About
The Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL) is a grassroots technical conference
dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and
free / libre / open source software and 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.
When & where
Fall 2021
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.
You may optionally register. This gives us
more accurate estimates of attendance, which help us raise money for the
conference. The registration system is free / libre / open source software and
we promise to protect your data.
Today is our second and FINAL day of SeaGL 2020! Here is the full SeaGL 2020 program, and please read on for today’s schedule, for Friday, November 13, 2020. As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual. SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.
You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.
Normal talk blocks are 30m - 20m for the talk, 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There are 15 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.
Please note that as of 6:30pm PST Friday Nov 13, a few of these have changed. Last minute schedule changes - it’s a wild world out there this year, but we can accommodate :)
All times are listed in Pacific Standard Time, which is UTC -08:00
- 9:20am Opening announcements by Wm Salt Hale, Nathan Handler, and Rachel Kelly
- 9:35am Keynote by Kathy Giori
10:00am-10:45am block
- Cameron Bielstein - Building Free CI/CD with GitHub Actions
- Elizabeth K. Joseph - Open Source on the Mainframe in 1960, 1999, and Today
- Aeva Black - Crossing the Gender Divide
10:45am-11:30am block
- Molly deBlanc - Introduction to Ethics from an Ethicist-in-Training
- Justin W. Flory and Bhagyashree (Bee) - Time for Action: How to Build D&I in your Project
- Bri Hatch - 10 Vim Tricks
11:30am-12:15pm block
- Ask Me Anything (AMA) about Kubernetes with Elana Hashman!
- Kara Sowles - Alcohol and Inclusivity in Tech
12:15pm-1:15pm block - go eat some lunch, come back at 1:15pm PST :)
1:15pm-2:00pm block
- Deb Nicholson - Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other
- Ian Kelling - When does a Service Take Away your Freedom?
- Wm Salt Hale - Contacts to Connections: CRM Funneling for Projects and People
2:00pm-2:45pm block
- Amanda Sopkin - The United States’ History with Free Software and what we can do to improve the Future
- Aaron Wolf - Software Freedom through Collective Action
- Lisha Sterling - Building Alternative Networks for Fun and Resistance
2:45pm-3:30pm is TeaGL! Bring the tea your TeaGL buddy sent you, and come enjoy the company of tea lovers even if you didn’t sign up for the Tea Swap!
3:30pm-4:15pm block
- Paris Buttfield-Addison and Tim Nugent - First Steps with Swift for TensorFlow
- Ben Cotton - Scheduling your Open Source Project
- Nočnica Fee - Data Liberation: Open Source Observability
4:30pm Closing Keynote by VM Brasseur
6:00pm Closing Virtual Party!
If you have any questions about any of these, please pop into attend.seagl.org and we’ll get you set right up!
Today is the day! Day 1 of SeaGL begins today! Here is the full SeaGL 2020 program, and please read on for today’s schedule, for Friday, November 13, 2020. As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual. SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.
You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.
Normal talk blocks are 30m - 20m for the talk, 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There are 15 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.
All times are listed in Pacific Standard Time, which is UTC -08:00
- 9:00am Opening announcements by Wm Salt Hale
- 9:10am Keynote by Máirín Duffy
- 9:35am Keynote by Daniel Takamori
10:00am-10:45am block
- Mariatta Wijaya - Oops! I Became an Open Source Maintainer!
- Mariah Villarreal - Rise Up for Free Software in Schools!
- Neil McGovern - Patently Obvious
10:45am-11:30am block
- Ruth Ikegah - A Beginner-Inclusive Approach to Open Source
- Stephen Wilson - The Open Digital Photography Workflow
- Nočnica Fee - Data Liberation: Open Source Observability
11:30am-12:15pm block
- der.hans - FLOSS and you
- Suraj Kumar Mahto - Introducing FOSS Culture at Universities
- Gareth Greenaway - Open Source Secrets Management
12:15pm-1:15pm block - go eat some lunch, come back at 1:15pm PST :)
1:15pm-2:00pm block
- Megan Guiney - Democratizing Documentation
- Josh Boykin - Gaming for Good: Using Passions and Technology for Social Change
- Mike Hamrick - Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator
2:00pm-2:45pm block
- Jill Rouleau - Demystifying Contributor Culture: IRC, Mailing Lists, and Netiquette for the 21st Century
- Elijah C. Voigt - Let’s Make Games with Rust
2:45pm-3:30pm is TeaGL! Bring the tea your TeaGL buddy sent you, and come enjoy the company of tea lovers even if you didn’t sign up for the Tea Swap!
3:30pm-4:15pm block
- Sumana Harihareswara - Stand-up comedy about FLOSS
- Kaylea Champion - How to build a zombie detector: Identifying software quality problems
- Rowin Andruscavage - Overclocking for your Mind and Body
4:30pm and on - Cocktails and Mocktails Evening Social, as presented by Benjamin Mako Hill
If you have any questions about any of these, please pop into attend.seagl.org and we’ll get you set right up!
We are SO excited for the conference which begins TOMORROW! Since we’re fully online this year, let’s talk about actually HOW to get online to watch talks and have a super social experience in your conference-going.
The tl;dr here is that you can go to attend.seagl.org and enter your name. You will be added to the broader SeaGL hallway chat and be sent instructions for how to join specific chat rooms. To view a talk, enter one of the three track channels and click on the watch button to open an embedded live stream.
Description of how talks will be delivered
The speaker will be delivering their talk in a private video conference. They will be alone in the “room” aside from the volunteer moderator. Our tech team will direct that feed to a publicly facing URL when the talk begins. Attendees can chat with each other and watch the video at attend.seagl.org. At the conclusion of the talk, if the speaker wants a Question and Answer period, the room moderator will read questions from the audience in that track’s attend.seagl.org chat room, which the speaker will be able to answer. There will also be a volunteer chat moderator for each talk to monitor the space for potential problems. Our Code of Conduct applies in all of these virtual conference spaces, throughout the duration of the conference, and in all of our IRC channels before and after the conference. You can read more details about our tech stack in the blog post: The SeaGL Experience, Virtually Speaking!
How to view a talk
First, go to attend.seagl.org. Enter a name and/or handle that you are comfortable with. No registration is required, because we believe that people should not have to opt-out to anything resembling tracking to attend SeaGL. If the name you select is not available, another name will be automatically assigned. For users who already have their own IRC setups, you can log onto #seagl on irc.freenode.net, however, you do not need to be familiar with IRC in the least to attend SeaGL!
You’ll begin in a chat room called #seagl-hallway, a space where you can read announcements about upcoming talks and interact with other attendees. You will see a number of other channels which you can join, such as #seagl-track-1, 2, and 3, #seagl-helpdesk, and others. It will look something like this!
In the Track rooms, e.g. #seagl-track-1, #seagl-track-2, and #seagl-track-3, there will be a feed available throughout both days, playing a live stream of the talks. You can pull up the embedded video by hitting the yellow “watch” button at the top right. You will not be joining the video conference room itself, but your interaction and participation encouraged in the track chat room.
At the end of the talk, if the speaker chooses to take questions (some will not, and that is ok!), please add your question to the queue in chat. The moderator will relay questions on the video feed to the speaker. Please remember to form your question in such a way that it requires a question mark at the end - in other words, we want genuine questions asked in good faith, and are hoping to avoid “story time”-style announcements from the audience. Stories and anecdotes are for the talks, and questions are for answering by the speaker! The moderators have been trained to facilitate this, and will be very excited to pass on your real questions!
Each talk is 20 minutes. The speaker optionally has an additional 10 minutes for Q&A. That makes 30 minutes total, and adding fifteen minutes between talks, each slot lasts 45 minutes. After 30 minutes, the talk is entirely over and we will be depending on our amazing tech team to move the feeds around to the next speaker - each speaker has their own “room.” Please be aware that this means that after the time is up, it is truly up, unlike a physical space where a little dallying is part of the talks!
We know this is a lot of information! Remember, you can go to attend.seagl.org, enter your name, and get started - we’ll help you when you arrive! We cannot WAIT to see you. And remember, you can view the whole schedule here: SeaGL 2020 Schedule
This year, our theme is “OSI Layer 8: freeing the people” and we intend to provide an open and free space, despite being online. To that end, we’ve been working dilligently to bring the strong social aspect our attendees expect to SeaGL in 2020.
As previously mentioned, our tech team has put together a website that features streaming video from the talks alongside Kiwi IRC, providing a web interface to our numerous text chat channels. They’ve also created a bot which helps orchastrate all of the potential social interactions we hope you help start.
A key feature we’ve tried to emulate is the “hallway track”. By asking the bot to create a channel, you can make visible spaces for like-minded folk to join you. Whatsmore, these rooms have a one-click on-demand video/voice option fully integrated utilizing Jitsi. Please feel encouraged to hop around, find your friends, and make some new connections.
Speaking of the hallway track, SeaGL depends on our sponsors to put on the conference. Make sure to drop by their “tables” and say thanks, especially to our platinum sponsors: Indeed, Amazon, and the Free Software Foundation.
Finally, below are a few of our scheduled social events. Please attend them, remembering that SeaGL’s primary focus and drive is on facilitating community interactions. We look forward to hearing whether our platform has taken a positive step in the direction of facilitating those interactions remotely!
Afternoon TeaGL Time
Friday & Saturday @ 14:45-15:15 PT (22:45-23:15 UTC)
While we don’t have an exhibitor hall to wander, there will still be afternoon #TeaGL! This year, as with everything else, we took our tea swap virtual. Missed the sign-up? Not to worry! Everyone will still be flocking together during the afternoon break. Bring along some minature treats and a beverage to warm your beak before returning to the final talk block of the day of this Free as in Tea conference. (and psst, the bot may have a special surprise for sharing virtual tea…)
New to this year’s tea time: #TeaGLtoasts. Record a video beginning with your mug to the camera; pull back, take a sip, and cheers software freedom, then bring your mug back to the camera. We will be stitching all of the videos together and overlaying a variety of freely licensed tunes to send around the socials!
Friday, November 13th @ 16:30-18:00 PT (00:30-02:00 UTC)
One of last year’s keynotes, Benjamin Mako Hill will be re-mixing up a series of GNU/Linux themed cocktails. “The good news is that the source for the cocktails is available! The bad news is that you’ll have to compile these drinks yourself.”
Take a peak at the program listing and pick up the recommended ingredients to shake alongside. Non-alcoholic? No problem! An EtOH-free option is available. Either way, join in the Friday fun with your fellow feathered folk!
Saturday, November 14th @ 18:00-22:00 PT (02:00-06:00 UTC)
After the talks have ended, and we’ve all taken a bit of a break from the screen glow, an evening of fun is ahead. Our IRC Bot will be helping along the mixing and mingling. Start up a special interest “table” to talk around, utilizing the embedded on-demand Jitsi rooms. Join in on a scavenger hunt, kicking yourself for all of the quarentine cleaning that means not having that perfect find. Then, at 8pm PT, we will be splitting into randomly assigned teams for trivia hosted by none other than Bri Hatch, an every-year SeaGL supporter.
Grab your favorite beverages and finger foods, sign-in to attend.seagl.org, and join the #seagl-party!
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