About
Founded in 2013, SeaGL (the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference) is a free—as in freedom and tea—grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free / libre / open source software, hardware, and culture.
SeaGL strives to be welcoming, enjoyable, and informative for professional technologists, newcomers, enthusiasts, and all other users of free software, regardless of their background knowledge; providing a space to bridge these experiences and strengthen the free software movement through mentorship, collaboration, and community.
When & where
October 23rd & 24th, 2026 at University of Washington and online.
Attend
SeaGL is free to attend, and registration is optional—just show up!
You may attend (and register for) SeaGL without identifying yourself, and you are encouraged to do so to protect your privacy.
If you do choose to register, which helps us estimate attendance, you may do so here.
All attendees must abide by the Code of Conduct, and if participating in-person, the Health and Safety Policy.
More details about how to attend can be found here.
Sign up for our low-traffic announcement mailing list or subscribe to our RSS news feed for updates from the SeaGL organizers.
Looking for a quick list of important pages? Discover and share our links list!
Welcome to the fourteenth year of our free—as in freedom and tea—grassroots technical summit!
Below are a variety of details regarding how to attend, what’s on the schedule, and where you can help. Please take a moment to read and share!
How to Attend
You can join us in-person on the University of Washington campus at the Husky Union Building (known as the HUB). Those not in Seattle, or otherwise occupied, are encouraged to participate remotely via Matrix.
As always, both options are free/gratis and registration is optional—just show up! However, we are once again providing an option to register without identifying yourself. This information helps us estimate attendance and focus our efforts.
Do note that all staff, presenters, and attendees of SeaGL are expected to obey the Code of Conduct not only at SeaGL but also in all SeaGL-associated spaces including but not limited to associated social events and virtual channels.
In-person attendees are also expected to obey the Health and Safety Policy for the duration of the conference. This policy requires wearing masks inside some but not all presentation rooms, which are clearly marked, and encourages them in other areas. If you don’t have your own we are providing them gratis.
Schedule
Each day of SeaGL will be packed full, with doors opening at 8am Pacific Time (PT) (15:00 UTC) and closing at 6pm PT (01:00 UTC). There will be two keynote presentation per day, starting at 9am PT (16:00 UTC) on Friday, 10/23 and at 5pm PT (00:00 UTC) on Saturday, 10/24.
For those attending in-person, there will be a tea break (TeaGL) each afternoon at 3:30pm PT in the Expo Hall. Saturday night’s social will begin with a screening of the new CultRepo documentary about KDE at 6:00pm PT, transitioning to Big Time Brewery & Alehouse - which is walking distance from the event - at 7:00pm PT. Unfortunately, we did not have the resources for an organized Friday evening event this year. If you want to organize something for a larger group, let us know and we’ll announce it.
Additional details can be found in the schedule.
Please note, the Saturday evening social has a capacity of approximately 80 people. If you find it too crowded, check-out the Hallway Matrix room to connect with other attendees who may be flocking to nearby venues.
We encourage everyone to get together, chat, and just generally share their SeaGL experiences. After all, people are the best part of Free Software.
If you share anything on your social network of choice, please use the #SeaGL2026 hashtag so everyone can follow along. You can also follow us on or for announcements and updates.
Volunteering
Don’t forget, SeaGL is a 100% volunteer run conference and we are always looking for more help! If you are interested in helping out during the event, stop by the information desk.
Here are some of the at-event positions we’re looking for more help with:
- Room Monitors: introduce speakers (with their permission), perform room head counts, make sure speakers have everything they need, and ensure sessions run smoothly and finish on time.
- Sign-Wranglers: post up and take down signs in and around venue.
- Chair-Stackers: help unstack chairs in the morning before the first talk and stack chairs at the end of the day after the last talk.
- Refreshment Aides: help with the set up, tear down, and clean up of coffee and tea breaks.
- Information Attendants: register attendees (if they want), check-in speakers and exhibitors, hand out programs, and provide directions and answers to questions.
- Virtual Hosts: keep an eye on the Matrix channels, identify content in need of moderation, reach out to in-person staff as needed.
We also love to welcome year-round volunteers who would like to continue helping out after the conference. If you’re interested in joining the flock, please reach out via Matrix or email, or fill out the volunteer form - we’d be thrilled to have you!
See You Soon
That’s all for now. We’re so excited for this year’s event, and we hope to see you at SeaGL today, tomorrow, and in the not-too-distant future!
A little squawk to get y’all checking your calendars 🗓️ and thinking about migrating north to Seattle on October 23rd and 24th! Keep an eye out — the full conference schedule will be released soon.
We’re so happy to announce 🥁 the keynote speakers for our 14th annual SeaGL conference!
This year’s lineup includes four keynotes: two morning sessions on Friday and two afternoon sessions on Saturday. True to SeaGL tradition, half of these spots are reserved for speakers who have plenty to share with the FLOSS community but may not have taken the keynote stage before.
Bradley M. Kühn
Bradley M. Kühn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). Kühn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992 — as an early adopter of Linux-based systems and a contributor to various FOSS projects, including Perl. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.
Kühn’s non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). As FSF’s Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kühn led FSF’s GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kühn began as SFC’s primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and became its first staff person in 2011. His work at SFC focuses on enforcement of GPL agreements, FOSS licensing policy, and non-profit infrastructural solutions for FOSS.
Kühn’s Master’s thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. He received the Open Source Award in 2012 and the Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2021 — both in recognition of his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing and enforcement.
Luis Felipe R. Murillo
Luis Felipe R. Murillo is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Across several research projects within and beyond the Global North, his work investigates how social movements and technoscientific experts design and implement common technologies as responses to pressing social, technical, and environmental concerns.
Grounded in long-term, collaborative ethnography, Dr. Murillo’s research examines how digital technologies are designed and implemented in response to pressing social, political, and environmental issues. Based on multi-sited research, his first book, Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures, is a study of the “alterglobalization of computing expertise” among hacker-activist collectives in the Pacific Rim.
Dr. Murillo’s current research and teaching span a wide range of topics in anthropology of science and technology, including the study of large-scale computing and its alternatives; the challenges of adopting and adapting “open technologies” for socio-environmental research; the production, circulation, and (re)appropriation of common software, hardware, and data; and, more recently, the role of language ideologies in the design and implementation of computational language models.
Mariatta Wijaya
Mariatta is a Python Core Developer, open source maintainer, and community leader with over 15 years of experience in software development. She is passionate about workflow improvements, automation, and building inclusive developer communities.
As a serial conference organizer, Mariatta has helped kickstart PyCascades and PyLadiesCon.
For her contributions to the Python open source community, she has received the Python Software Foundation Community Service Award, a Google Open Source Peer Bonus award, and is recognized as a Microsoft MVP. She also appears in the official Python Documentary.
Toby Betts
Toby Betts has been breaking and, when possible, fixing computers since childhood. He has worked as a system administrator, service engineer, site reliability engineer, incident response engineer, and free and open source software consultant for mid- to large-sized businesses for over 25 years. His main interests are system security, free cryptography, and fun file systems.
Toby has been a dedicated speaker at SeaGL for several years, regaling audiences with his excellent talks on TempleOS.
CFP Review Results
Thank you to everyone who submitted proposals! Our first round of acceptances have been sent out and most speakers have confirmed their attendance, but if you haven’t heard anything in a while, please reach out ASAP.
Coming to SeaGL? Want to let us know?
Attending SeaGL has always been free/gratis and registration is optional—just show up! However, last year we created a registration form to gather information without identification. This has been helpful when estimating our attendance numbers and attendee makeup. If you know that you’ll be coming and are comfortable, please consider filling out this year’s attendance form.
We Need You! Volunteer at SeaGL 2026
As an all-volunteer conference, SeaGL simply can’t happen without folks like you pitching in on the day of the event. We’re looking for volunteers to help with tasks like staffing the registration desk, running A/V for sessions, guiding attendees, and generally keeping the flock flying smoothly on October 23rd and 24th. No experience necessary — just a friendly attitude and a willingness to help! If you’re interested in lending a hand, fill out our volunteer application form, reach out to us on Matrix, or send an e-mail to participate@seagl.org. We’d love to have you join the team!
New Date: October 23rd and 24th
We have an important announcement to make, thank you for your attention. Due to an unexpected scheduling conflict with our venue, we are shifting our dates to ensure everything runs smoothly. The 14th annual SeaGL will be held at the University of Washington HUB on Friday & Saturday, October 23rd and 24th.
This is a big change, and trust us, we didn’t make the decision lightly. Given the reduced timeline, we’d like to remind everyone that SeaGL is entirely run by volunteers and we’d love to have you join the team!
CFP open through June 30th
First off, a big thank you to everyone who submitted proposals over the past month! We’ll be reaching out shortly to verify that you can still make it if accepted, given the new dates.
Now some good news: For those of you who missed the cut-off or are just hearing about SeaGL, do we have good news! We are re-opening the CFP and accepting proposals through the end of June. So please spread the word and send in those submissions!
Like any good open source project, SeaGL thrives on community contributions. Please share the news, brainstorm a topic you’re passionate about, and submit your proposals to help build this year’s schedule!
We need your help to make the 14th edition of SeaGL the best conference that it can possibly be! The SeaGL 2026 Call for Presentations (CfP) is now open, and we want to hear your talk ideas. You have until May 31, 2026 at 23:59 Pacific Daylight Time to submit. Please don’t delay; submit early, submit often!
We’re a small community-focused event which aims to bring together new and experienced open source hobbyists. Our audience includes university students, security professionals, software engineers, technical writers, and open source contributors across a wide range of disciplines.
We welcome introductions to free/libre/open (FLO) software, hardware, and tools, as well as more technical deep-dives. In addition to technical talks, we invite presentations on FLOSS alternatives to proprietary products, hacking for good, personal security and privacy, and open source in non-tech domains such as education and art.
We do not accept sponsored talks. If your company wants to get involved, you can find more information on our sponsorship page.
This year’s Program Committee is run by Dina Buric and Dawn Cooper.
Keynote nominations
We also need your help to find our 2026 keynote speakers! We have four keynote speakers each year, and have done since 2018. Two slots are reserved for people with previous keynote speaking experience. The other two slots are for first-time keynoters.
Our keynote speakers are generally well-known in the open source community. They may be involved with community organising, contribute to free software, or use open source products in innovative ways. If that sounds like you, or someone you know, please submit their name to our keynote suggestion form.
Once the submission form has closed for the year, our volunteers vote on the submitted names and send out invites to our top choices. If you want to be part of that process, please consider joining our volunteer team!
Spread the word
Don’t have a talk idea, but still want to help?
- Share our CfP at your workplace and in community groups. The more the merrier!
- If you know someone who might make a good keynote speaker, share their name with us.
- Tell your friends about SeaGL, and ask them to tell their friends!
- Distribute our flyers in shared spaces and on bulletin boards.
- Share our sponsorship page with projects and companies that may be interested in partnering with us.
SeaGL wouldn’t exist without our community, and we greatly appreciate your help in promoting our event.
Remember to submit early and often, and watch our blog for more updates. We hope to see you at SeaGL 2026!
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