Hi everyone, we’d like to give an estimation of what comes for SeaGL during the global pandemic. We are keeping a close eye on it and it may come to pass that we’ll have to postpone or cancel SeaGL 2020, as so many conferences, like our sister conference Linux Fest Northwest, have had to do.
We will give several months’ notice in the event we have to cancel.
However, we’re not ready to make that call yet. We will have more details soon, and we’re also working on a potential virtual solution in the event that it’s not safe to congregate (as it is unsafe to do so now, 20 March). In short, we’re working on an alternate plan, potentially multiple alternate plans. We’ll have more plans as the situation unfolds.
Until then, please take care of each other, check in, safely, with your neighbors, drink lots of water, and check if your favorite restaurant will do a curbside pickup!
Hello and welcome to 2020! First, a bit of housekeeping. We have confirmed dates for this fall (OUR EIGHTH YEAR!!!) and those dates are November 13 & 14 2020. SeaGL (the Seattle GNU/Linux conference) is Seattle’s grassroots free/libre/open source software, hardware, and culture summit. Founded in 2013, SeaGL now features over 50 talks, four keynotes, and the Cascadia Community Builder Award each year. Join speakers and participants from around the world for Seattle’s FREE, as in freedom and coffee, GNU/Linux conference.
If you would like to help with this entirely volunteer-run, no-profit conference, please email us at participate@seagl.org and we’ll get talking soon about the details for the coming year’s conference.
Please find within our long-awaited videos of 2019’s fabulous keynotes, who were in no order, Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, Benjamin Mako Hill, Sage Sharp, and finally, Lisha Sterling!
Abigail’s keynote described a view into stewarding open source communities with a lens on learning and open leadership and open organizational design. Open By Design
Benjamin’s keynote describes a shift from open source tools to private organizations profiting from the community and technical work done over decades. How Markets Co-opted Free Software’s most Valuable Weapon (Note: Video is from a different event, but contains similar content with a higher production value)
Sage describes how to counter imposter syndrome on a cultural and systematic level, and the importance of including the very community members who need this support most. Countering Imposter Syndrome Culture
Lisha describes some of her work with Geeks Without Bounds and the limiting factor of corporate expression of power, pitted against activism, unions, and social justice. The Cost Of Freedom
Stay tuned this week for the next blog post on all recorded talks!
At SeaGL this year (starting in TWO DAYS!!) we are so excited to welcome Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler from the Software Freedom Conservancy! They’ll be recording a live audio podcast and taking a few questions from the audience. In advance of their podcast recording, they’ve answered a few questions for us to get us all EXCITED for the live recording of Free as in Freedom, which you can attend Saturday at 3:45pm in room 3183!
What can folks expect from this episode of your podcast?
Karen and I have been doing our podcast, Free as in Freedom, semi-regularly since 2010 – nearly ten years! This will be our very first live episode. We hope to interact with the crowd and get questions from everyone.
We encourage folks who haven’t heard our show before to listen to a few episodes by visiting faif.us and get a sense of our podcast. We’ll be accepting written questions ahead of the show (find me and Karen for index cards to give us questions!), as well as questions from the audience during the show.
We do the podcast because there are very few podcasts that do in-depth discussion of policy issues around software freedom. This is the primary area we work in, so we try to make a show that can get deep into issues and consider the complex topics that face Free Software today.
What do smaller conferences (like SeaGL!) offer for FLOSS communities?
We’ve made a commitment to send a large part of Conservancy’s staff (the two of us, plus Deb Nicholson) to SeaGL because even though it’s small conference, SeaGL and events like it are exactly the types of events we need more of to promote software freedom.
These events are run by the community for individuals, not by big corporate interests. That means that there is no corporate agenda: the goal is to help attendees learn more about software freedom and become a part of the community using that software. We really appreciate the efforts of all the organizers to make this conference a success.
That said, what’s your favorite mid to large size open source conference and why?
FOSDEM is the obvious answer, because it is by far the largest run FOSS conference in history. With more than 4,000 attendees each year, FOSDEM is the main event each year, and it’s amazingly run by all volunteers! So, FOSDEM is what a community conference can become as it grows. While we wouldn’t expect SeaGL and other events to grow to this amazing size –
FOSDEM is really unique – but we’re really glad for any event run by volunteers rather than companies and trade associations.
What’s a FLOSS project under the Software Freedom Conservancy that deserves more attention?
Some of our most essential work is Conservancy’s GPL enforcement work – whereby we work with many projects including Linux, BusyBox, Samba, Inkscape and others – to assure compliance with the GPL family of licenses. Particularly with regard to small Linux-based devices, we see an overwhelming need for a watchdog organization that assures the software freedom guaranteed under copyleft licenses like GPL. Conservancy is one of the very few organizations that focuses on the rights of users who receive these devices. We fundamentally believe that the next generation of inventive activities with FOSS will come from people using the source code of their devices to do new and interesting things with those devices. By assuring GPL compliance, we put the tools in the hands of the next generation of hacktivists who want to build community-oriented software.
Thanks Karen and Bradley!! See you Saturday at 3:45pm in room 3183!
