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.
Aeva is on twitter @aevavoom
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!
We are excited to be able to announce the first of our amazing keynote presenters for SeaGL 2022: Sumana Harihareswara!
Image Credits Alison Wilgus
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.
Sumana microblogs in the Fediverse and on Twitter.
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):
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.
CfP Open: Wednesday 6 July, 2022
CfP Close: Wednesday 3 August, 2022 Friday 19 August, 2022
Acceptances: Early September 2022
Finalized Speakers: Mid August 2022
Program Published: Mid September 2022
CONFERENCE: Friday 4 November and Saturday 5 November 2022!
Submit at: OSEM
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:
As in prior years, we agree to abide by the SeaGL Program Committee Code of Practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Thank you!! Please email us or tweet, or mastodon at us with any questions! And don’t forget to Submit Early, Submit Often!
SeaGL has decided to remain virtual for our 10th conference, on November 4th and 5th, 2022. The SeaGL staff have given a lot of thought to the format, and we want to avoid last-minute venue changes and disruption of travel plans due to health and safety requirements. We look forward to running a hybrid event and seeing people in person for our 11th conference in 2023.
As hinted above, planning for this year’s event is already underway. We are in the process of arranging keynote speakers, and our Call for Papers will be opening this month. We are also starting promotion to attract you, our audience.
SeaGL is an inclusive, grass-roots FLOSS conference with volunteers from many time zones and multiple continents. In addition to Matrix, IRC, and mailing lists, we coordinate with bi-weekly meetings in Jitsi (18:00 Pacific Time on Tuesdays). Please contact us via email, Matrix or IRC if you would like to participate. Specifically, the following committees could use some extra help this year:
Partnerships - finds and signs sponsors; partners with community organizations
Public Relations - creates, edits and manages PR materials such as blogs posts, social media strategy and SeaGL artwork
IDEA (Inclusion Diversity Equitable Accessible) - outreach to improve our interaction with the entire community
Volunteer - mostly volunteer coordination leading up to and during the event while also reaching out for new volunteers throughout the year
Tech - we have a strong tech team, but there’s always more we’d like to build
Let us know you’d like to volunteer for SeaGL at:
Email - participate@SeaGL.org
Matrix - https://matrix.to/#/#SeaGL:seagl.org
IRC - #SeaGL on Libera.chat
SeaGL is a grassroots conference. It exists for the community and because of the community. If you want to help, we’re always looking for volunteers.
SeaGL will take place November 4-5, 2022.
Do seagulls hibernate? Maybe! But after a winter of resting our feathers, it’s time to take flight again. And this year is special: it’s the tenth SeaGL! That’s right: a whole decade of free and open source software enthusiasts coming together.
Every SeaGL has been special, but we want to make this year even more special. To do that, we need your help! SeaGL has always been a free—as in freedom and tea—grassroots technical summit. That doesn’t happen without our amazing community volunteers. If you’re willing to lend a wing, we want to hear from you. And if your employer wants to join our illustrious list of sponsors, we’ll have a sponsorship prospectus soon.
You may have already seen our call for keynote nominations. We’d love to hear your suggestions for keynote speakers. If you’d like to speak in one of our program tracks, the call for participation will be posted in the coming months.
One thing that you may be wondering is: where will SeaGL 2022 be? The last two years, we have had a virtual SeaGL with great success. Being virtual has allowed us to reach all parts of the globe and make new friends we’d have never met. But we also know that there’s something special about being together in person that just can’t be replicated online. The safety of our community is paramount, so we’re still working on a plan for this year.
However we get together, we hope to see you November 4–5!