One of the ways SeaGL supports first-time speakers is by holding CfP office hours.
If you have questions about the Call for Proposals process or want feedback on your talk proposal, you can join us in chat at chat.seagl.org or on video on:
- Sun Aug 1, 3pm PDT
- Tues Aug 3, 5:30pm PDT
- Sat Aug 7, 3pm PDT
We’d love to see you, whether you’re making your first conference proposal or you’re an experienced speaker!
Whether you need topic ideas or want help wrangling the central argument of your talk, we’re here to help.
We’ll also have some prepared topics for each session.
If you can’t make the office hours, email your questions to cfp-help@seagl.org any time.
And many of us are on the channel much of the time besides, so come say hi!
We’re in #SeaGL on Libera.Chat and #SeaGL:seattlematrix.org on Matrix.
The rooms are bridged, so join us on the network and client of your choice.
If you haven’t used IRC before, no sweat.
Join in the browser chat version of the channel, choose a nickname, and you’ll be in!
Welcome to the 2021 SeaGL Call For Proposals! Every year, we want to hear from YOU, and we’re always looking for speakers who are traditionally underrepresented in tech, and people with perspectives uncommonly heard, as well as first-time speakers. Because we’re virtual for the second year in a row, there is opportunity for speakers anywhere in the world to submit talks! In 2020, we had talks from four continents!! So let’s take advantage of our virtual closeness for another year.
Details
CfP Open: Thursday 24 June 2021
CfP Close: Thursday 5 August 2021
Acceptances: Early September 2021
Finalized Speakers: Mid September 2021
Program Published: Late September 2021
CONFERENCE: Friday 5 November and Saturday 6 November 2021!
Submit at: OSEM
Committee and Code of Practice
The Program Committee is the group responsible for choosing and scheduling all of the great talks you enjoy at SeaGL. This year the committee steering the Program consists of:
- Nathan Handler (co-chair)
- Rachel Kelly (co-chair)
- Monica Ayhens-Madon
- Remy DeCausemaker
- Megan Guiney
- Sri Ramkrishna
- Alison Yu
As in prior years, we agree to abide by the SeaGL Program Committee Code of Practice.
Code of Conduct
The SeaGL Code of Conduct applies to all staff, all volunteers, all speakers and keynotes, all attendees and viewers, and all sponsors. SeaGL is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone; regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, nationality, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference staff, volunteers, presenters, attendees, and participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference, without a refund, at the discretion of the conference organizers.
These are more than words, they are a framework that we have used and will use in the future when the situation calls for it. We encourage you to become familiar with the contents of the SeaGL Code of Conduct, as you indicate your strong agreement to these principles in submitting a talk, attending the conference, volunteering, sponsoring, or otherwise participating in the conference.
Talk Topics/Labels
We encourage almost any topic related to open source that you have a personal engagement with. We have created a list of topic labels you might choose to use — these might give you some ideas.
- Security: Security Practices (Personal and Industry) and Security Career
- Hardware: Free and Open hardware projects
- Leaving the Walled Garden: Owning Your Own Data
- Tools: Command line, databases, web tools, accessibility, open graphics tooling, and more
- Tech Culture: FLOSS for EveryOne: how can FLOSS be of help to those outside our immediate community?
- Community: Community building, labor rights, & advocacy
- Virtual meetings & “meatspace”
- DevOps: Open source DevOps, containers, continuous integration/continuous deployment, & monitoring
- Licensing & Legal
- Career Development in FLOSS software and hardware
- Performance Art! Seriously :)
- Misc: Have a great talk that doesn’t fit these categories? Submit it!
Talk categories and “vibe”
SeaGL is a very special conference. We’re a community-focused Free/Libre Open Source Software annual event in Seattle, and since last year, all over the world virtually! We’re looking for technical talks from folks who usually give community talks, and activism talks from folks who usually give coding deep dives, and so forth. We would love to see you out of your comfort zone. The categories we used last year were, loosely: Security, Community, Career Development, Tech Culture, Tools, Virtual Life & Work, DevOps, Performance Art! and Miscellaneous, and we had amazing submissions as a result, like Devops Standup and several talks on labor organizing! We’re an independent bunch but we still like to take care of each other.
We are not looking for sponsored talks, however we’d love to welcome you over at our Sponsorship Prospectus and give you an opportunity 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 not very likely to accept broad introductory talks, but specific, scoped introductions to a discrete part of the Operations or Network/Sysadmin world are very sought after, and we also love talks on the broad theme of “hacking for good”, and personal security as well. Are you making choices for your personal technology outside of Amazon/Google/Apple/other giants? We would love to hear about that too!
We welcome talks you have given elsewhere, but if you have, please indicate so in the abstract (a link would be great) and let us know how this talk will be different.
Talk structure
Talks will be presented remotely. Speakers may give their session live, or pre-record their session for the room moderator to play while they are in the chat session with the attendees.
Talk length is 20 minutes, with another 10 minutes allowed for questions, for 30m total.
We do not have longer time slots available at SeaGL 2021 because the online medium makes it more critical to present yourself concisely. Please do not propose talks that cannot be presented well within the allotted time. If you have a topic that absolutely needs more time, consider breaking your proposal into two talks: an introductory talk and a more “advanced” talk.
Office Hours
SeaGL pioneered the idea of CfP Office Hours, so stay tuned for details, and if you need help in the meantime, please email us at cfp-help@seagl.org, and we’d love to help you work through a good proposal.
How To Submit
FINALLY, let’s talk about how to submit! First, you’ll go to SeaGL’s OSEM and either create an account or log in to an account you have previously used. For those of you who have submitted before, this is the same system as the last several years.
Scroll down to the Call For Papers section, and “Submit your paper now” for your proposal, and then New Proposal. There you’ll input the Title, Talk Type (there is only one - 20m talk), and the Abstract, up to 500 words. Do not put your name or biography in your proposal. Repeated, do not put your name or your bio in your proposal. It is part of our Code of Practice that our initial review is unaware of who the submitter is, therefore any proposal which includes biographical information will be rejected. Your bio will be asked for later.
When you have submitted, you will be taken to a page called Proposals for SeaGL 2021, and you will see your own talk(s) listed there. This is where you will add your bio and the talk label (“track”). Please note, you will not receive an email confirming your proposed submission.
Finally, please find the plaintext link to our submission software here: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2021
Thank you!
Thank you!! Please email us or tweet at us with any questions! And don’t forget to Submit Early, Submit Often!
Like many other conferences, the SeaGL staff has given a lot of thought to the format.
After much discussion and consideration of the general landscape, we have decided that SeaGL 2021 will be a virtual event.
Last year’s first-ever virtual SeaGL was a great success, and we’re confident that we can deliver another delightful virtual experience this year!
We loved how the remote format brought SeaGL to a wider audience, although we absolutely miss flocking together.
Seagulls are not particularly known for clairvoyance, and we didn’t feel as though we could predict what the pandemic situation will look like in early November.
We are encouraged by the progress being made on vaccinations, but we understand that many people will still be hesitant to attend in-person events.
We’re still holding open the idea of doing an in-person meetup for those of you in the Seattle area, but the conference proper will remain online in 2021.
Join us on the Internet, Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 2021!
We will be announcing the Call for Participation soon.
In the meantime, we’re always looking for more help with planning the conference.
Please reach out to participate@seagl.org if you’d like to help with a well-defined, well-supported volunteer role as we ramp up to this year’s conference organization.
Many of our volunteers have been helping with the conference for years, so you’ll be joining an established team of people who care deeply about free software and community in equal measure!
Thank you so much for sticking with us through SeaGL 2020! We’ll be announcing more with videos and other content from last year soon, but the big announcement here is that we are gearing up for year NINE of SeaGL! SeaGL 2021 will be Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 2021!
We are very close to decided on doing another fully virtual conference, which genuinely exceeded the highest of any of our expectations, but depending on how vaccinations go, there may be some kind of hybrid option. This is undecided, but we are working on setting a date to decide by, not later than by summer 2021.
Please reach out if you’d like to help with a well-defined, well-supported volunteer role as we ramp up to this year’s conference, at participate@seagl.org. Many of the volunteers have been helping with the conference for many years, so you’ll be joining an established team of people who care about free software and community in equal measure!
Thank you & stay tuned!