News
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!
We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’re hosting lightning talks at SeaGL this year!
Think of this space as a great opportunity to learn about fun topics, or even present your own talk.
It’s a great way to get comfortable with speaking to an audience or to explore the kernel of an idea that could become a full-length talk at SeaGL 2022!
The lightning talks will be a series of 5 minute talks which will be pre-recorded - meaning
that we can accommodate speakers from all over the world!
We’re looking for any community focused talks.
A few examples are:
- Tech examples: Event organization, coding, design, documentation, open source, etc.
- Non-tech examples: non-profit work, hobbies/programs (eg. community gardens), sports teams, theater, etc.
Our one request is that there are no promotions of any kind - meaning, please no video resumes, no company/product promos, etc.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you, our community. Please submit your talk ideas as soon as possible,
as we will be reviewing them on a rolling basis.
Hello SeaGL community,
Some of you might be getting multiple emails from us. We want to apologize for the unintended mailings. Some changes were made to past conference schedules as part of a general clean up. We were working on an archive page that was disconnected from OSEM, our conference software. Unfortunately, there were no notifications from OSEM that emails were being sent to the community.
We are currently working on a shim to stop any emails from going out until all updates are done. Thank you so much for your patience. You can reach out to us on our usual communication channels.
Need a little more time to get your proposal together for SeaGL 2021?
Good news!
We’ve extended the submission deadline to August 19.
This gives you two more weeks to submit a talk proposal about free software, security, tech culture, community, and more!
If you need some ideas, check out our suggested topic categories.
If you have questions about the Call for Proposals process or want feedback on your talk proposal, we have one more office hours session.
Join us in chat or on video at seagl.org/meet at 3:00 PM Pacific on Saturday, August 7.
If you can’t make the office hours, email your questions to cfp-help@seagl.org any time.
When you’re ready to submit, our CfP portal is ready for you!
One of the ways SeaGL supports first-time speakers is by holding CfP office hours.
If you have questions about the Call for Proposals process or want feedback on your talk proposal, you can join us in chat at seagl.org/meet or on video on:
- Sun Aug 1, 3pm PDT
- Tues Aug 3, 5:30pm PDT
- Sat Aug 7, 3pm PDT
We’d love to see you, whether you’re making your first conference proposal or you’re an experienced speaker!
Whether you need topic ideas or want help wrangling the central argument of your talk, we’re here to help.
We’ll also have some prepared topics for each session.
If you can’t make the office hours, email your questions to cfp-help@seagl.org any time.
And many of us are on the channel much of the time besides, so come say hi!
We’re in #SeaGL on Libera.Chat and #SeaGL:seattlematrix.org on Matrix.
The rooms are bridged, so join us on the network and client of your choice.
If you haven’t used IRC before, no sweat.
Join in the browser chat version of the channel, choose a nickname, and you’ll be in!