News
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.
Part of what makes SeaGL so special are the social events.
They’re a chance to make new friends and catch up with old ones.
This year, we’re bringing in a few new events to go with the returning favorites.
Thanks so much to everyone who’s helping us bring the fun!
All times below are in Pacific Daylight Time
Schedule
Friday, November 5
Saturday, November 6
- 9:15–9:30 AM Costume Contest — Get there early to strug your stuff! We have prizes for Most Creative, Most Nerdy, and Audience Choice. Voting will be open from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM via this form.
- 2:30–2:45 PM Costume Contest Winners announced!
- 2:45–3:15 PM TeaGL — Enjoy some tea drinking and tea talk and meet your swap buddy if you participated in this year’s swap. Fancy hats are always optional, and always welcome.
- 5:30–6:30 PM Tea Sandwiches with Molly and Sri — Two different sandwiches with some options for folks following along at home.
- 6:45–8:00 PM SeaGL Trivia returns with hosts Remy DeCausemaker and Elana Hashman
Attend
All events will happen on the Social Room, except for the DevOps Party Games, which will take place on Twitch. Please take a minute to sign up!
No registration is required for any of these events although you may want to check in on ingredients lists next week.
The food and beverage programming doesn’t require you to have everything to follow along, but it is a little more fun that way.
Lastly, our Code of Conduct applies to the social events.
We expect folks to behave respectfully (but not seriously!) during our social events so that everyone can enjoy themselves.
Daytime events should be considered all-ages, while the later evening events might be a bit more PG-13.
We can’t wait to see you online next week!
Every year, we select a theme for SeaGL, and this year is no different (at least in that regard)!
Without further ado, may we introduce the SeaGL 2021 theme: “on cloud nine”.
“On cloud nine” is an English language idiom that means “a state of blissful happiness.”
That’s the feeling we get whenever we think about the wonderful community of volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees that make SeaGL happen.
The ninth year will be our best yet!
If you know a little bit of German, there’s a variation on the theme: “on cloud? Nein!”
SeaGL is proudly a free and open source software conference.
Our virtual experience is built on open software, much of which is hosted and managed by our tech team volunteers.
We hope you’ll be in a state of blissful happiness when you attend SeaGL on November 5–6.
The speaker lineup is top notch.
We’ll have plenty of social events for you to meet your fellow attendees, including the ever-popular TeaGL tea swap.
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.
We know you’ll be blissfully happy if you join us on cloud nine.
See you soon!
SeaGL is proud to be a safe, welcoming, and inclusive space for our community to gather and share ideas.
We are always working to make sure that our conference is welcoming for people of all backgrounds and skill levels.
As part of this, we expect all participants to abide by our Code of Conduct.
We’ve recently made some changes to our Code of Conduct to ensure that it continues to meet our goals.
We added some examples of behavior that is considered harassment so that everyone knows what acceptable behavior looks like.
There is now a dedicated email contact for Code of Conduct issues so that we can address incidents quickly while respecting privacy.
The Code of Conduct now clearly states that it applies to all physical and online spaces associated with the conference, as well as to anyone participating in any role—speaker, attendee, staff, volunteer, or exhibitor.
Our Code of Conduct has never been about punishment—we hope that by clearly defining acceptable behavior, all participants will be able to help make our space safe and welcoming.
However, we recognize that an unenforced Code of Conduct serves no one.
We take the Code of Conduct seriously and will address any violations.
The SeaGL staff welcome constructive feedback on how we can continue improving our Code of Conduct to serve the needs of the community.
In addition to our Code of Conduct, we continue to take active steps to welcome newcomers with offerings such as:
- Holding office hours to help prospective speakers with their proposals as part of our CFP process
- Reaching out directly to underserved communities to encourage speaking and attendance
- Actively encouraging new speakers
- Conducting the CfP according to our published Code of Practice
All that said, SeaGL is a big-and-little-F free grassroots technical event organized by volunteers.
It is difficult to express how much we appreciate all of those who have participated in bringing SeaGL into its 9th year (THANK YOU!).
We wouldn’t be here without the community that has supported us along the way and we are committed to supporting it!
If there are any questions regarding our conference or the commitments we make to our community, please reach out to info@seagl.org.
If there is a need for further communication regarding the Code of Conduct, please use coc@seagl.org.
Hello SeaGL seagulls! The schedule itself is now published! There will be some additions and some things might get moved around, depending, but this is fairly finalized for the talks themselves!
We’ll see you Friday November 5 & Saturday November 6 for SeaGL 2021, all virtual! As always, SeaGL is completely free to attend and no registration is required. All speakers, sponsors, volunteers, staff, and anyone else involved in SeaGL are required to abide by the Code of Conduct.
Schedule: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2021/schedule
Keynotes
- Marie Nordin
- Elana Hashman
- Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber
- Cory Doctorow
Talks
(listed alphabetically by speaker’s given name)
- Walking The Cultural Tightrope - Aeva Black
- Computing Confidentially in the Clouds - Aeva Black
- FLOSS daily — but FLO all the time - Aaron Wolf, Athan Spathas, Wm Salt Hale
- Your bug tracker and you - Ben Cotton
- SSH from your DevOps CI/CD securely - Bri Hatch
- Good Shell Patterns - Bri Hatch
- Stories from reviving and extending a university’s information security program - Brian Callahan
- JSON Document Validation in MySQL 8.0 - David M. Stokes
- Understanding the MySQL Authentication Process - David M. Stokes
- The Stories We Don’t Tell - Dawn Cooper
- Free Security for Open-Source Projects - Dawn Cooper
- Responding Thoughtfully to a Crisis - Deb Nicholson
- Introduction to Nextcloud - der.hans
- Intro to jq: grep for JSON - der.hans
- Sounds of Open Source archaeology: processing sound with sox - Dmitrii
- Developing on Nextcloud - Elior Sterling
- Building cloud networks: Terraform or Ansible? - Francois Caen
- Building and Supporting Open Source Communities Through Metrics - Georg Link
- Open Source Governance: Six Types and Three Models - Josh Berkus
- Open Source Business Practices - Jim Hall
- Expressive Security - Katie McLaughlin
- Predictive Modeling and Privacy - M. de Blanc
- PostgreSQL Participation in Google’s Summer of Code - Mark Wong
- Birds by Starlight: Tracking Nocturnal Flight Calls Using Open Source Software - Richard Littauer
- Know Your Rights as a Tech Worker - Shauna Gordon-McKeon
- Software Tools for Collective Self-Governance - Shauna Gordon-McKeon
- Lessons Learned from a Ransomware Attack - Ski
- Technically Biased: Taking Free Software’s Niche Appeal Mainstream - Stephen Michel
- Cross debugging on Linux : A history, current state of the art and coming improvements - Thierry Bultel
- Does open source need its own Priority of Constituencies? - Tobie Langel
- Debugging Reproducible Builds One Day at a Time - Vagrant Cascadian
As we get closer to November, SeaGL is starting the process of looking for volunteers to help with several roles across the virtual conference. There are many opportunities to get involved!
Please note, while the schedule is still in the oven baking, please reach out to participate@seagl.org. Once a finalized schedule is formed, we will reach out with a detailed sign up form via email to coordinate training in short informative sessions or via prerecorded instruction.
Help Desk
Folks in this role will assist in answering common questions about the conference, where to find information, when talks are happening, how to navigate to virtual sponsor area or events, etc. We will provide a FAQ sheet and other documentation, and you will have the ability to escalate questions to specific folks as needed.
Speaker Wrangler
Assist speakers in entering the room for presentation, troubleshooting their presentation needs, making sure speakers are at the right place at the right time, and introduce the speaker to the audience. Moderate the Q&A portion as needed by relaying chat questions to the speaker. Give time cues to the speaker, if wished by the speaker. Additional tasks include keeping an eye out and responding to Code of Conduct abuse in the channel and to, as needed, triage to staff to assist.
Career Counseling
The Career event at SeaGL is a great opportunity to share and get feedback on resumes and all things jobs and hiring. Having more folks to provide unique perspectives and feedback to folks seeking counseling is always appreciated.
SeaGL also requires a lot of work leading up to the conference. More helping hands are always valuable. These roles can start ASAP as we gear up for the conference date, and many continue in the time in-between each year’s conference.
Tech
SeaGL has put together a lot of fun tech to make this conference run and can always use help to further the platform. If you have experience with light web development, and customizing Matrix bots (likely a mix of Python and TypeScript) that would be great. More eyes on the development stage and user experience testing would also be great.
Outreach
Outreach handles promotion and community communication through social media and other avenues. They also provide the graphic design support, blog posts, social media blasts, etc. The committee is also looking for another chair to help lead.
Partnerships
Reaching out to partnership leads is an exciting role that involves emailing leads, corresponding and sharing the yearly prospectus, and relaying the results through an internal process. If you are passionate about connecting community sponsors to SeaGL or representing SeaGL in other community spaces, there’s also room for you too! Organization and timely correspondence via email and light Google Sheets skills are the key here.
Volunteers
The volunteer committee could use more support documenting all areas of the conference or in user-testing the documentation that comes about for various users so all volunteers have a guide to work off of.
We are always open to more ideas of how folks can get involved, so if you have anything you’d like to do that isn’t listed above, please also reach out to participate@seagl.org.
We’re excited to share the first part of the SeaGL 2021 program with you—our keynote speakers!
Taking the virtual stage this year are:
- Marie Nordin
- Christine & Morgan Lemmer-Webber
- Elana Hashman
- Cory Doctorow
Some of these names are new to SeaGL and some have spoken here before.
But all of them will be giving great talks that you don’t want to miss.
As in years past, the Program Committee selected keynote speakers from your nominations.
We thank everyone who gave us suggestions.
For the other talks, all speakers have been notified.
Once we have confirmation, we’ll be able to share the schedule with you.
We can’t wait to see you online November 5–6!