Office Hours for SeaGL CFP 2019
July 08, 2019
Several years ago, the Program Committee began CFP Office Hours. This has been successful, in fact so successful that we now see other conferences offering them. So this year, we’ll be offering office hours on the schedule of every Wednesday from 12pm-1pm Pacific time, until the CFP closes August 11. We’ll also do a special session the night that the CFP closes. We’d love to see you! We believe strongly in supporting new voices, and whether you need topic ideas or how to wrangle the central argument of your talk, we’re here to help. And lots of us are on the channel much of the time besides, so come say hi!
We use IRC for all our SeaGL communication, and we’re at #seagl on freenode. You may also reach the CFP mentors by email at cfp-help@seagl.org. If you would like more information, read on!
If you haven’t used IRC before, no sweat. Just click here for the browser chat version of the channel, choose a nickname, and you’ll be in! If you’d like to learn more, SeaGL Organizer Vicky Brasseur has written a quickstart guide on opensource.com on how to get started with your own nickname (“nick”).
Program Committee Code of Practice
June 25, 2019
The Program Committee is the group responsibile for choosing and scheduling all of the great talks you enjoy at SeaGL. This year the committee steering the Program consists of:
- Wm Salt Hale
- Nathan Handler
- Rachel Kelly
- Deb Nicholson
- Georgia Reh
- Lucy Wyman
Code of Practice
This is what we believe in and how we operate as we go about our business of building the best possible program and schedule for SeaGL.
As members of the SeaGL program committee and proposal reviewers, aside from the SeaGL Code of Conduct, we also agree to operate according to these values and statements:
Values
We believe in the importance and power of free and open source software.
We believe in putting the needs of our audience and our community before our needs or those of our employers.
We believe in boosting the voices of others above our own.
We believe in mentoring and helping to create the speakers, leaders, and contributors of the future.
We believe in supporting diversity in thoughts and experiences in the talks and speakers we select for SeaGL.
We believe in creating and protecting a SeaGL environment that welcomes all people in safety and comfort.
But what does that mean? Like, practically?
How are these values reflected in how we operate as program committee members and reviewers? There could be many different ways, obviously, but here are some examples of what we will do our best to do:
- Promote the CFP to all our communities.
- Seek out unreached/underrepresented/underserved communities and help them to propose talks.
- As time allows, assist people with their proposals, making it easy for them to propose and what they propose a higher quality.
- Do our best to do all initial reviews blind, within the non-blind constraints of the system.
- Only vote on talks we feel qualified to review.
- Abstain from voting on talks where we made substantial contributions to the the proposal (but we can advocate during the review call).
- As much as possible, don’t allow our personal or professional biases (or those of our employer) to influence our talk reviews.
- After proposals are accepted, and as time allows, assist people with their talks to help ensure that what they deliver is valuable to the audience.
We’re all pleased to have the opportunity to serve the SeaGL community and share this Code of Practice with you. It’s our hope that we can serve as a model for other free and open source events, who can publish their own Codes of Practice.
To help with that, don’t forget that everything published here on the SeaGL website is licensed CC BY-SA. We encourage you to copy, modify, and redistribute this Code of Practice however you and your event need.
The 2019 SeaGL CFP is open for business!
June 25, 2019
Calling all speakers or speakers-to-be! Our 2019 Call for Proposals is open!
We are currently doing weekly proposal review/feedback sessions as well as email proposal review and feedback. Please bring us your talk ideas and proposals and we’ll help you polish them before you submit them to the CFP. See the Help and mentoring for your proposals section for more information.
SeaGL is dedicated to supporting newer speakers. We welcome speakers of all backgrounds and levels of experience – even if you’ve never spoken at a technical conference. If you’re excited about Free/Libre/Open technologies or communities, then we want to hear from you!
Because we’re a community-focused event based in Seattle, we’re particularly interested in hearing from new and experienced speakers from the Seattle and Pacific Northwest region, but we welcome proposals from anyone no matter where you’re based.
Here’s what we cover in this CFP announcement. We know it’s rather a lot, so you can click to jump to the section you need (but we encourage you to read it all through at least once).
- CFP dates
- Audience profile
- Talk formats
- Talk categories (aka Tracks)
- Topic ideas
- PLEASE don’t do this…
- How To Submit
- Proposal and public speaking resources
- Help and mentoring for your proposals
- Speaker travel support
- Code of Conduct
- Code of Practice
- Click here to propose a talk
CFP dates
- CFP Opens: June 24th, 2019
- CFP Closes: August 11th, 2019 - Midnight PDT
- Speaker Notifications: September 15th, 2019
- Schedule Published: October 8th, 2019
- SeaGL!: November 15-16, 2019
Audience profile
SeaGL is honored to be hosted by Seattle Central College. Because our event occurs partly during their school week, we have not one but two audiences. Both audiences are present both days of the event, but each day has a larger proportion of one type of audience member:
- Friday: School is in session on this day, so many of our attendees are community college students. We try to schedule more “Free/open source 101” type talks on this day to help the students get a firm grounding in FOSS and its technologies.
- Saturday: Weekend! We have fewer students on this day and more professionals and hobbyists. This audience is more familiar with technology in general and often is looking for more advanced talks or introductory talks on more advanced topics.
Talk formats
Like the last few years, in 2019 SeaGL is looking for talks in two formats:
- 20 minutes: Introduce the audience to a new technology, concept, or just recap an older idea which you think is really neat.
- 50 minutes: Go more in depth! Do a demo! This is your chance to really educate the audience about something you enjoy.
Both of these time slots include the Q&A time. Please time your presentations accordingly. We suggest aiming for a 15 minute presentation for the 20 minute time slot and for 40-45 minutes for the 50 minute time slot, but as the speaker the final presentation time is up to you (as long as you don’t exceed your time slot).
We do not have workshop (60+ minute) slots available at SeaGL and will not be opening any. Please do not propose talks that cannot be presented well within the two time slot options above.
Talk categories (aka Tracks)
SeaGL doesn’t do “tracks” like many other conferences do, but we do use tracks to make sure we have a nice balance of subjects covered during the event. Think of them more like categories than tracks in the traditional tech conference sense. This year you can select from one of the following categories when creating your proposal:
- Data/AI/ML
- Design/UI/UX/Accessibility
- Documentation
- Education
- Hardware/IoT
- Legal/Licensing
- People
- Programming
- Security/InfoSec
- Something different
- Systems/Ops
Don’t worry if your talk isn’t a snug fit with any of these categories. It’s not a problem and we don’t mind at all. Just pick the one that’s the closest fit, and if nothing else please do use the Something different category.
Topic ideas
Not sure what to propose? Here are some ideas!
- How to get involved in free and open source software
- DevOps, system administration, infrastructure, CI/CD
- Career tips and strategies
- Web development tools and techniques
- Policy and licensing affecting free and open source software use or development
- Hardware, embedded Linux, or the Internet of Things
- The cloud and other distributed services
- Building free and open source communities
- Using free software at home, work, or school
- Security and privacy online
- Writing testable code, and testing in general
- Effective documentation patterns and strategies
- Free and open software on non-GNU/Linux platforms (Windows, macOS)
- Anything else that you think would be interesting to new or seasoned Free/Libre/Open source fans!
PLEASE don’t do this…
Our conference software doesn’t currently support concealed reviews (where the reviewers can’t see who proposed a talk), but we do the best we can to review everything concealed anyway.
Because of that, DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME IN YOUR ABSTRACT.
Your name is for your bio, not for your abstract. If you include your name in your abstract, you are at risk of having your proposal voted down and not accepted.
We really can’t stress this enough. Don’t do this. Really.
How to submit
First, Click here to propose a talk. This screen will ask you for your name, the title of your talk, and an abstract. The abstract needs to be less than 500 words. Indicate whether or not this is your first time speaking, and/or if you identify as a member of a group historically underrepresented at techinical conferences.
Then, you’ll hit submit. Notice that there is now a link asking for you to Complete Your Proposal. At this link, you can add Track and Difficulty, and edit any of the other fields that you have already filled.
Proposal and public speaking resources
Never presented at a conference or meetup before? Presented but still not feeling confident? It’s OK, even the most experienced conference presenters aren’t necessarily confident at this stuff.
VM Brasseur’s Public_Speaking repository has collected a lot of resources to help you level up in your conference presenting.
Pay particular attention to the Proposing talks section of this page. Follow these tips and your talk proposals will stand a better chance of being selected.
PLEASE NOTE: Whether your talk is accepted or not often doesn’t have as much to do with how great your proposal is as it does with how many speaking slots the conference has available and the balance of the program the organisers need to craft. It’s nothing personal: we just don’t have enough time to accept all the great talk proposals we receive.
Don’t let that stop you from proposing! You can’t win a race you don’t even run, so click here to propose a talk.
Help and mentoring for your proposals
Want to propose a talk but want feedback on your idea, proposal wording, talk title or just on how to deal with nerves? The speaker committee is running CFP office hours during the CFP. We’ll do everything possible to help you be successful with your proposal and presenatation. Office hour times to come shortly, probably a time or two on a regular schedule each week.
All office hours are held in the #seagl IRC channel on Freenode IRC. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with IRC. Just click here for the webchat, choose a nickname, and you’re good to go!
If you’d like assistance outside of the office hours, please email us at cfp-help@seagl.org. We welcome all questions that arrive between June 4th and July 29th.
Speaker travel support
As SeaGL is a free to attend community-oriented and -organized conference, we regret that we are unable to help with the cost of travel and accommodation for speakers at this time.
Code of Conduct
All speakers and attendees of SeaGL must agree and adhere to the Code of Conduct for the safety and enjoyment of all organizers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees. We ask that all prospective speakers review and confirm their willingness to abide by the Code of Conduct terms and expectations when interacting within SeaGL community spaces.
Code of Practice
All members of the SeaGL Program Committee have agreed to operate according to our Code of Practice.
No, really, click here to propose a talk. Please. We want to hear from you!
Keynote Videos for SeaGL 2018
January 21, 2019
We’re very happy to announce that we’ve posted the videos for the four excellent keynote presentations that we featured at SeaGL 2018:
And, as an extra bonus, we even have a video of the presentation of the 2018 Cascadia Community Builder Award to Don Sheu.
Thank you, everyone, for making SeaGL 2018 amazing. We’ll be starting work soon on SeaGL 2019. If you’re interested in helping with SeaGL 2019, we’d love for you to join us.
Older News
About
The 2019 Seattle GNU/Linux Conference is scheduled for November 15th and 16th at Seattle Central College (Maps). 9am-5:30pm both days.
SeaGL is a grassroots technical conference dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free/libre/open-source software/hardware. Our goal for SeaGL is to produce an event which is as enjoyable and informative for those who spend their days maintaining hundreds of servers as it is for a student who has only just started exploring technology options. SeaGL's first year was 2013. The SeaGL web site is built with Jekyll and we use OSEM for event management.
The cost of attendance is free.
Attendee Registration will not require the use of non-free software.
You may attend SeaGL without identifying yourself, and you are encouraged to do so to protect your privacy.
Contact
IRC
Social Media
participate@seagl.org | press@seagl.org
or join the announcement mailing list.
Exhibitors
We will have a small hall available for exhibitors. Free tables will be available for free/libre/open-source software/hardware and non-profit organizations, and there are several sponsorship levels for everyone else. If your organization would like an exhibit table at SeaGL, please send an email to sponsor@seagl.org for our vendor prospectus.
Exhibitor space is limited, please contact us right away if you are interested in a table.
Sponsorship
We can't do what we need to do without the support of the community. If you would like to offer financial support but don't need an exhibit table, please send an email to sponsor@seagl.org.
Donate now
Our fiscal sponsor, Free Software Foundation, set up a donation page to support SeaGL. It accepts credit card or PayPal and provides instructions for donating via check or Bitcoin. Thank you for your support!
SeaGL is dedicated to a harassment-free conference experience for
everyone.
Our code of conduct can be found
here