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News

SeaGL 2022 Call For Proposals Extended
August 04, 2022

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!

SeaGL 2022 CFP Office Hours
July 22, 2022

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.

SeaGL 2022 Call For Proposals
July 06, 2022

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.

Details

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

Committee and Code of Practice

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:

  • Nathan Handler (chair)
  • Dawn Cooper
  • Donald Robertson
  • Lee Damon
  • Lucy Voigt

As in prior years, we agree to abide by the SeaGL Program Committee Code of Practice.

Code of Conduct

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

Thank you!

Thank you!! Please email us or tweet, or mastodon at us with any questions! And don’t forget to Submit Early, Submit Often!

Virtual SeaGL in 2022
June 28, 2022

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.

Kicking off SeaGL 2022
April 20, 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!

Now Accepting Nominations for SeaGL 2022 Keynotes
April 15, 2022

One of the things that makes SeaGL unique from other conferences is that our community helps us select our keynote speakers. For the next two weeks, we will be accepting nominations for people you would like to see present this year’s keynote talks.

While you are welcome to nominate yourself, we encourage you to take some time to think about other people you have seen present in the past who you think have an important message to share and nominate them as well.

To nominate someone, please use our keynote speaker nomination form. You can submit as many nominations as you want (the more the merrier!), and all submissions are completely anonymous. The form will be open until Friday, April 29 at 11:59pm PDT.

Nominees need not have prior keynote experience; we are interested in both new and veteran keynote presenters. If they have been doing exciting work in the Open Source community and have and exciting story to share, we want to know about them! We also strive to have representation from a broad range of backgrounds.

We challenge you to think about people who

  • You go out of your way to read all of their Open Source posts on social media
  • Might only have a small following, but are doing amazing work in their own little corner
  • Has done work to empower others and challenge social norms
  • Are always tinkering with new and exciting projects that inspire others to try new things
  • Are slowly, but steadily, working to make the Open Source community and the world a better place for everyone and nominate them to be a SeaGL Keynote presenter!

SeaGL will take place November 4-5, 2022.

SeaGL archives available!
January 14, 2022

Welcome to 2022, the year of the tenth SeaGL! We’re still months away from this milestone, so we have something to hold you over. Archives of the first nine SeaGLs are now available.

Each year’s archive contains a full list of the talks. Every talk has a page that includes the title, speaker(s), and abstract. Where we have recordings, you can watch them right there in your browser. We can’t thank The Internet Archive enough for hosting these videos. If the speaker provided us with slides, those are available, too.

Whether you missed a talk you really wanted to see or loved a talk so much that you want to re-watch it, the SeaGL archive has what you’re looking for. We hope you enjoy SeaGLs past as we start thinking about SeaGL 2022! SeaGL is run by all-volunteer team. If you’d like to be involved, reach out to us.

Thank you for a great 2021!
November 19, 2021

Well, SeaGL 2021 happened and hopefully we’re all on cloud nine. Our second virtual SeaGL was a flying success! It was great to connect folks from around the world, sharing our love of free software and free culture together. And of course, all of the surrounding social events were delightful and insightful as well.

There are just so many people we want to thank! The keynotes from Marie Nordin, Christine Lemmer-Webber, Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber, Elana Hashman, and Cory Doctorow were awesome. And truly, all of the presentations were fantastic. Join us in a big thank you to all of our speakers for sharing their time with the community. Ahem, and if you happen to be a speaker, please be sure to check your email for information about this year’s speaker gifts!

SeaGL couldn’t happen without our many wonderful volunteers giving countless hours to the effort. Our heartfelt thanks go to everyone who helped speakers, built our attendee platform, designed our social media images, advised the career expo, and all of the other tasks, major and minor, that went on for months and minutes behind the scenes. SeaGL is first and foremost a grassroots conference, and our volunteers are what keeps it that way. If you want to be a part of SeaGL 2022, it’s never too early to think about volunteering!

Last, but certainly not least, even a volunteer-run conference has expenses. We would of course like to thank the SeaGL 2021 sponsors. In particular, thanks goes to our platinum sponsors—Amazon Web Services and JMP.chat—as well as our gold sponsors—C-SATS, Google, Schedules Direct, and the Ubuntu Community Fund. Thanks also to our silver and bronze sponsors, our media sponsors, and the many other organizations and projects that helped make SeaGL 2021 a resounding success.

We can’t wait for you to join us November 4–5, 2022 for the tenth year of SeaGL!

SeaGL 2021: DAY 2!
November 06, 2021

Welcome to the second and final day of SeaGL 2021! Please find the full SeaGL 2021 program, and you can read on for just today’s schedule, for Saturday, November 6, 2021. As a reminder, SeaGL 2021 is completely virtual for the second year in a row. The conference is also completely “free as in tea” with no registration required. Everyone is welcome to attend!

You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.

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 are 5 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.

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.

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 on Saturday)

  • 9:15am Morning Announcements and Costume Contest
  • 9:30am Keynote by Christine Lemmer-Webber and Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber

10am-10:30am block

  • Dawn Cooper - Free Security for Open-Source Projects
  • David M. Stokes - Understanding the MySQL Authentication Process
  • Shauna Gordon-McKeon - Know Your Rights as a Tech Worker

10:45am-11:15am block

  • François Caen - Building cloud networks: Terraform or Ansible?
  • Tobie Langel - Does Open Source need its own Priority of Constituencies?
  • Aeva Black - Walking the Cultural Tightrope

11:30-12pm block

  • Dmitrii - Sounds of Open Source Archaeology: Processing Sound with Sox
  • Aeva Black - Computing Confidentially in the Clouds

1:15pm-1:45pm block

  • Brian Callahan - Stories from Reviving and Extending a University’s Information Security Program
  • Josh Berkus - Open Source Governance: Six Types and Three Models
  • Thierry Bultel - Cross debugging on Linux : A history, current state of the art and coming improvements

2pm-2:30 block

  • Vagrant Cascadian - Debugging Reproducible Builds One Day at a Time
  • Jim Hall - Open Source Business Practices
  • Richard Littauer - Birds by Starlight: Tracking Nocturnal Flight Calls Using Open Source Software

2:45pm-3:15pm break block

  • Winner announced from this morning’s Costume Contest!
  • Saturday TeaGL!

3:30pm-4pm block

  • Katie McLaughlin - Expressive Security
  • Stephen Michel - Technically Biased: Taking Free Software’s Niche Appeal Mainstream
  • Ben Cotton - Your Bug Tracker and You

4:30pm-4:50pm Closing Keynote block

  • Cory Doctorow - Seize the Means of Computation!

5:30pm-6:30pm party block

  • Make Tea Sandwiches with Molly and Sri!

6:30pm-8pm party block

  • Trivia Contest with Remy and Elana for fun and prizes!

SeaGL 2021: DAY 1!
November 05, 2021

Welcome to the first day of SeaGL 2021! Please find the full SeaGL 2021 program, and you can read on for just today’s schedule, for Friday, November 5, 2021. As a reminder, SeaGL 2021 is completely virtual for the second year in a row. The conference is also completely “free as in tea” with no registration required. Everyone is welcome to attend!

You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.

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 are 15 minute periods between talks (except for between sessions 1 and 2 and the Lighting Talk block this morning only, where there are only 10m), which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. 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 on Saturday)

  • 9:00am Opening announcements and welcome by Wm Salt Hale
  • 9:10am Keynote by Elana Hashman
  • 9:35am Keynote by Marie Nordin

10:10am-10:40am block

  • Aaron Wolf, Athan Spathas, Wm Salt Hale - FLOSS daily - but FLO all the time
  • Deb Nicholson - Responding Thoughtfully to a Crisis
  • Bri Hatch - SSH from your DevOps CI/CD securely

10:50am-11:20am block

  • Mark Wong - PostgreSQL Participation in Google’s Summer of Code
  • der.hans - Intro to jq: grep for JSON
  • M. de Blanc - Predictive Modeling and Privacy

11:30-12pm Lightning Block!

  • Athan Spathas - GLass Beatstation Updates
  • Aaron Wolf - Preach Only What You Practice
  • Kaylea Champion - TIL… 10+ Findings from 2021 Global FLOSS Research in Five Minutes

1:15pm-1:45pm block

  • David M Stokes - JSON Document Validation in MySQL 8.0
  • Ski - Lessons Learned from a Ransomware Attack
  • der.hans - Introduction to Nextcloud

2pm-2:30 block

  • Dawn Cooper - The Stories We Don’t Tell
  • Elior Sterling - Developing on Nextcloud

2:45pm-3:15pm break block

  • Friday Booth Crawl!

3:30pm-4pm block

  • Bri Hatch - Good Shell Patterns
  • Shauna Gordon-McKeon - Software Tools for Collective Self-Governance
  • Georg Link - Building and Supporting Open Source Communities Through Metrics

4:30pm-5:30pm party block

  • Devops Party Games!

5:45pm-7:15pm party block

  • Cocktails and Mocktails with Mako!