News
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!
Welcome to the 2021 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 second year in a row, there is opportunity for speakers anywhere in the world to submit talks! In 2020, we had talks from four continents!! So let’s take advantage of our virtual closeness for another year.
Details
CfP Open: Thursday 24 June 2021
CfP Close: Thursday 5 August 2021Thursday 19 August 2021
Acceptances: Early September 2021
Finalized Speakers: Mid September 2021
Program Published: Late September 2021
CONFERENCE: Friday 5 November and Saturday 6 November 2021!
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 (co-chair)
- Rachel Kelly (co-chair)
- Monica Ayhens-Madon
- Remy DeCausemaker
- Megan Guiney
- Sri Ramkrishna
- Alison Yu
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 labels you might choose to use — these might give you some ideas.
- Security: Security Practices (Personal and Industry) and Security Career
- Hardware: Free and Open hardware projects
- Leaving the Walled Garden: Owning Your Own Data
- 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
- Virtual meetings & “meatspace”
- DevOps: Open source DevOps, containers, continuous integration/continuous deployment, & monitoring
- Licensing & Legal
- Career Development in FLOSS software and hardware
- Performance Art! Seriously :)
- 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 last year, 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. The categories we used last year were, loosely: Security, Community, Career Development, Tech Culture, Tools, Virtual Life & Work, DevOps, Performance Art! and Miscellaneous, and we had amazing submissions as a result, like Devops Standup and several talks on labor organizing! 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 2021 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 2021, 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/seagl2021
Thank you!
Thank you!! Please email us or tweet at us with any questions! And don’t forget to Submit Early, Submit Often!
Like many other conferences, the SeaGL staff has given a lot of thought to the format.
After much discussion and consideration of the general landscape, we have decided that SeaGL 2021 will be a virtual event.
Last year’s first-ever virtual SeaGL was a great success, and we’re confident that we can deliver another delightful virtual experience this year!
We loved how the remote format brought SeaGL to a wider audience, although we absolutely miss flocking together.
Seagulls are not particularly known for clairvoyance, and we didn’t feel as though we could predict what the pandemic situation will look like in early November.
We are encouraged by the progress being made on vaccinations, but we understand that many people will still be hesitant to attend in-person events.
We’re still holding open the idea of doing an in-person meetup for those of you in the Seattle area, but the conference proper will remain online in 2021.
Join us on the Internet, Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 2021!
We will be announcing the Call for Participation soon.
In the meantime, we’re always looking for more help with planning the conference.
Please reach out to participate@seagl.org if you’d like to help with a well-defined, well-supported volunteer role as we ramp up to this year’s conference organization.
Many of our volunteers have been helping with the conference for years, so you’ll be joining an established team of people who care deeply about free software and community in equal measure!