News
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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
5:45pm-7:15pm party block
- Cocktails and Mocktails with Mako!
Edited 26 Oct 2023 to add new Signal pack
Have you always wanted to channel your inner Patch the SeaGL seagull but you didn’t know how?
We have good news for you: you can now add Patch sticker sets to popular messaging applications!
Click the links below to add them to your app of choice.
These digital stickers allow you to express yourself the way Patch would in a variety of situations, including their two favorite activities: eating fries and drinking tea!
Best of all, they’re available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, which means you can remix to your heart’s content.
Please credit alexlexi on Fiverr when providing attribution.
We’ll add more stickers to the pack in the future, so let us know what should be in the next round.
In the meantime, enjoy letting your inner seagull fly!
Matrix instructions
To enable SeaGL stickers in Matrix, follow the instructions below.
Note that these instructions are for the Element web client.
If you’re using another client, the steps may not be the same.
- Go to any room that you can access
- Click the name of the room at the top to open the room settings
- Select the Advanced tab and click the Open Devtools button
- Click the Send Account Data button
- In the Event Type field, type
m.widgets
- In the Event Content field, enter the content below.
Be sure to replace “@you:matrix.server.name” with your account and server.
For example: “@patch:seagl.example.org”
- Click the Send button
- Click the “X” in the upper-right to close Devtools and then again to close the room settings
- Send a sticker in any room with the Show Stickers icon!
Event content information:
{
"stickerpicker": {
"content": {
"type": "m.stickerpicker",
"url": "https://seagl.org/stickerpicker/web/?theme=$theme",
"name": "Stickerpicker",
"data": {}
},
"sender": "@you:matrix.server.name",
"state_key": "stickerpicker",
"type": "m.widget",
"id": "stickerpicker"
}
}
Over the last few months, we’ve collected name suggestions for our official color palette.
Sure, you could refer to the colors by their RGB values, but wouldn’t friendly names be so much better?
Well now it’s time to see which names are the best.
Vote now to select your favorites.
Voting is open through noon Pacific on Saturday, November 6.
The winning names will be announced in the closing remarks on Saturday afternoon.
Thanks for your input and we can’t wait to see you online this weekend!
SeaGL is excited for the return of our Virtual Career Expo on Friday, November 5th.
For the career expo, we will provide resume reviews, career guidance, practice interviews, and job seeking assistance via private consultation.
Counselors will be available for 30 minute jitsi sessions (video optional) starting at 10:00 Pacific time Friday morning.
Counseling sessions will wrap up by 17:00 Friday afternoon.
SeaGL exists to support the FLOSS community.
We started the career expo to help people find and nurture careers working in and with FLOSS.
Like other aspects of SeaGL, the career expo is dedicated to providing a harassment-free, inclusive experience that follows our Code of Conduct.
Career Expo Enrollment
Please sign up using our Nextcloud form if you would like to book a session.
There is no charge for participating in the career expo.
Resume Review
It is beneficial if our counselors can review resumes ahead of the expo.
We ask resumes be made available as soon as practical to allow our counselors to determine their own review schedule.
As counselors might wish to make notes, please provide resumes in a writeable free and open format such as LibreOffice ODT or plain text.
We can also make notes on an annotatable format such as PDF.
Day of Participation
We will open a Matrix channel (with an IRC option) for participants the day of the career expo.
Counselors will contact participants via Matrix, IRC or email to schedule sessions.
The counseling sessions will be conducted via jitsi rooms.
Jitsi provides in browser conferencing with a video option.
No account is required to sign up for counseling sessions or to use jitsi.
Background
Hans started the Free Software Stammtisch career nights as a means of helping his students enter the field or further their careers.
Thanks to generous volunteering from other counselors, the career nights have helped many people over the years.
The job nights led to working with the job board and career guidance events at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE).
We found career guidance events such as “Ask a recruiter”, “What a hiring manager looks for” and “Resume reviews” to garner significant interest.
Our first resume review event was scheduled for one hour, filled the room and ran for 3 hours.
At SeaGL we added a job board, but found it wasn’t sufficient for what we wanted to offer.
In 2020 RaiseMe worked with SCaLE to add Open Source Career Day
Then, the pandemic hit and everything went virtual.
As it turns out, the pandemic actually provided opportunity.
Going virtual gives us access to assistance from counselors who don’t usually make it to Seattle.
We hope that our 2021 virtual career expo will provide value to our community.
Thank Yous
SeaGL wants to thank the career counselors who are volunteering their time for the career expo.
We also want to thank our volunteers and sponsors who make SeaGL possible.
Thanks especially to Lori B and her RaiseMe program at events like ShellCon and LayerOnefor providing a virtual event model for us to learn from.
Thanks also to her for volunteering to help with counseling for our Career Expos!
If you have questions or would like to help with career guidance, please contact us at CareerExpo (at) SeaGL.org.