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
November 7th & 8th, 2025 at University of Washington and online.
Attend
SeaGL is free to attend, and you do not need to register—just show up!
You may attend SeaGL without identifying yourself, and you are encouraged to do so to protect your privacy.
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.
Happy Friday the 13th! We are thrilled to announce our keynote speakers for the 13th Seattle GNU/Linux Conference:
Esther Jang
Esther is a newly graduated PhD turned postdoc in Computer Science at the University of Washington. She is the Director at the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Local Connectivity Lab (LCL). She founded the Seattle Community Network (SCN) in 2019, building DIY Internet infrastructure for digital equity. She has installed community networks in the US and around the world, and teaches technical networking at the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp (TBB).
Esther’s projects tend to center around DIY, empowerment, and pedagogy. For example- building communities of practice to sustain technical infrastructures, and vice versa.
Find more about Esther on:
Nadya Peek
Dr. Nadya Peek is an associate professor in the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington where she directs the Machine Agency. Her work focuses on unconventional digital fabrication tools, small scale automation, networked control systems, and advanced manufacturing. Spanning electronics, firmware, software, and mechanics, her research focuses on harnessing the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals.
Before joining the HCDE faculty in February 2018, Peek was a postdoctoral research scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. She is VP of the Open Source Hardware Association, half of the design studio James and the Giant Peek, and plays drum machines and synths in the band Construction.
Find more about Nadya on:
Evan Prodromou
Originally based in San Francisco, hacker and entrepreneur Evan Prodromou now lives in Montreal where he is the Director of Open Technology at Open Earth Foundation (https://openearth.org/), a non-profit organization that makes Open Source software to fight climate change. He leads a team of full-stack engineers, data engineers and AI apps engineers to make climate intelligence and climate action available to all cities.
A passionate advocate of Open Source and Open Content, Evan is best known for founding the Free travel guide project, Wikitravel. He is the Chair of the W3C Social Web Working Group and the author of ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web (O’Reilly Media). Evan has also been an active member of Open Source projects like MediaWiki, Freenet, and Debian GNU/Linux.
Find more about Evan on:
Allison Randal
Dr. Allison Randal is a free software and open hardware developer and strategist. She is chair of the board at Software Freedom Conservancy, board member at LLVM Foundation, governing board member at CHERI Alliance and OpenInfra Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group.
In the past three decades, she has served as president of Open Source Initiative, board chair at OpenInfra Foundation, president at Perl Foundation, board member at Python Software Foundation, board chair at Parrot Foundation, and technical architect of Ubuntu. She collaborates in the Debian, RISC-V, and CHERI projects, has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and currently works on Linux and open hardware at Capabilities Limited.
Find more about Allison on:
CfP extended thru June 30th
We are pleased to announce an extension of this year’s Call for Presentations! To ensure a broad and inclusive range of voices, we are keeping the submission portal open until June 30th.
If you’ve been considering submitting a talk, workshop, or performance, you now have a couple more weeks to send in your proposal! Please don’t delay; submit early, submit often!
Our Call for Presentations (CfP) has officially opened! As announced last week during the 25th LinuxFest Northwest, our CfP will remain open until June 15, 2025. Please don’t delay; submit early, submit often!
As a small community event, our attendees tend to be university students, open-source hobbyists, engineers, security professionals, technical writers, and more, with a focus on community rather than corporate involvement.
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.
Please note that we are not looking for sponsored talks. However, companies may review our sponsorship prospectus for details on how to participate through other means.
Updates for 2025
This year, we have updated one of our tracks. “Big Data and Machine Learning” felt somewhat outdated, so it has been split into two separate categories:
- Open Source AI and Data Science: Explore the interplay between AI, data, and free/libre/open-source licensing. This topic includes ML frameworks, data tools, MLOps solutions, or open datasets. We’re interested in everything from technical deep dives to big-picture perspectives.
- Cloud and Infrastructure: This category focuses on the systems that power computing environments. Topics include core infrastructure, both physical and virtual, such as servers, networks, and databases. It also covers cloud computing services, spanning everything from infrastructure and deployment to monitoring and telemetry.
For details on all our available tracks and to submit your application(s), please visit: https://seagl.org/cfp
Office Hours are back
SeaGL strives to be welcoming for first time (and veteran) speakers. Part of how we support this mission is by providing an opportunity for prospective speakers to receive real time assistance with their talks and/or CfP submissions.
Are you unsure which of your two talk ideas to submit (hint: submit both!)? Do you need help crafting an abstract for your talk? Or perhaps you are interested in adapting a talk you’ve presented before so that it fits SeaGL’s theme. We will have members of the SeaGL Programming & Flow Committee on hand to help answer these and any other questions you might have.
Office Hours will be taking place via chat on Matrix (#office-hours:seagl.org) at the following times throughout of CfP dates (this list will be updated if more windows open):
- Mondays, 6-7pm PT (Tuesdays 01:00-02:00 UTC)
If none of the office hours time slots fit your schedule, or if you prefer to interact asynchronously, please email your questions to cfp2025@seagl.org.
About Keynotes
We’ve had some question about the keynote selection process that begins much earlier in the year. To clarify, anyone can submit a nomination via this form which is open year-round. We encourage you to take a look and submit anyone you would like to see keynote at SeaGL next year!
Since 2018, we’ve had four spots available for keynoters. Two are reserved for experienced keynoters, notable individuals from academia or industry who have given keynotes before. The other two spots are for first-time keynoters, notable community members who have given talks in the past but have never had the opportunity to keynote.
Candidates are invited after the current staff volunteers participate in a STAR voting poll. If you want to be part of that process, consider joining our volunteer team!
Spread the word
Another way to help our community would be by getting the word out, about the CfP and SeaGL in general. If you have a bulletin board, lunchroom, or other shared space at your office or community spot, please consider distributing some of our fliers. Also, we are still looking for partners, both fiscal and community. If you think your workplace or project would be interested, please share our prospectus. All contributions toward promoting the event are greatly appreciated!
That’s all for this update. Thanks for reading, and remember to submit early and submit often!
We are thrilled to announce that last year’s conference videos are now available on the SeaGL Archive! They can also be accessed directly via our Internet Archive collection. This release marks a significant achievement for our volunteer-run organization, and we couldn’t be more excited to share these valuable resources with the free / libre / open source community.
As a volunteer-driven conference, we rely on the dedication and hard work of our team members. Sometimes this means that tasks take longer to complete than we’d like. In this case, we had a single person working tirelessly behind the scenes. We are extremely grateful for their efforts and appreciate your patience.
A special shout-out to the Internet Archive for hosting our video archives. Their platform has allowed us to share the vast wealth of knowledge created by our community, and for that, we are incredibly thankful.
Regrettably, we encountered some technical issues during last year’s conference which resulted in a couple of videos not being recorded properly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciate the understanding of our attendees and speakers.
We are committed to learning from these experiences and improving our processes. We’ve already begun addressing last year’s issues to ensure that all presentations are cleanly captured and made available for everyone to enjoy.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to announce that the Call for Presentations (CfP) for SeaGL 2025 will be opening soon. If you’re interested in sharing your knowledge and expertise with the FLO community, stay tuned for the CfP announcement. As usual, we welcome submissions from industry experts and enthusiasts alike. We can’t wait to see what exciting topics and ideas you’ll be sharing with us!
Once again, thank you to our volunteers, the Internet Archive, and everyone who attended SeaGL last year. Your support and participation are what make this conference possible, and we’re honored to be a part of such a thoughtful community!
As we shake off the winter chill and begin organizing this year’s conference, we wanted to share some things with the community.
New Theme
We’re excited to announce the theme for the 13th annual SeaGL: freedom is in the cards
Fliers Fly
The newest SeaGL handbill design has dropped and can be found here! You’re welcome and encouraged to share it around, whether in the printed or posted form. And keep an eye out at SCaLE (the Southern California Linux Expo), hosted this weekend in Pasadena, for the first in-person batch!
Newest Social Stand
It has been great to see so many people leaving walled garden social media networks lately! While we will continue to cross-post in an effort to reach those who are left, we’ve added a new network to our quiver: Bluesky
This network has grown quite a bit with the recent migration. It is built on top of the AT Protocol, an open source, open standard.
Our website will still be the primary place to look for all things SeaGL related, but we hope to keep the various social media profiles up-to-date. Please follow us and share what you see!
Keynote Nominations
One of the many things that sets SeaGL apart from other conferences is that the community helps us select our keynote speakers. In prior years we’ve asked for suggestions over a two-week period, but moving forward we’ll keep the form open year-round.
Nominees need not have prior keynote experience; we are interested in both new and veteran presenters. In fact, since 2018, we’ve been reserving half of our keynote slots to amplify the voices of speakers who may be presenting on the main stage for the first time.
While you are welcome to nominate yourself, we encourage you to take some time to think about people you have seen present, who you think have an important message to share. If they have been doing exciting work in the Free / Libre / Open (FLO) community, we want to know about them!
We challenge you to think about people who:
- Have done work to empower others and challenge social norms
- You go out of your way to read all of their Open Source posts on social media
- Might only have a small following, but are doing amazing work in their own little corner
- Are always tinkering with new and exciting projects that inspire others to try new things
- Are slowly, but steadily, working to make the FLO community and world a better place, for everyone
Submissions are anonymous and the form is open, so nominate someone today!
Volunteering
As always, we want to remind folks that SeaGL is an all-volunteer effort. Visit the get involved page for more details about how you can help!
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