News
Our next keynote announcement for 2018 is Elizabeth K. Joseph!
Lyz is a Developer Advocate at Mesosphere where she
focuses on the Apache Mesos and DC/OS communities. Previously, she
spent four years as a systems engineer on the OpenStack Infrastructure
team and six years on the Ubuntu Community Council. She is the author
of Common OpenStack Deployments and The Official Ubuntu Book, 8th and
9th Editions. At home in the San Francisco bay area, she sits on the
Board of Directors for Partimus, a non-profit providing Linux-based
computers to learning facilities in need.
Two keynote announcements down, two to go. Keep an eye out tomorrow for our next 2018 keynoter reveal!
It’s time to start announcing our four brilliant keynoters for 2018, starting with Molly de Blanc!
Molly is Campaigns Manager for the Free Software Foundation, where she organizes people around free software issues, researches and writes on new and longstanding software issues, and draws connections between current events and user freedoms.
As an independent researcher, Molly has explored how people communicate in and around free software communities and the effects on language from policies such as codes of conduct. Her interests include the demographics of communities and the way labor is divided among participants based on open contribution. Molly works with the Debian project’s Outreach team, facilitating Debian participation in the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy mentorship projects. She serves on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative.
Prior to joining the FSF, Molly worked in free and open education including the publishing team at MITOpenCourseWare and as community coordinator of the Open edX Project. She was previously affiliated with One Laptop Per Child and the Youth and Media Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
In her spare time, Molly enjoys biking, climbing, cooking, and playing guitar and bassoon in a band that produces freely licensed music.
Stay tuned for our second keynote announcement tomorrow!
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:
- 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)
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
In preparation of announcing our 2018 keynotes next week, we’re revisiting our great keynotes from 2017.
And for our final flashback: Rikki Endsley! Rikki showed the audience the powerful effect that writing can have on your career in tech and made an offer to help everyone in the crowd to share their story on opensource.com.
In preparation of announcing our 2018 keynotes next week, we’re revisiting our great keynotes from past years
Next up: Nithya Ruff! Nithya entranced the audience with the story of her path from India to Silicon Valley and accompanied it a slide show of photos from her history.
In preparation of announcing our 2018 keynotes next week, we’re revisiting our great keynotes past years
First up: Karen Sandler! Karen shares her personal story of how software freedom—or the lack of it—affects her life in a special way: by controlling the beating of her heart. She shares the dangers of proprietary systems for critical systems such as the implant that keeps her alive.
SeaGL 2018 organising is moving along nicely! We’re talking about our A/V requirements and what sort of fun stuff we’d like to do onsite. We’re also starting to reach out to potential sponsors who want to be a part of our sixth year. We would love it if you would share our prospectus with your company or organisation!
The Program Committee is the group responsible for choosing and scheduling all of the great talks you enjoy at SeaGL. This year the committee is:
- Christopher Aedo
- John SJ Anderson
- VM Brasseur (program committee chair)
- Wm Salt Hale
- Nathan Handler
- Tiberius Hefflin
- Chris Neugebauer
- Deb Nicholson
- Pirate
Later in the process we’ll be joined by a collection of hand-picked people to help us review all of the talks you’ll be sending our way.
When should you start sending those talks? Good question! We’ve decided on dates for our 2018 Call for Proposals (aka CFP):
- Open CFP: June 4 (you can start proposing talks on this date!)
- Close CFP: July 29
- Notify by: September 3
Like last year, we’ll have CFP office hours to help people brainstorm talk ideas and craft their proposals. We’ll also publish our review criteria again, but there probably won’t be many changes there from 2017.
What is new in 2018 is the Program Committee Code of Practice. It’s inspired by SeaGL’s mission of mentoring, collaboration, and openness. We’re very happy to share it here publicly for the first time:
Code of Practice
This is what we believe in and how we operate as we go about our business of building the best possible program and schedule for SeaGL.
As members of the SeaGL program committee and proposal reviewers, aside from the SeaGL Code of Conduct, we also agree to operate according to these values and statements:
Values
We believe in the importance and power of free and open source software.
We believe in putting the needs of our audience and our community before our needs or those of our employers.
We believe in boosting the voices of others above our own.
We believe in mentoring and helping to create the speakers, leaders, and contributors of the future.
We believe in supporting diversity in thoughts and experiences in the talks and speakers we select for SeaGL.
We believe in creating and protecting a SeaGL environment that welcomes all people in safety and comfort.
But what does that mean? Like, practically?
How are these values reflected in how we operate as program committee members and reviewers? There could be many different ways, obviously, but here are some examples of what we will do our best to do:
- Promote the CFP to all our communities.
- Seek out unreached/underrepresented/underserved communities and help them to propose talks.
- As time allows, assist people with their proposals, making it easy for them to propose and what they propose a higher quality.
- Do our best to do all initial reviews blind, within the non-blind constraints of the system.
- Only vote on talks we feel qualified to review.
- Abstain from voting on talks where we made substantial contributions to the the proposal (but we can advocate during the review call).
- As much as possible, don’t allow our personal or professional biases (or those of our employer) to influence our talk reviews.
- After proposals are accepted, and as time allows, assist people with their talks to help ensure that what they deliver is valuable to the audience.
We’re all pleased to have the opportunity to serve the SeaGL community and share this Code of Practice with you. It’s our hope that we can serve as a model for other free and open source events, who can publish their own Codes of Practice.
To help with that, don’t forget that everything published here on the SeaGL website is licensed CC BY-SA. We encourage you to copy, modify, and redistribute this Code of Practice however you and your event need.
We’re excited to announce the dates for this year’s Seattle GNU/Linux Conference: Friday, November 9th and Saturday, November 10th, 2018. We’re also happy to be back at Seattle Central College on Capitol Hill once again. Now we are six!
We are brimming over with amazing ideas for this year’s event – maybe you are too? Join our organizing mailing list and become part of the action. For news about the CFP, join our low-traffic announcement list. For fun and seagull memes, follow us on Twitter.
Thanks to all of our illustrious sponsors! We especially want to recognize Seattle Central College. They’ve been amazing each and every one of the five years that they’ve been our host. This year, though? They went above and beyond and managed to find us five new rooms for our sessions, just one week after a very, messy, no-good HVAC issue drowned out our original rooms.
We also want to thank all of our fine community sponsors for bringing their enthusiasm, their pals, their kids.. even their very adorable dogs. The expo floor was a thriving hub of friendly activity and excellent new connections this year. We especially want to thank the Free Software Foundation for helping us with promotion and accounting work as our fiscal sponsor, as well as continuing to send some of their lovely employees to SeaGL each year.
We have so many high fives to give out to our behind the scenes volunteers! Core volunteers have been showing up for weekly meetings for months. (Seriously, months of Monday night meetings.) People have pitched in over the years with many, many things like getting our volunteer info organized, making sure our prospectus is professional, hosting our website, schlepping our stuff and putting us in touch with potential speakers, sponsors and volunteers.
Our onsite volunteers this year were amazing. They warmly welcomed our attendees, they made sure our speakers were taken care of and they disposed of many dirty coffee cups and pizza boxes. They hopped in and helped each other get up to speed and they continually asked “what else can I help with?” We are very lucky to have attracted such a stellar crew this year.
Also, our lineup of speakers was off the hook this year! Two great keynotes, fifty-five informative and thought-provoking sessions, eight speedy lightning talks, six brave slide karaoke participants and two lovely party emcees! Every single one of our speakers donated their time, their energy, and their enthusiasm to help us make this community a continually learning, growing and improving place. They took time away from their families, their other hobbies or their work to be with us. Whether they travelled from Peru, or Minnesota, or just strolled down Capitol Hill, we can’t thank them enough.
Our Program Committee did a truly excellent job putting together a fantastic program this year. They deserve all the thanks for helping folks polish their talk ideas, reaching out to new speakers and for sorting though the many proposals we received. Their tremendous dedication and support of new speakers makes SeaGL a special event with fresh ideas and diverse voices.
Speaking of people who deserve all the thanks – congratulations to Lance Albertson who won this year’s Cascadia Community Builder Award! He’s a tireless champion for open source who is busy mentoring the next generation of developers and advocates at the Open Source Lab. (The OSL is always accepting donations for their work, if you are so moved.) We’d also like to thank everyone who serves on our CCBA commitee and everyone who took the time to nominate someone.
Finally, thanks to all of our attendees! We really, really like you.
Did we forget anyone? Let us know @SeaGL and tag it #shoutouts
Gareth Greenaway gives his talk titled, “Your Solution Is Not My Problem” on Saturday afternoon.
Gareth is also one of our illustrious party emcees! He might even wear a top hat!
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: My name is Gareth Greenaway and I’ve been an active free & open source user & supporter for over 20 years. I’m currently a senior software engineer at SaltStack where I have the fortunate privilege to spend my days writing open source code. Prior to that I’ve been a DevOps engineer at various companies. I am also an occasional co-host for the FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: When I’ve attended various talks at conferences in the past, particular those of a technical nature, it can be tempting to take the ideas & concepts in their entirety. When often times those solutions are crafted to solve a particular problem in a particular environment. It can also be tempting to think that to order to be successful those presented solutions must be emulated completely. My hope is that this talk will illustrate that this isn’t the case.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This will be my fifth SeaGL and I’ve really enjoyed attending since the first event. It’s been amazing watching it grow over the years and I always look forward to see everyone each year.
A: Question: What are you most looking forward to about visiting Seattle again? Answer: One of my favorite parts about traveling to different conferences is experiencing the different climates meeting the different people.