News
SeaGL speaker and staff member edunham answers a few questions about the
upcoming conference:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
A: Hi, I’m edunham. I’m a “DevOps” engineer for Mozilla Research and alum of
the OSU Open Source Lab. I enjoy working on and with free and open source
software, and find that public speaking is a natural extension of that
instinct to share information.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of
what we might expect?
A: My talk is called “You Should Speak”, and it’s all about offering technical
solutions to the obstacles which keep others from taking advantage of the
excellent personal and professional opportunities that result from presenting
at tech conferences. Halfway through my education at Oregon State University,
I accidentally founded a sysadmin training program called DevOps Bootcamp, and
found myself teaching a bunch of newbies about topics that I wasn’t yet super
confident at myself. I’ve gone on to speak at over a dozen different tech
conferences in the past few years. This SeaGL will be my 19th talk since 2013,
and the 3rd or 4th conference I’ve helped organize, so the suggestions in my
talk are drawn from a reasonable amount of experience (though I haven’t been
doing this long enough to forget what it’s like to be new).
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?
I spoke at SeaGL last year, and found it to be a really pleasant, welcoming
event. I think its size is in the sweet spot for Northwest tech conferences:
Large enough to offer a wide variety of talks and cater to diverse experience
levels, yet small enough to mitigate problems with getting lost in the crowd.
It also fits in a downtown venue surrounded by restaurants, which you’ll
appreciate if you’ve ever been to a gathering at a convention center in a
“food desert”! Socially, I felt like SeaGL was less “cliquey” than some larger
conferences, as well – attendees seemed happy to talk to strangers, and
always had something interesting to say!
We’re looking for volunteers to help out on the days of the conference. We need helpers to assist speakers setting up in the presentation rooms, direct attendees towards rooms, and to complete other tasks.
If you’re interested in volunteering, please contact us here.
Our schedule is up! Take a look! The first day is visible first, but if you change the tab at the top, you’ll see the second day.
The schedule doesn’t include our very exciting keynotes yet. Shauna Gordon-McKeon will speak on Saturday morning from 9:30 - 10:30am about her work with brand new contributors to free software. At the end of the day on Saturday, Richard M. Stallman will speak at 2:30pm about Free Software and Your Freedom. Expect news about the expo floor, post-conference party and our community partners soon!
If you are just marking your calendar now, we’ll be at Seattle Central College again and the conference will be held on Friday October 23rd and Saturday October 24th,
- Booth space is definitely filling up, so now’s the time to drop us a line by emailing sponsor@seagl.org about your company or group. Our sponsor prospectus is right here. We’d love to hear from you!
Check back here or subscribe to our mailing
list for updates!
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, either by
emailing participate@seagl.org
or visiting us on IRC on
Freenode in
#seagl.
Due to the response from potential speakers we’re extending our Call for
Participation deadline to Friday, July 31, 11:59:59 p.m. PDT.
Submit your proposal here.
This year we’re hosting live help sessions for potential speakers on our IRC
channel on Freenode. If you’d like to know of your idea is a good fit
for our conference, or just want help finessing a few sentences in your
proposal, please join our channel on the dates below:
Thursday, July 16, 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. PDT
Sunday, July 26th, 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. PDT
Freenode channel:
#seagl
Of course, if you can’t make our live help sessions, we’re always available by
email at participate@seagl.org and many of the conference
organizers can be found at random times hanging out in the IRC channel.
We are pleased to announce that we will be giving the out the first Cascadia Community Builder Award at SeaGL this year!
This is a new award for a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the free software movement in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Idaho. This award will be given to someone for their work to build the free software community over the last one to three years. The winner of this award will be someone who has have applied deep commitment and creativity to growing and broadening the community. The 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 is not the primary goal.
To nominate someone, please send us an email award@seagl.org with the nominee’s name in the subject line. The more information you can provide about the nominee’s work, affiliations and history with free software, the better. Thanks in advance for helping us honor a great community builder!
If you want to speak with us in realtime, come visit us on IRC on Freenode in #seagl.
Our Call for Participation is Open!
Submit your
presentation
now.
It doesn’t matter if this is your first conference presentation or your
fifteenth; If you’re excited about a topic related to GNU/Linux or free
and open source software, then we want to hear about it! Below are some sample
subjects that will appeal to our audience:
- How to get involved in free and open source software
- Dev/Ops: both beginner and advanced topics
- Career tips and strategies
- Web development tools
- Policy and licensing that affects free and open source software development
- Hardware, Embedded Linux, or the Internet of Things
- Scaling and optimizing GNU/Linux
- The “cloud” and other distributed services
- Building free and open source communities
- Using free software at home, work, or school
- Security and privacy online
- Anything else that you think would be interesting to new or seasoned GNU/Linux enthusiasts!
The CFP deadline is midnight on July 26th (PDT). We look forward to seeing
your presentations!
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, either by
emailing participate@seagl.org
or visiting us on IRC on
Freenode in
#seagl.
Our Call for Participation opens soon!
We’re currently testing our CFP system. After we do a little more tweaking,
the CFP will officially open.
Like years past, we welcome presentations on diverse topics and speakers from
diverse backgrounds. If you have something interesting to say about GNU/Linux,
or free and open source software, we want to hear from you!
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, either by
emailing participate@seagl.org,
or visiting us on IRC on
Freenode in
#seagl.
We are excited to announce that Shauna Gordon-McKeon, the main organizer of
OpenHatch’s Open Source Comes to Campus events,
and Richard M. Stallman, GNU’s Project leader, will deliver the keynote
addresses at the 2015 Seattle GNU/Linux Conference.
Besides her work bringing open source tools to some of the world’s top
universities, Shauna’s numerous contributions to the open source community are
listed on the Open Hatch site:
She’s also a freelance programmer, researcher, organizer and writer. She’s
worked for the MIT Media Lab and Civic Commons, among others, and volunteers
with the Sunlight Foundation and the Open Science Collaboration.
Richard’s three decades of activism are summed up on the Free Software
Foundation website:
Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy
for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as
campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright
laws. Before that, Richard developed a number of widely used programs that are
components of GNU, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection,
the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various others.
We’re very excited to be returning to Seattle Central College for SeaGL 2015!
The conference will be held on Friday October 23rd and Saturday October 24th,
2015.
Check back here or subscribe to our mailing
list for updates on
the call for proposals and booth opportunities!
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, either by
emailing participate@seagl.org
or visiting us on IRC on
Freenode in
#seagl.