News
Cascadia Community Builder Award: Fourth Winner Announced!
The Cascadia Community Builder Award recognizes a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the free software movement in the Cascadia region and this year’s winner is Don Sheu. The award was presented in person on Saturday, November 10th at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference https://seagl.org/. Don founded PuPPy, a friendly user group dedicated to proliferating a diverse and talented Python community in the Puget Sound region. In a little over four years, he’s served PuPPy attendees about 20,000 tacos and taco equivalents.
With organizers from the PNW Python communities, he founded PyCascades in 2018. The first meeting was attended by 390 people including the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum. Guido delivered his last talk as BDFL at PyCascades. Because of the spectacularly inclusive community Sheu helped build, the talk schedule was majority women and non-binary speakers. Sheu is the first Cascadia Community Builder Award recipient based in Seattle, where the regional award is presented each year.
Sheu’s passion for seeding extremely welcoming communities is exactly what the Cascadia Community Builder Award was created to highlight. The award committee couldn’t be more pleased to highlight his impactful and timely work. The committee was especially struck by Sheu’s success in reaching out to traditionally under-represented groups. We hope that Sheu’s energy, vision and leadership inspire others to share their favorite tech with new people in their own regions.
OMG Only Two Days Until SeaGL Holy Smokes!
Ladies, gentlemen, and geeks of all genders (or no gender at all)! Welcome to the final few two days before SeaGL 2018! We’ve a few final notes to share with you before the 🎉 Big Event 🎉…
Code of Conduct
SeaGL, like free software, is for everyone. It’s paramount to us that all attendees feel (and be!) safe and welcome.
Please remember that all staff, presenters, and attendees of SeaGL are expected to obey the Code of Conduct not only at SeaGL but also in all SeaGL-associated spaces including but not limited to associated social events, the conference party, and the IRC channel.
If you have any concerns at all that are of a Code of Conduct nature, please email coc AT seagl.org as soon as possible. If you need immediate help, please locate any SeaGL staffer. We’ll be wearing name tags that say STAFF so hopefully we’ll be easy to spot.
Onsite
The SeaGL site includes maps to and of the venue and surrounding area, including information about parking should you need that sort of thing.
As the venue is a community college, it’s able to support people of all types of accessibility needs. Please see Seattle Central’s accessibility page for complete information.
We encourage people to get together, chat, and just generally share their SeaGL experiences. People are the best part of Free Software, after all.
If you share anything on your social network of choice, please use the #seagl2018 hashtag so everyone can follow along. If you do the Twitter thing, please follow @seagl for up to the minute announcements and updates.
Join our official conference IRC channel on Freenode for backchannel chatter and socializing. It’s #seagl and already has a number of folks hanging out in there. If you haven’t used IRC before, don’t worry! There’s a web interface to get you up and going with minimal fuss. You’ll need to register a nickname with Freenode in order to join, but that’s quick and easy to do. Instructions for that and a lot of other helpful IRC tips are available in this quickstart guide.
Social events
We have several associated social events you can join, if that’s how you roll:
Thursday
- Where: La Cocina Oaxaqueña, 1216 Pine St.
- When: Dinner-ish time (7PM or whenever)
- Details: Feel like getting a bite and maybe running into SeaGL folks? Then come here for dinner. We have no reserved seats and everyone will pay for themselves. If it’s a nice night, aim to be seated on the patio out front.
Friday
SeaGL lunch
- Where: Expo hall
- When: 11:30AM - 1PM
- Details: Thanks to our friends at Twilio, there is such thing as a free lunch. Refuel for the afternoon of filling your brains with more free and open source goodness.
Free Software Foundation mixer
- Where: McMenamins Six Arms, 300 E. Pike St.
- When: 6PM - 9PM
- Details: Light appetizers, a tasty beverage, and a Free Software Social courtesy of our dear friends at the Free Software Foundation!
Diverse SeaGLs Flocking Together
- Where: Herb & Bitter Public House: 516 Broadway East
- When: 6PM
- Details: Thanks to the generosity of IBM and the assistance of Twilio, this year SeaGL will host its first social event focused around diversity and inclusion. Folks belonging to groups under-represented in technology (and their allies!) are welcome. Arrangements are being finalised now, seating will be limited, and invitations will be handed out at the event on Friday.
Saturday
- Where: The SeaGL expo hall
- When: all day, but especially the afternoon break
- Details: If there’s any tea you particularly enjoy, bring it along to SeaGL on Saturday and bring enough for a few other people. Share your tea with the SeaGL community and try some interesting teas brought by others. Black, green, white, herbal, whatever! All teas are welcome at TeaGL. The sharing happens all day, so bring your tea to the expo hall in the morning on Saturday. We’ve also dedicated the Saturday afternoon break as Tea Time so all tea lovers (or simply tea curious) can get together in the expo hall, visit with our sponsors, and have a nice cuppa.
SeaGL lunch
- Where: Expo hall
- When: 11:30AM - 1PM
- Details: Thanks to our friends at Twilio, there is such thing as a free lunch. Refuel for the afternoon of filling your brains with more free and open source goodness.
The Official SeaGL Conference Party
- Where: Silver Cloud Inn, 1100 Broadway
- When: 6PM-10PM
- Details: Food! Beverages! Fun! There’ll be entertainment, including lightning talks (sign up during the conference if you’d like to deliver one). It’s always a great time, so please do join us!
Whew, that was a lot
Wow, there’s a lot going on at SeaGL this year. We can’t wait to see you there!
Interested in Kubernetes? Curious about Habitat? You’re in luck! Thanks to IBM and Chef you can learn them for free!
Join us on November 8th, the day before SeaGL starts, for a workshop at hosted in the Chef offices in Seattle. You’ll learn the basics of Kubernetes and how to get great results with Habitat in a Kubernetes cluster. Ideally you’ll come out excited and confident to use Kubernetes and Habitat in your own projects. Thanks to IBM donating a robust public Kubernetes cluster (which will be available for a month), you’ll even be able to practice what you learn after the tutorial is done!
Space is limited and RSVPs are required. Here are the vitals:
- When: Thursday November 8, 2018 from 10-3
- Where: Chef Software Inc. located at 619 Western Ave, Seattle, WA 98104
- Who: Anyone and everyone, which is to say: You!
- How much: Absolutely free (just like SeaGL!)
- What: IBM workshop on Kubernetes, food break, Chef/Habitat workshop
- RSVP Link
Hope to see you there!
SeaGL 2018 is approaching quickly and we’re starting to put the finishing touches on preparations.
This year, due to technical constraints, we are not recording talks. However, all speakers are—as always—encouraged to record their own and share them with the world.
A/V connection details
All rooms will have HDMI connectors (though a few may also have VGA). Please come prepared with whatever adapters you’ll need to hook up your laptop to the HDMI connector. If you forget your adapter, don’t worry: we’ll have a few on hand, just in case.
Do try to test out your laptop in your presentation room during one of the breaks or lunch times before your talk is scheduled. Two minutes before your talk is not a good time to learn that you forgot your video adapter.
🎥 Recording your talk 🎥
Regardless of your preferred platform, we have recording instructions for you.
If you’ve not recorded your own presentations before, you’ll probably want to do a test run before you get to SeaGL just to be sure you have the software you need and that you’re familiar with how to use it.
The Windows instructions also include details for using Open Broadcaster Software (which is Free software) to record your screencast. These instructions will work for any platform where you can run OBS (read: pretty much all of them).
The room moderator for your talk may not be familiar with the recording instructions for your platform, so please test this out ahead of time to make sure you know how to do it.
Out of respect for everyone else using the conference wifi, we ask that you not attempt to live stream your presentation.
Sharing your slides, video, etc.
Once you’ve recorded your talk, what do you do with it? Or with your slides?
You could upload the video to YouTube and the slides to SlideShare, and if that’s your preference that’s great. However, we encourage you to upload the video and the slides together to a single item at Internet Archive.
Here are instructions for uploading a video to the Archive. The exact same instructions will work for slides or any other digital material you wish to share.
If you upload your video and/or slides to Internet Archive (or anywhere else), please include seagl2018 as a subject tag. That will make it easier for us to locate your material and share it around.
Please also tweet out any talk content that you post. If you tag @seagl we’ll retweet it to boost the signal.
This year we’re pleased to introduce TeaGL, the SeaGL Tea Swap!
If there’s any tea you particularly enjoy, bring it along to SeaGL on Saturday and bring enough for a few other people. Share your tea with the SeaGL community and try some interesting teas brought by others.
Black, green, white, herbal, whatever! All teas are welcome at TeaGL.
The sharing happens all day, so bring your tea to the expo hall in the morning on Saturday. We’ve also dedicated the Saturday afternoon break as Tea Time so all tea lovers (or simply tea curious) can get together in the expo hall, visit with our sponsors, and have a nice cuppa.
Over on Twitter we mentioned that we had some exciting news to share with you soon, and we’re very happy to report that it’s time!
Thanks to the generosity of our friends at Twilio, this year SeaGL is thrilled to provide…
🎉 Free Lunch! 🎉
In past years we’ve been able to provide lunch (pizza) on the second day of the event, but in 2018, thanks to Twilio, we’ll have full, catered lunch on each day of the event!
BUT WE NEED YOUR INPUT!
To make sure we can provide for everyone’s food needs, we need your input. Our partner at Twilio has put together a Google Form to gather folks’ dietary needs. If you’re planning to attend SeaGL in 2018, do us a solid and…
Please fill out this form
Even if you don’t have special dietary needs, that’s still good information for us to have. And if you do have special dietary needs we definitely want to hear from you.
OK, so, that’s a pretty great announcement, but we’re not done yet because (also thanks to Twilio, wowzers!) now we get to announce…
🎉 Free Childcare! 🎉
Never before in the history of SeaGL have we been able to offer childcare to our attendees. We’re over the moon that we can do so in 2018 and we can’t wait to welcome more people to our community because of it. We’ll be offering childcare each day of the event, so you don’t have to worry about choosing one day or the other; you can attend them both!
BUT WE NEED YOUR INPUT!
To make sure we have enough coverage to support everyone who needs childcare to make the most of their SeaGL, we absolutely need you to fill in this form. The last thing we want is to turn people away because we weren’t able to plan enough childcare capacity, so…
Please fill out this form
🎉 Free Is Best! 🎉
With these incredibly generous benefits thanks to Twilio, we’re able to continue our dedication to providing the best Free and open source learning to the community. In 2018 SeaGL offers…
- FREE attendance (no charge to attend, ever)
- FREE lunch
- FREE childcare
- FREE software
We cannot thank Twilio enough for their help in providing these benefits to the SeaGL community. To be clear, they haven’t simply thrown money at the problem. Twilio believes in free and open source software and its communities and is contributing a great deal of time and effort in helping to organize the lunches and childcare. As a volunteer run and organized event, we value and appreciate the gift of time that Twilio is giving to the SeaGL community.
When you attend SeaGL this year, find a Twilio team member and thank them for their dedicate to free and open source software and its communities.
But before you do that…
Please fill out this form
(no, really, we need this information)
We’re pleased to announce the SeaGL 2018 schedule!
Two days!
Four amazing keynotes!
Fifty six spectacular talks!
Click on the Schedule link in the header to see what we have in store for you in 2018, or just click here.
We’re really excited by this schedule and can’t wait for you to join us in November to learn from these brilliant presenters.
Many months ago I had a request to share our CFP accept/decline/waitlist emails. Since a lot of conferences have to send these out, I figured I’d share them publicly here rather than share them with a single person.
As with all SeaGL materials, these are licensed CC BY-SA, so feel free to use and remix them however you and your event needs.
SeaGL Talk Proposal Acceptance Email
SUBJECT: [seagl20XX] Proposal accepted!
BODY:
Dear {name},
Your proposal, {eventtitle}, is accepted for {conference}!
We would like to announce the schedule soon, so please confirm your talk no later than EOD Pacific Time on DATE. You can confirm your talk at {proposalslink} or by responding to this email.
Your submission can be found at: {proposalslink}
We encourage you to share the news of your talk acceptance far and wide! If you tweet about it, please tag @seagl so we can retweet it for you.
We are hoping to record this year’s talks. Please let us know if you would NOT like your talk recorded.
We’re looking forward to seeing you in MONTH!
Best wishes,
{conference} Team
{conference_splash_link}
SeaGL Talk Proposal Decline Email
SUBJECT: [seagl20XX] Proposal declined
BODY:
Dear {name},
Your proposal, {eventtitle}, was unfortunately not accepted for SeaGL this year.
We know you put a lot of time and effort into your proposal and we want to thank you for making our selection process so challenging.
If you would like feedback on your proposal, please email proposal-feedback@seagl.org and we will share what we can, as soon as we get a chance. (If everyone asks for feedback, it might take a little while.)
There are many potential reasons why we declined your proposal that have nothing to do with the quality of the topic itself. For instance, it may not have been a good fit for the SeaGL audience, or it was declined because we’re only accepting one talk per speaker.
It’s still a good idea that deserves more exposure. If you would like to share your story, we encourage you to submit your proposal to our friends at opensource.com as an article idea: https://opensource.com/how-submit-article
We hope you will plan to attend SeaGL in MONTH. There will be lots of great people like you there to meet and share ideas with.
Thanks again for taking the time to submit a talk proposal. We really appreciate it!
Best wishes,
{conference} Team
{conference_splash_link}
SeaGL Talk Proposal Waitlist Email
SUBJECT: [seagl20XX] Proposal Waitlisted
BODY:
Dear NAME,
Your proposal(s) was highly rated by our reviewers but faced a lot of excellent competition. We would like to include it in the program but ran out of space for it:
We’ve sent out the first round of acceptance emails and anticipate some speakers will not be able to make it, leaving open holes in the schedule where we can fit your talk. This may take a little while as the schedule settles out.
If you would like to remove your proposal from the waitlist rather than wait for a schedule opening, we totally understand. Just reply to this email and we’ll handle that for you.
We hope you will still plan to attend SeaGL in MONTH. There will be lots of great people like you there to meet and share ideas with.
Thanks again for taking the time to submit a talk proposal – we really appreciate it!
Best wishes,
Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 20XX Team
https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl20XX
All talk proposal notifications went out this morning. While we’re still waiting for speakers to confirm they can do the selected talks, we thought it would be interesting to share some more numbers now that the schedule is taking shape.
Method
Our selections are based almost entirely upon raw score data. To put it simply: the highest-rated talks were accepted, with the caveat that we only accepted one talk from any proposer.
Normally we’d look at the raw scores and then massage things a bit to get a better balance of topics and speakers, but that was not necessary. The proposals we received this year were so good and so diverse that no program-massaging was necessary at all. The straight numbers were pretty much all we needed.
And speaking of numbers…
55 talks accepted
We received 163 proposals and accepted 55 of them. That’s a 33.7% acceptance rate.
The majority of declined talks were due to us accepting only one talk per speaker. A lot of folks proposed several talks, so they received several decline emails.
We’re very grateful that people proposed multiple talks. It allowed us a lot of flexibility in creating a well-balanced and interesting program. Next year, though, we’d like to consolidate to a single decline email if possible. It’s more humane than, for instance, one acceptance email and six decline emails (as one of our proposers received).
Break down by track
Sysadmin/Ops/DevOps was far and away the most popular track among the accepted talks, but Programming and InfoSec weren’t too far behind.
Bringing up the rear is Data/AI/ML with only a single accepted talk. Considering the current popularity of AI and Machine Learning, we were really surprised we didn’t receive more good proposals on this topic.
Regardless, the SeaGL schedule is going to have something for everyone. We’re very pleased with the diversity of topics represented.
27% 20-minute talks
Last year we introduced the 20-minute talk option and we had 14 talks of that length on the schedule.
This year we have 15 20-minute talks on the schedule (so far), which is nice and consistent.
13% first-time presenters
SeaGL believes in building the Free Software and open source community of the future and part of that is supporting new conference speakers.
We’re pleased that 13% of our acceptances this year were from people who have not presented at a conference before.
We would like to improve this number in future years, but when 6.4% of the total number of proposals were from people who self-identify as first time speakers, we think that 13% is still pretty darn good.
Welcome to presenting! We’re happy to have you at SeaGL.
44% under-represented presenters
A full 44% of the accepted talks come from people who self-identify as a member of an under-represented group in technology.
We’re particularly proud of this number, we have to confess. We work very hard to make SeaGL a safe space for all people. With numbers like this, it looks like the word is getting out. We’re very honored that people trust us to continue having a welcoming environment.
It’s only through embracing, increasing, and fostering diversity in technology that we’ll be able to improve and spread the ethos of Free Software. Thank you, SeaGL attendees and staff, for helping with this and keep up the great work.
Schedule caveat
These numbers are just for the initial acceptances. Due to speaker schedules and obligations, some of them may not be able to present at SeaGL in November. Therefore the final schedule may not reflect these exact numbers as we sub in someone from the waitlist.
Nominations are open for the 2018 Cascadia Community Builder Award
The Cascadia Community Builder Award is designed to recognize work in software projects, non-profit organizations, outreach and education, hackerspace, user groups or any activity that promotes the adoption and appreciation of free software to new and larger groups of people. The awards committee is especially interested in individuals who have successfully reached out to traditionally under-represented groups, even if that isn’t their primary goal.
To nominate someone, please send us an email email us at award@seagl.org with the nominee’s name in the subject line.
- Name and email address of the nominee (if you have it)
- A sentence or two about why you think they deserve this award
- Projects or organizations they serve through (links are very helpful!)
Please only nominate people who are doing their free software work in the Cascadia region and who are currently living. Thanks in advance for helping us honor a great community builder!
The award will be presented in November at SeaGL. Want to be part of the action? We’re actively seeking volunteers! Just email participate@seagl.org and introduce yourself!