Welcome to the first day of SeaGL 2022! Be sure to check out our amazing lineup of events. Below, you will find the schedule for today (Friday, November 4, 2022). As a reminder, SeaGL 2022 is completely virtual for the third year in a row. The conference is also completely “free as in tea” with no registration required. Everyone is welcome to attend!
As a reminder, our Code of Conduct applies during ALL SeaGL interactions. In chat, during one’s talk if you are giving one, social events during SeaGL, and on other platforms during or as a result of the conference.
Normal talk blocks are 30m. There are 20m for the talk, and 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.
All times are listed in Pacific Daylight Time, which is UTC-07:00. (Note: The US time change happens the evening AFTER the conclusion of the conference early on Sunday morning)
9:10am-9:35am
9:10am Opening Announcements
9:15am Keynote by Aeva Black
9:40am-10:10am
Alexander Krizhanovsky - Building a CDN edge using open source
Neslihan Turan - Struggles and possible solutions of a local free software movement
10:25am-10:55am
justinribeiro - Free-Riders and the Motivations that Keep OSS Developers Writing Code
der.hans - Intermediate jq: sed for json
11:10am-11:40am
Alanna Burke - The struggle of getting an open-source community off the ground (Re-Scheduled to Saturday, November 5 at 10:00am)
jberkus - The Cloud Native Burrito
11:55am-12:25pm
TheyofHIShirts - The Fediverse @ Your Library
vavroom - The internet is unusable: The disabled view.
1:30pm-2:00pm
Deb Nicholson - Cross-Pollinate Your Volunteering
Bradley Molinaro - Accessible Data Visualization
2:15pm-2:45pm
Dawn Cooper - Finding the right tools for your new job
Richard Littauer - Gulls do gull: Using Node, D3, React and occasionally grep to get insight into bird subspecies distribution
We are extremely excited for the conference which begins… TOMORROW!
There are a variety of details regarding how to attend, what’s on the schedule, and an announcement that’s been a decade in the making below. Please take a moment to read and share!
Attending SeaGL
Since we’re fully online for the third time this year, let’s talk about HOW to actually get online to watch talks and have a super social conference-going experience.
To get started visit seagl.org/attend and follow the directions to join our virtual conference space hosted in Matrix. Once there, you will be able to join rooms where you can view talks, socialize, and get assistance. Throughout the event Patch—our friendly SeaGL seagull bot—will invite you to various spaces making navigation easier.
Each talk has its own room within the virtual conference space. These rooms will move between three subspaces: current, upcoming, and completed sessions. Attendees may join these rooms to chat anytime throughout the conference. Talks are expected to be 20 minutes and if the speaker would like, they have an additional 10 minutes for Q&A, which will be collected from the presentation’s chat room.
Presenters will be delivering their talk on a private video platform. They will be assisted by volunteer moderators (please reach out if you would like to help). Our tech team will then be directing that room’s feed to a continuous YouTube video stream that is viewable within the attend platform or website’s view page.
We had intended to use an alternative to YouTube this year, but ran out of volunteer bandwidth. If you have strong objections to viewing the content on YouTube, but would still like to watch live, we are hoping to provide a solution on a best effort basis. Please consider volunteering to better address this in future years!
As a reminder, our Code of Conduct applies in all virtual conference spaces. You can also read more details about the decisions that informed our tech stack in this blog post.
Scheduled sessions
SeaGL has been striving to bring excellent content from a diverse pool of speakers for ten years and we are so excited about this year’s schedule! Some highlights include:
Keynote speakers: Aeva Black, Sumana Harihareswara, Lorena Mesa, and Ernie Smith
Social food prep and snacking
Afternoon TeaGL tea-time break
Evening trivia and mock/cocktails
and so much more!
Group meal
As SeaGL continues to be virtual this year we’ve been challenged on how to provide social eating events.
The word “trebuchet” might have been hinted at, but interstate launches require more counterweight than we were willing to lift and there are probably laws against interstate food flinging.
Delivery by carrier seagull might be possible, but let’s face it, only the empty containers would arrive. Heck, just trying to fit them with basket french fry harnesses would probably bust a bunch of safety regulations.
In the end the attendee experience committee decided on revision controlled recipes from the SeaGL social-cookbook for food you can make at home. These recipes do not require cooking and can be made with ~30 minute of prep time. Choose what you’d like to make and gather the ingredients ahead of time, then come cook lunch together on Saturday!
This year’s theme
Last, but definitely not least, each year we poll the community for theme ideas and take a vote within the staff. This year that process led to…
Okay, that’s it for now. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read and share this post, and to all of the folks volunteering to make SeaGL such an amazing conference!
If you’d like to volunteer to help—this year or in the future—visit seagl.org/get_involved or send an email to participate@seagl.org. We hope to see you at SeaGL this year!
SeaGL is only two weeks away! We are therefore thrilled to be able to share that Ernie Smith
will be our fourth and final keynote speaker!
Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, and an active internet snarker. Between
his many internet side projects, he finds time to hang out with his wife Cat,
who’s funnier than he is.
We’re SO pumped to announce our next keynote speaker: the amazing Lorena Mesa!
Lorena Mesa is a political scientist turned coder, a GitHub data engineer, Director & Chair of the Python Software Foundation, JOSS editor, and PyLadies Chicago co-organizer. Lorena’s time at Obama for America and her subsequent graduate research required her to learn how to transform messy, incomplete data into intelligible analysis on topics like predicting Latinx voter behavior. It’s this unique background in research and applied mathematics that drove Lorena to pursue a career in engineering and data science. One part activist, one part Star Wars fanatic, and another part Trekkie, Lorena abides by the motto to “live long and prosper”.
Lorena is a tinkerer, explorer, martial artist, cat enthusiast, Trekkie, marathon runner, a “learn by doing”-er. You can find more ways to get in touch on her website.
If you’re looking for good news this week, we’ve got it: Aeva Black will be one of our keynote
presenters at SeaGL 2022!
Aeva Black is an incurably queer geek, passionate about privacy and ethics in
tech. They’re an open source hacker in Azure’s Office of the CTO, focusing on community safety and
supply chain security, and currently serve on the OSI Board, the OpenSSF TAC, and as a CNCF Board
Shadow. In a previous life, Aeva founded the OpenStack Ironic project, served on the board of the
Consent Academy, managed a few small MySQL databases, and lived on a tiny farm in the Olympic
Mountains.
As SeaGL turns ten, relying on the virtual format for a third year, it’s time to talk foundations. How does a Free Software conference approach the transition from in-person to Internet?
First, we considered what we like about our in-person conferences:
They’re accessible: We’re trying to build an open and welcoming community, not an exclusive club. To accomplish this, there is no fee to attend and we minimize the number of barriers to entry. Additionally, we have been hosted in a central location that is near transit lines, eateries, and lodging. In recent years, we’ve also been able to provide childcare for those with children too young to attend.
They respect privacy: Avoiding the collection of personal data can be tricky, our primary solution has been to not require registration. While this may cause us headaches when ordering coffee or pizza, it has been one of SeaGL’s core values from the beginning. Our mailing lists are also opt-in and we don’t share their contents with sponsors.
They’re social: People attend conferences for much more than scheduled programming - a concept commonly referred to as the “hallway track”. We’ve always built in dedicated social time, whether through extended breaks between talks or socializing opportunities such as TeaGL.
They’re civil: Our conference attracts people from many different backgrounds, holding many contrasting views. Over the years we have developed a robust Code of Conduct, of which violations have been rare and well-managed. We are fortunate that our attendees tend to bring an open ethos, leading to understanding and respect.
Now, how do we translate these values to a virtual setting? (Aside from the obvious: avoiding non-free software!)
Access: Going remote has at least one huge advantage over the physical space; people can participate from all over the planet! Whether attending, presenting, sponsoring, or volunteering; we have spread our wings and welcomed folks from at least four continents.
Aside from location, we have also been able to provide resources for disabled participants. For instance, talks now have closed captioning and are recorded for later review (something we always struggled with in-person). Additionally, local residents who might have been mobility impaired can now attend without the strains of transportation.
And of course, our enthusiastic team of volunteers has been working hard to keep the event cost-free to attend.
Privacy: While metadata is unavoidable with networked devices, we have continued to ask ourselves tough questions. How little tracking can we get away with? Is a virtual conference possible without user accounts? Must privacy be compromised for security?
Perfect answers may not exist for each of these, but we feel like we’ve come up with some darned good ones that are continually refined. The last question about privacy vs. security is especially tricky given that we are exposed to more potential abuse online.
Socially: Interacting through text and video is just not the same as in-person. Text is clumsy and can easily lead to misunderstandings. Video calls may introduce latency and exclude the context/space that each person is in. Being behind a screen makes it all too easy to tune out or multi-task.
What’s more, it’s 2022 and we’re all tired of virtual everything…
But these are all challenges we believe that we can meaningfully improve upon. Again, our solutions may not be perfect, but we’ve strived to prioritize the social conference experience.
Civility: For some reason, people tend towards being more mean over the Internet. Misunderstandings may escalate and, especially for a technical audience, abuse tools become a real concern. Traditional moderation methods are still relevant but the speed and scale of a response may be much more challenging.
Community: In-person conferences are very time-bound. Participants may look forward to the next one, but rarely do they stay connected with each other in-between. The virtual environment provides new opportunities to bring people into a year-round space, holding both the conference and free software movement together.
So… what’s the tech stack powering all these values?
For our first virtual conference, we mashed together IRC, Kiwi, BigBlueButton, and Restreamer. It was a hit and the next year we expanded from IRC by bridging into Matrix. Our excitement has only grown about the Matrix project and its goal of creating an open network for secure, decentralized communication. Thus, this year we’ve decided to double-down and run the event primarily on Matrix.
With November rapidly approaching, we’re assembling the pieces yet again! During this process we are trying to responsibly balance the competing goals and questions outlined above. Some of these are fundamentally at odds, some we might have a cleaver solution for, and some are stuck competing for volunteer bandwidth…
Does this vision excite you? Want to hear more details about how we’re solving these problems? We welcome additional wings and beaks! Please contact participate@seagl.org to volunteer today!
Sumana Harihareswara is an open source
contributor and leader who has contributed to pip, GNOME, MediaWiki,
Dreamwidth, GNU Mailman, and other open source projects – and is
working on a book to teach what she’s learned along the way. She has
keynoted LibrePlanet and other open source conventions, spoken at PyCon
and OSCON, performed standup comedy and theater at several tech
conferences, and manages and maintains open source projects as
Changeset Consulting. Her work has earned her
an Open Source Citizen Award and a Google Open Source Peer Bonus. She
lives in New York City.
Did you perhaps forget to submit your talk proposal before the deadline?
Wish you had a little extra time to put the finishing touch on your abstract or to submit a second (or third) proposal?
In that case, we’ve got good news for you. We have decided to extend the CFP deadline two weeks until Friday, August 19.
We will also be continuing to hold CFP Office Hours during this extension.
So be sure to take advantage of this extension and not delay, get your talk proposals in today!
Our goal is for SeaGL to be a welcoming place for first time (and veteran) speakers. We are therefore pleased to announce the launch of SeaGL 2022 CFP Office Hours! Office Hours are designed to provide 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 Program 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) and IRC (#seagl-office-hours on Libera.Chat) or on video at the following times (Times are in PDT / UTC-7):
Mondays from 8:00am-9:00am
Wednesdays from 3:00pm-4:00pm
Fridays from 4:00pm-5:00pm
Saturdays from 1:00am-2:00am
If none of the office hours time slots fit your schedule or if you prefer to interact asynchronously, you can email your questions to cfp-help@seagl.org at any time.
Welcome to the 2022 SeaGL Call For Proposals! Every year, we want to hear from YOU, and we’re always looking for speakers who are traditionally underrepresented in tech, and people with perspectives uncommonly heard, as well as first-time speakers. Because we’re virtual for the third year in a row, there is opportunity for speakers anywhere in the world to submit talks! In 2021, we had talks from three continents!! So let’s take advantage of our virtual closeness for another year.
The Program Committee is the group responsible for choosing and scheduling all of the great talks you enjoy at SeaGL. This year the committee steering the Program consists of:
The SeaGL Code of Conduct applies to all staff, all volunteers, all speakers and keynotes, all attendees and viewers, and all sponsors. SeaGL is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone; regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, nationality, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference staff, volunteers, presenters, attendees, and participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference, without a refund, at the discretion of the conference organizers.
These are more than words, they are a framework that we have used and will use in the future when the situation calls for it. We encourage you to become familiar with the contents of the SeaGL Code of Conduct, as you indicate your strong agreement to these principles in submitting a talk, attending the conference, volunteering, sponsoring, or otherwise participating in the conference.
Talk Topics/Labels
We encourage almost any topic related to open source that you have a personal engagement with. We have created a list of topic ideas you might choose to use — these might give you some ideas.
Security & Privacy: Security Practices (Personal and Industry) and Security Career, owning and controlling your [own] data
Hardware: Free and Open hardware projects
Tools: Command line, databases, web tools, accessibility, open graphics tooling, and more
Tech Culture: FLOSS for EveryOne: how can FLOSS be of help to those outside our immediate community?
Community: Community building, labor rights, & advocacy
DevOps: Open source DevOps, containers, continuous integration/continuous deployment, & monitoring
Licensing & Legal
Performance Art!
Misc: Have a great talk that doesn’t fit these categories? Submit it!
Talk categories and “vibe”
SeaGL is a very special conference. We’re a community-focused Free/Libre Open Source Software annual event in Seattle, and since 2020, all over the world virtually! We’re looking for technical talks from folks who usually give community talks, and activism talks from folks who usually give coding deep dives, and so forth. We would love to see you out of your comfort zone.
We’re an independent bunch but we still like to take care of each other.
We are not looking for sponsored talks, however we’d love to welcome you over at our Sponsorship Prospectus and give you an opportunity 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 not very likely to accept broad introductory talks, but specific, scoped introductions to a discrete part of the Operations or Network/Sysadmin world are very sought after, and we also love talks on the broad theme of “hacking for good”, and personal security as well. Are you making choices for your personal technology outside of Amazon/Google/Apple/other giants? We would love to hear about that too!
We welcome talks you have given elsewhere, but if you have, please indicate so in the abstract (a link would be great) and let us know how this talk will be different.
Talk structure
Talks will be presented remotely. Speakers may give their session live, or pre-record their session for the room moderator to play while they are in the chat session with the attendees.
Talk length is 20 minutes, with another 10 minutes allowed for questions, for 30m total.
We do not have longer time slots available at SeaGL 2022 because the online medium makes it more critical to present yourself concisely. Please do not propose talks that cannot be presented well within the allotted time. If you have a topic that absolutely needs more time, consider breaking your proposal into two talks: an introductory talk and a more “advanced” talk.
Office Hours
SeaGL pioneered the idea of CfP Office Hours, so stay tuned for details, and if you need help in the meantime, please email us at cfp-help@seagl.org, and we’d love to help you work through a good proposal.
How To Submit
FINALLY, let’s talk about how to submit! First, you’ll go to SeaGL’s OSEM and either create an account or log in to an account you have previously used. For those of you who have submitted before, this is the same system as the last several years.
Scroll down to the Call For Papers section, and “Submit your paper now” for your proposal, and then New Proposal. There you’ll input the Title, Talk Type (there is only one - 20m talk), and the Abstract, up to 500 words. Do not put your name or biography in your proposal. Repeated, do not put your name or your bio in your proposal. It is part of our Code of Practice that our initial review is unaware of who the submitter is, therefore any proposal which includes biographical information will be rejected. Your bio will be asked for later.
When you have submitted, you will be taken to a page called Proposals for SeaGL 2022, and you will see your own talk(s) listed there. This is where you will add your bio and the talk label (“track”). Please note, you will not receive an email confirming your proposed submission.
Finally, please find the plaintext link to our submission software here: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2022
