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!
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!
SeaGL 2026 is coming together nicely, and we have a handful of exciting updates to share with the community! 🎉
Help us choose our keynote speakers
🔑 Keynote speakers are a vital part of our conference and we’d love the SeaGL community’s help finding voices to highlight on the main stage! If you’re an attendee, past speaker, volunteer, or simply someone who cares about free/libre/open values, we’d really appreciate your suggestion of someone who would make a meaningful and inspiring keynote speaker at an upcoming SeaGL.
Consider nominating people whose work you admire, who have engaged in advocacy that has made a difference, or those that hold a perspective you think would challenge and energize an audience of free and open source enthusiasts.
Note that we reserve two of the four keynote positions for those who rarely, if ever, have been invited to the main stage. Nominees do not need to be widely known; they just need to have a passion that they want to share with the FLOSS community and a connection to the values that SeaGL is built on.
Please fill out our Keynote Nomination Form to submit your suggestions today!
Although this form is open year-round, the SeaGL organizing team will be considering all nominations submitted by April 26th for this year’s event. 🗓️
Find us at LinuxFest Northwest
🐧 The SeaGL team will be on the ground with a booth at LinuxFest Northwest on April 25 & 26. If you are there too, please stop by and give us a squak!
This is an excellent opportunity to meet some of the people who bring SeaGL together year after year. Feel encouraged to ask questions about how the conference works, find out how to get involved, or simply spend a few minutes talking about the free/libre and open source tools we all care about.
Community events like LinuxFest Northwest are a big part of what keeps the FLOSS ecosystem vibrant, and we are glad to be a part of it. 💚
Call for Proposals opens April 24th
📢 If you have a talk, workshop, or session idea that you have been sitting on, now is the time to dust it off and polish it up: the SeaGL 2026 Call for Proposals opens on April 24th!
SeaGL welcomes speakers at every level of experience, from folks sharing something publicly for the very first time to seasoned presenters with years of stage time behind them. If you have something to share, we want to see your proposal.
Full details about the CfP process, including topics, formats, and submission guidelines, will be shared when it launches. We encourage you to start thinking about what you know, what you are passionate about, and what you think the SeaGL community would benefit from hearing. We cannot wait to see what you submit! 🚀
Keep in touch
🫂 There is plenty more news on the way as SeaGL 2026 takes shape. Follow us on social media and keep an eye on our website for updates on the CfP, the program, and everything else we have in store for our community.
If you are interested in volunteering or getting more involved with the organizing effort, visit our Get Involved page or fill out our Volunteer Application Form. We’d love to have you join the gullery!
As always, thank you for being part of what makes SeaGL a welcoming space that bridges experiences and strengthens the free software movement! 🐦
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