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 8th & 9th, 2024 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.
Sign up for our low-traffic announcement mailing list or subscribe to our RSS news feed.
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.
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!
We’re excited to share that the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference is returning for its twelfth (12th) year on Friday, November 8th and Saturday November 9th, 2024.
Our in-person event will again take place in the Husky Union Building at the University of Washington and we are striving to provide a great experience for our remote attendees too (but we need your help, see below).
This year’s staff-selected theme is “Around the Clock” and we’ll be working around the clock to bring you the best SeaGL yet!
An internal goal this year, appropriate given the theme, is to clarify when each conference component needs to be ready.
To that end, we are currently planning on opening the CFP in May and our sponsorship prospectus should be available in March.
If you (or a friend) have ever wondered what it takes to put these things on, join us and find out!
We realize that our virtual experience last year suffered, in part due to being spread too thin with the return to in-person.
Hopefully more folks will join SeaGL’s all-volunteer staff, which is actively recruiting committee coordinators and helpers of all levels.
Not quite ready to volunteer? No problem! Please join our matrix community or low-traffic announcement list to stay in touch.
And send some suggestions about how SeaGL can be more IDEA (inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible) aligned.
As always, SeaGL couldn’t have come this far without our community and we want to thank each and every one of you.
It may be well over the horizon, but we are flying high and looking forward to seeing many of you on November 8th & 9th (if not before)!
Today marks the return of an in-person SeaGL!
Welcome to our eleventh year, SeaGL 2023!
There are a variety of details regarding how to attend, what’s on the schedule, and how you can help. Please take a moment to read and share!
How to Attend
You may have heard… this year SeaGL will be hybrid! The in-person event will take place on the University of Washington campus at the Husky Union Building (known as the HUB). We’ve created this page with maps and links to information about parking and the venue.
As the venue is located within a public university, it has a wide variety of accessibility and diversity features. However, if there are additional ones that are important to you, please suggest them in this IDEA form and we will see what accommodations can be made.
If you are planning to join remotely, visit attend.seagl.org and either create an ephemeral account or sign-in with your Matrix ID. You will be added to the broader SeaGL hallway chat and sent instructions for how to join specific chat rooms. To view a talk, enter one of the “Current Session” channels and click on the watch button to open an embedded live stream.
Code of Conduct + Health and Safety Policy
SeaGL, like free software, is for everyone. It’s paramount to us that all attendees feel (and be!) safe and welcome.
To that end 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 includes requiring masks inside presentation rooms and encouraging them in other areas. If you don’t have your own we are providing them gratis.
If you have any concerns that are at all of a Code of Conduct nature, please email coc AT seagl.org as soon as possible. If you need immediate help, please locate any SeaGL staffer.
Keynotes + Programming + Social Events
Each day of SeaGL will be packed full with two keynote speakers nominated by this year’s organizers followed by over 40 presentations selected by our program committee. Each afternoon we will have a tea break (TeaGL, described below) and each evening there will be a social event at the conference venue. On Friday there will also be a career expo where you can get assistance and advice on your professional development.
Some of the schedule highlights:
Friday
Saturday
Beverages and Snacks
Venue doors open at 8am each day and we’ll be providing coffee and tea with some light pre-packaged fare.
This year we will not be able to offer lunch, however, there is an excellent selection of eateries within walking distance of the HUB and on Friday there are various in-building options available.
We are also unable to provide a larger meal or drinks during the social events. That said, we will have individually packaged nibbles and finding a few feathered friends for later night food focused conversations is always fine!
Finally, the afternoon talks will be separate by a special event we like to call…
TeaGL: Tea Tasting and Exchange
If you’re a fan of tea, we’ve got just the event for you!
We’ll have a variety of grab-and-go teas, hot water, and disposable cups for those wanting to hold something warm while socializing.
However, for the patient and persistent, this year will feature a sampling of black, green, white, oolong, and pu-erh Chinese teas, as well as an herbal blend named “Lunar Orchard” that turns purple.
Additionally, if you’d like to bring your favorite teas along to sample and share, please do! But make sure they are in an unopened package to keep the venue satisfied.
We encourage people to get together, chat, and just generally share their SeaGL experiences. People are the best part of Free Software, after all.
If you share anything on your social network of choice, please use the #SeaGL2023 hashtag so everyone can follow along. If you use Mastodon, please follow @SeaGL@mastodon.social for announcements and updates.
Volunteering
Per usual, we are seeking volunteers to help make the event a success. 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.
- 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: keeps an eye on the Matrix channels, identifies content in need of moderation, reaches out to in-person staff as needed.
We also welcome up-and-coming volunteers for future years. If you’re interested in joining the flock, please fill out this form or reach out via Matrix or email.
Whew, that was a lot
There’s so much going on at this return to an in-person SeaGL and we can’t wait to see you there!
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