretalx.

Simply go to the new submission portal and create a new account. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click Submit a proposal. Then just follow the steps indicated. You will be able save a draft and come back to it when you are ready to submit.

What are we looking for

We like to see specific introductions to open-source software, hardware, and tools, as well as technical deep-dives. Outside of technical talks, we welcome talks on FLOSS alternatives to big tech companies’ products, hacking for good, personal security and privacy, and open-source in non-tech domains such as education and art.

We’re accepting both 20-minute and 50-minute talks from in-person and virtual presenters. We welcome uncommonly heard perspectives and like to watch presenters get out of their comfort zone to apply lessons across technical disciplines. We also want to see submissions from first-time speakers and members of under-represented groups in tech.

**We are not looking for sponsored talks**; but you can take a look at our Sponsorship Prospectus for details on how 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 looking for talks related to open-source which fall broadly into the ten categories below. We’ve added examples of past talks for each to give you an idea of what we might be looking for.

If you have a great idea for a talk on open-source which doesn’t fit into these categories, then submit it under ‘Everything Else’.

• Community and Culture: Open-source hardware and software wouldn’t exist without the communities that build and maintain it. This category covers the open-source community and tech communities in general, as well as the cultural aspects of working with technology.
• Education: This category covers both the use of open-source software in education and technical education in general, from elementary school to university.
• Hardware: This category is for adventures in open-source hardware, whether it be about building your own or developing on top of projects created by others.
• Languages and Tools: This category is all about the languages and tools that we use in our day-to-day work. It covers everything from shell scripting to open-source languages such as Rust and Python, as well as tools built for the open-source ecosystem.
• Machine Learning and Big Data: Data isn’t just the domain of large tech companies. From open-source tools for machine learning to data management strategies, this category covers everything related to machine learning and big data.
• Open Source Careers: If you want to talk about building a career in open-source technology, or leveraging your experience with FLOSS communities in a work context, you’ve come to the right place. We welcome discussions on how FLOSS can benefit everyone from a career point of view.
• Performance Art: This category encompasses both performance art about the tech community, and art projects which are supported by open-source software. From stand-up comedy to generative art to knitting with software, we would love to see what you can come up with!
• Security and Privacy: Open-source communities have been at the forefront of security and privacy for many years. As well as securing your tech stack, talks in this category will look at the human side of security, and the privacy impacts of today’s tech ecosystem.
• Systems and Platforms: How does old-school systems administration fit into the IT industry of today? What do we need to do to run platform teams using open-source software? This category covers everything related to the systems and platforms on which we build, from systems architecture to DevOps to CI/CD.
• Everything Else: Have a great talk that doesn’t fit these categories? Submit it here!

What we expect from speakers

The SeaGL Code of Conduct and Health & Safety Policy applies to staff, presenters, volunteers, attendees, and sponsors alike. The content of your presentation, and your behaviour at the conference, must abide by both the Code of Conduct and Health & Safety Policy.

To present at SeaGL, you’ll need to be able to do one of the following:

• be in Seattle on November 8th or 9th to present live;
• or, be available to present via live-streaming on November 8th and 9th, with a required technical check a week before.

Office Hours

SeaGL pioneered the idea of CfP Office Hours, so stay tuned for details. If you need help in the meantime, please email us at cfp-help@seagl.org, or join the General Discussion room in SeaGL’s Matrix space.

Deadline

You can enter proposals until 2024-06-30 23:59 (UTC) Extended until 2024-08-05 23:59 (UTC) 2024-07-14 23:59 (UTC).

About expenses

SeaGL is an annual community-focused Free/Libre/Open-Source event in Seattle. Since 2020, we also broadcast all over the world virtually! We’re an independent bunch, but we still like to take care of each other. However, as a grassroots community conference, we are not able to pay travel or lodging expenses for speakers.

Call for SeaGL Committee Volunteers
March 19, 2024

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!