News
Our Call for Presentations (CfP) has officially opened! As announced last week during the 25th LinuxFest Northwest, our CfP will remain open until June 15, 2025. Please don’t delay; submit early, submit often!
As a small community event, our attendees tend to be university students, open-source hobbyists, engineers, security professionals, technical writers, and more, with a focus on community rather than corporate involvement.
We welcome introductions to free/libre/open (FLO) software, hardware, and tools, as well as more technical deep-dives. In addition to technical talks, we invite presentations on FLOSS alternatives to proprietary products, hacking for good, personal security and privacy, and open source in non-tech domains such as education and art.
Please note that we are not looking for sponsored talks. However, companies may review our sponsorship prospectus for details on how to participate through other means.
Updates for 2025
This year, we have updated one of our tracks. “Big Data and Machine Learning” felt somewhat outdated, so it has been split into two separate categories:
- Open Source AI and Data Science: Explore the interplay between AI, data, and free/libre/open-source licensing. This topic includes ML frameworks, data tools, MLOps solutions, or open datasets. We’re interested in everything from technical deep dives to big-picture perspectives.
- Cloud and Infrastructure: This category focuses on the systems that power computing environments. Topics include core infrastructure, both physical and virtual, such as servers, networks, and databases. It also covers cloud computing services, spanning everything from infrastructure and deployment to monitoring and telemetry.
For details on all our available tracks and to submit your application(s), please visit: https://seagl.org/cfp
Office Hours are back
SeaGL strives to be welcoming for first time (and veteran) speakers. Part of how we support this mission is by providing an opportunity for prospective speakers to receive real time assistance with their talks and/or CfP submissions.
Are you unsure which of your two talk ideas to submit (hint: submit both!)? Do you need help crafting an abstract for your talk? Or perhaps you are interested in adapting a talk you’ve presented before so that it fits SeaGL’s theme. We will have members of the SeaGL Programming & Flow Committee on hand to help answer these and any other questions you might have.
Office Hours will be taking place via chat on Matrix (#office-hours:seagl.org) at the following times throughout of CfP dates (this list will be updated if more windows open):
- Mondays, 6-7pm PT (Tuesdays 01:00-02:00 UTC)
If none of the office hours time slots fit your schedule, or if you prefer to interact asynchronously, please email your questions to cfp2025@seagl.org.
About Keynotes
We’ve had some question about the keynote selection process that begins much earlier in the year. To clarify, anyone can submit a nomination via this form which is open year-round. We encourage you to take a look and submit anyone you would like to see keynote at SeaGL next year!
Since 2018, we’ve had four spots available for keynoters. Two are reserved for experienced keynoters, notable individuals from academia or industry who have given keynotes before. The other two spots are for first-time keynoters, notable community members who have given talks in the past but have never had the opportunity to keynote.
Candidates are invited after the current staff volunteers participate in a STAR voting poll. If you want to be part of that process, consider joining our volunteer team!
Spread the word
Another way to help our community would be by getting the word out, about the CfP and SeaGL in general. If you have a bulletin board, lunchroom, or other shared space at your office or community spot, please consider distributing some of our fliers. Also, we are still looking for partners, both fiscal and community. If you think your workplace or project would be interested, please share our prospectus. All contributions toward promoting the event are greatly appreciated!
That’s all for this update. Thanks for reading, and remember to submit early and submit often!
We are thrilled to announce that last year’s conference videos are now available on the SeaGL Archive! They can also be accessed directly via our Internet Archive collection. This release marks a significant achievement for our volunteer-run organization, and we couldn’t be more excited to share these valuable resources with the free / libre / open source community.
As a volunteer-driven conference, we rely on the dedication and hard work of our team members. Sometimes this means that tasks take longer to complete than we’d like. In this case, we had a single person working tirelessly behind the scenes. We are extremely grateful for their efforts and appreciate your patience.
A special shout-out to the Internet Archive for hosting our video archives. Their platform has allowed us to share the vast wealth of knowledge created by our community, and for that, we are incredibly thankful.
Regrettably, we encountered some technical issues during last year’s conference which resulted in a couple of videos not being recorded properly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciate the understanding of our attendees and speakers.
We are committed to learning from these experiences and improving our processes. We’ve already begun addressing last year’s issues to ensure that all presentations are cleanly captured and made available for everyone to enjoy.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to announce that the Call for Presentations (CfP) for SeaGL 2025 will be opening soon. If you’re interested in sharing your knowledge and expertise with the FLO community, stay tuned for the CfP announcement. As usual, we welcome submissions from industry experts and enthusiasts alike. We can’t wait to see what exciting topics and ideas you’ll be sharing with us!
Once again, thank you to our volunteers, the Internet Archive, and everyone who attended SeaGL last year. Your support and participation are what make this conference possible, and we’re honored to be a part of such a thoughtful community!
As we shake off the winter chill and begin organizing this year’s conference, we wanted to share some things with the community.
New Theme
We’re excited to announce the theme for the 13th annual SeaGL: freedom is in the cards
Fliers Fly
The newest SeaGL handbill design has dropped and can be found here! You’re welcome and encouraged to share it around, whether in the printed or posted form. And keep an eye out at SCaLE (the Southern California Linux Expo), hosted this weekend in Pasadena, for the first in-person batch!
Newest Social Stand
It has been great to see so many people leaving walled garden social media networks lately! While we will continue to cross-post in an effort to reach those who are left, we’ve added a new network to our quiver: Bluesky
This network has grown quite a bit with the recent migration. It is built on top of the AT Protocol, an open source, open standard.
Our website will still be the primary place to look for all things SeaGL related, but we hope to keep the various social media profiles up-to-date. Please follow us and share what you see!
Keynote Nominations
One of the many things that sets SeaGL apart from other conferences is that the community helps us select our keynote speakers. In prior years we’ve asked for suggestions over a two-week period, but moving forward we’ll keep the form open year-round.
Nominees need not have prior keynote experience; we are interested in both new and veteran presenters. In fact, since 2018, we’ve been reserving half of our keynote slots to amplify the voices of speakers who may be presenting on the main stage for the first time.
While you are welcome to nominate yourself, we encourage you to take some time to think about people you have seen present, who you think have an important message to share. If they have been doing exciting work in the Free / Libre / Open (FLO) community, we want to know about them!
We challenge you to think about people who:
- Have done work to empower others and challenge social norms
- You go out of your way to read all of their Open Source posts on social media
- Might only have a small following, but are doing amazing work in their own little corner
- Are always tinkering with new and exciting projects that inspire others to try new things
- Are slowly, but steadily, working to make the FLO community and world a better place, for everyone
Submissions are anonymous and the form is open, so nominate someone today!
Volunteering
As always, we want to remind folks that SeaGL is an all-volunteer effort. Visit the get involved page for more details about how you can help!
As we look back on SeaGL 2024, we want to send a heart-felt thank you to the speakers, attendees, sponsors, and volunteers for making our 12th SeaGL such a success 🎉! We hope you had an opportunity to listen to some great talks and chat with other open minded folks. Here’s to continuing to ruffle some feathers and supporting a more free technological world in 2025!
Speaking of 2025, we have confirmed our dates and want to share them with you all! Please mark your calendars for SeaGL on November 7th and 8th. We are returning to the University of Washington for a third year in rainy, and proud of it, Seattle. And if you’re refraining from migration, we plan to keep you connected by live streaming our gathering as in past few years.
We also wanted to let you know that the A/V & DevOps team members are working hard to publish recordings on our archive and appreciate your patience. If you have opinions and would like to shape SeaGL for the better, we would love to have you join us! Please consider becoming a volunteer!
Cheers ✨ to all who have contributed to such a creative and inclusive community! We are looking forward celebrating the spooky thirteenth event with you at the beginning of November this year!
It is with great pleasure that we present the schedule for our 12th instance of SeaGL (the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference).
The conference starts on Friday, November 8th at 9am PST and will run through Saturday, November 9th at 7pm PST. We have four keynotes, two opening on Friday and two closing on Saturday. We will also have three tracks running concurrently each day.
The full schedule can be found here: https://pretalx.seagl.org/2024/schedule/
Some highlights of the year
Opening keynotes on Friday, November 8th:
Closing keynotes on Saturday, November 9th:
Performance events:
Special events:
- Relax with a cuppa delicious, and not so common tea, each afternoon at TeaGL
- Friday, 3:30pm to 4:30pm
- Saturday, 3:00pm to 4:00pm
- Enjoy an evening of post-conference socializing
- Saturday, 5:20pm to 7:00pm
- Give your public speaking skills a shot with presentation roulette
- Saturday, 5:30pm to 6:30pm
The schedule is made possible by the work of our volunteer Programming & Flow Commitee. If you are intereseted in contributing or joining this, or another committee, do not hesitate to get involved.
We look forward to seeing you all next month!
Our twelfth annual conference is just a few weeks away! This year, we are continuing with the hybrid in-person/virtual format, offering remote participation options throughout the event.
Last year, we reached out to our community through the post, IDEA Sharing at SeaGL, seeking insights on how to make our event more inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible (IDEA). We extend our heartfelt thanks to all who responded, participated, and contributed to making the conference more welcoming to everyone.
One significant change we have made this year is the promotion of pronoun visibility within our community. We have incorporated a pronoun field into our speaker proposals, which has been well-received. From the responses we discovered, 12.5% of our speakers identify as they/them, 15% as she/her, 37.5% as he/him and 35% preferred not to disclose. This is a small but meaningful step toward ensuring that all voices are heard and respected.
| Pronoun |
they/them |
she/her |
he/him |
prefer not to say |
| Percent |
12.5 % |
15% |
37.5% |
35% |
We recognize that fostering an inclusive environment is an ongoing process. Your feedback is important in helping us make continuous improvements. If you have suggestions on how we can further enhance inclusivity and accessibility, especially for underrepresented groups, we encourage you to share your suggestions in our anonymous feedback form. If you would like to discuss your feedback in more detail, there is an option to provide your contact information, and we would be happy to follow up with you.
Our goal is to make this event not only accommodating for those already established in the tech community, but to also welcome and provide space for those individuals who feel they are on the outside looking in. If you know someone who could benefit from attending or participating, we encourage you to share this opportunity with them. Personal invitations often have a profound impact, and can reach a wider audience.
Some ways to get involved include:
- Attend the conference on November 8th and 9th, either in-person or remotely.
- Share the event with your networks and encourage others to participate.
- Volunteer to help shape the event and its programming by signing up at https://seagl.org/get_involved.
For those attending in person, please be advised that our Code of Conduct and Health & Safety Policy will be in effect to ensure a safe environment for all.
Last but certainly not least, cheers to Google for joining our IDEA sponsors this year, we’re so grateful for your support!
Regards,
The SeaGL 2024 IDEA committee
We are very pleased to announce our 2024 Seattle GNU/Linux conference keynote speakers:
Christopher Neugebauer
Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organizer, who presently lives in the United States.
He serves as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, and is co-organizer of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in unusual venues — include an old vaudeville theater, and more recently a barn on a farm — in Petaluma, California.
Christopher is also a contributor on the open source Pants build system, helping make Python’s testing, correctness, and style tools accessible and fast for developers, no matter how big their codebase.
Find more about Christopher on:
Duane O’Brien
Duane is the Director of Collaborative Engineering at Capital One. His organization focuses on developing internal and external collaborative development practices through open source and InnerSource. He is the creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund framework, and loves helping organizations get involved in funding and sustaining their open source dependencies. Duane is a force of chaotic good using his high stats in intelligence and charisma to advocate for the open source community. If you encounter him in forested areas, he will share his fire, drink, and philosophy.
Find more about Duane on:
Aaron Wolf
First time keynote speaker, Aaron is a community music teacher, co-founder of Snowdrift.coop (a long-struggling and principled platform working to solve economic coordination dilemmas around FLO public goods), and an activist and volunteer in many other areas. Originally from Ann Arbor, MI; he now lives in Oregon City with his wife, dog, and two kids.
Find more about Aaron on:
Rachel Kelly
Rachel is a long-time nerd and denizen of the internet, learning to form community without social media! A proud career-switcher, she has worked for tech companies small and large since 2014 and has been happily plugging away at Fastly for the last several years as an SRE on the Certificate Authority project. A staunch advocate of community and locality, Rachel now uses skills learned from many years of co-organizing Portland’s PyLadies chapter and participating in many community-oriented technology user groups toward something completely different. She and her partner live in Portland, OR, going to too many Burning Man events (not possible) and training for simply too many races of all kinds (also not possible). You can reach Rachel at her email, rkrk@rkode.com.
Find more about Rachel on:
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 in place to 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)!