We’re trying something new in 2018: rather than having a single keynote present for an hour each morning, we’re having two people present for about 25 minutes each morning instead. We have two reasons for trying this:

1. We get to give twice as many people the opportunity to keynote our wonderful event and present to our beautiful audience. (as you can see, we have no bias here)
2. Our audience members get twice the opportunities to learn and be inspired each morning of SeaGL.

We’re using the extra keynote slots to host people who haven’t keynoted before, but who are experienced speakers and brilliant technologists. This continues SeaGL’s commitment to boosting new voices in our community. We’re very excited to announce all of these speakers in the coming days this week, but first we want to share how we selected our keynoters:

1. Gather candidates. We asked the entire SeaGL and free/open source communities to nominate people they thought would make great keynote speakers. The nominations were collected in a simple Google Form. This process generated dozens of nominations! It was obvious that the choice wasn’t going to be easy.
2. Clean up the nominations. You don’t crowd source nominations on the internet and expect not to get trolled. We didn’t have to remove many joke nominations, only two or three, but it had to be done before voting.
3. Sort the nominations into two groups: Keynoted and Not Really Keynoted. We did some really quick web searches to figure out who should be in which group. The groups each became a new Google Form.
4. The most important step: the voting. The entire SeaGL organising staff voted for each candidate in each group, selecting a value from 0 (I have no opinion on this nomination) to 5 (omgyesplz).

That was about it. We then invited the candidates who received the most votes, and got to celebrate when they accepted!

Over the next four days we’ll reveal the four brilliant people who’ve agreed to keynote SeaGL 2018. They’ll be revealed one a day in alphabetical order by their last names. We hope once you see who they are you’ll be as excited as we are!