News
Like other conferences, the shift from an in-person to virtual format forced us to think about the virtual SeaGL experience.
Conferences are about more than just the great talks that the speakers deliver; they’re about the personal connections.
When thinking about what it meant to move SeaGL online, we had to consider how we could preserve that authentic SeaGL feel.
The experience itself isn’t the only thing we value.
As you might be able to guess from our name, the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference values the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
While there are some proprietary offerings that would have provided a glossy user experience, in the end we decided to stick to our core principles.
Thus this grass-roots, community-built Free Software conference will run on a grass-roots, community-built Free Software platform.
The Experience™
Talks will be streamed to a variety of services, including the SeaGL website.
As always, the conference is free to attend and registration is not required.
You also don’t have to interact, but we hope you do.
There’s something nice about seeing each other’s faces and hearing each other’s voices during a time when we’re all stuck in place.
To that end, we’ve developed a web-based interface that combines the video streams and the chat channels.
Each talk track will have a separate channel/room, alongside a number of additional channels for general chat, announcements, etc.
In order to recreate the “hallway track” feel, we have a bot that can create visible breakout rooms on demand.
For instance, if you have a spicy take on software licenses, maybe you want to create a room where you can debate the finer points of your favorite license.
Or if you want to get into a deep discussion about documentation best practices, you can start a room for word nerds.
The idea is to start with an easy, consolidated place for everyone participating in SeaGL.
From there, it’s easy to find the conversations that match your interests or stake out a spot for folks to match yours.
If you want to use your IRC client of choice, you’ll be able to do that—all of the text communication will take place on the freenode IRC network.
Furthermore, we’ll be spending some time after the event to polish up and document the system for anyone who wants to replicate the experience for their own conference.
In the spirit of free software, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants and making contributions to the future.
And, of course, SeaGL’s Code of Conduct still applies.
The Tech
Our technical decisions were driven by a few guiding principles:
- Single chat infrastructure everywhere
- No login/registration required to participate
- Integrate as much as possible in a single frontend
- As much of a full-stack FLOSS solution as possible
- Maximize ease for new speakers
Given the demands on our team of volunteers (and the Free Software ethos), we wanted to reuse wherever we could instead of writing new functionality from scratch.
Not-invented-here is a feature in FOSS.
For the chat functionality, we’ve embedded a Kiwi IRC instance into the SeaGL portal which connects to the freenode IRC network.
Presenters will connect to a BigBlueButton instance graciously provided to us by the Free Software Foundation.
Their video will be broadcast to a variety of third party streaming sites, as well as being sent to Azure for live transcription for display within our embedded chat.
Additionally, to further mirror the “hallway track”, attendees will be able to open up embedded Jitsi video conferencing rooms on-the-fly inside any of the breakout rooms.
Of course, we couldn’t get away with not creating anything.
The orchestration between all of these components is helped along by seagl-bot.
seagl-bot is an IRC bot designed to help ease the IRC experience and make it feel more like a conference.
It allows users to create breakout rooms.
It also supports broadcasting announcements from the organizers.
We’re working on adding some other neat features, too, so be sure to check out the documentation when it’s published.
Thanks
As with any great undertaking, there are so many great people involved!
In particular, we’d like to extend our thanks to Andrew, Don, Keith, Salt, and Tree for their work on putting this all together as well as the rest of the organizing committee who helped with testing and making the final decision go with the in-house design.
And, of course, we have to thank all of the projects we built this solution on.
We’re excited about the SeaGL Experience, and we’re looking forward to sharing it with you November 13th and 14th.
Please invite your friends from near and far to hang out with us!
SeaGL is excited to announce a new feature for 2020.
We will have a Career Expo Thursday afternoon, the day before our conference kicks off in full.
For the career expo, we will provide resume reviews and career guidance via private consultation.
Counselors will be available for 30 minute jitsi sessions ( video optional ) from 13:00 to 17:00 Pacific time Thursday afternoon.
In UTC, that’s from Thursday at 19:00 to Friday at 01:00.
SeaGL exists to support the FLOSS community.
We’re starting 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 an IRC channel for participants the day of the career expo.
Counselors will contact participants via IRC or email to schedule sessions.
The counselling sessions will be conducted via jitsi rooms.
Jitsi provides in browser conferencing with a video option.
No account is required to sign up for counselling 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.
This year SCaLE added an Open Source Career Day thanks to RaiseMe.
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.
Also, luckily for us, Lori B had aRaiseMe event at ShellCon 2020 a couple weeks ago.
That provided an excellent example for running a virtual career guidance event.
We hope that our inaugural 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 ShellCon 2020 for providing a virtual event model for us to learn from.
Thanks also to her for volunteering to help with counseling for our first Career Expo!
##Contact the SeaGL Career Expo
If you have questions or would like to help with career guidance, please contact us at CareerExpo (at) SeaGL.org.
We are pleased to announce that the SeaGL 2020 program is now live!
The schedule is filled with lots of great talks from very talented speakers and spans November 13-14.
Take some time to browse through the list of talks and start deciding which ones you will be attending.
As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual.
SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.
All Speakers And Talks (in non-preferential order):
- 10 Vim Tricks - Bri Hatch
- A Beginner-Inclusive Approach to Open Source - Ruth Ikegah
- Alcohol & Inclusivity in Tech - Kara Sowles
- Building Alternative Networks for Fun and Resistance - Lisha Sterling
- Building Free CI/CD with GitHub Actions - Cameron Bielstein
- Contacts to Connections: CRM funneling for projects and people - Wm Salt Hale
- Crossing the Gender Divide: How I Learned to See My Own Bias - Aeva Black
- Data Liberation: Open Source Observability - Nočnica Fee
- Democratizing Documentation - Megan Guiney
- Demystifying Contributor Culture: IRC, Mailing Lists, and Netiquette for the 21st Century - Jill Rouleau
- Environments - Christopher Neugebauer
- Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator - Mike Hamrick
- First Steps with Swift for TensorFlow - Paris Buttfield-Addison
- FLOSS and You - der.hans
- Gaming for Good: Using Passions and Technology for Social Change - Josh Boykin
- How to Build a Zombie Detector: Identifying Software Quality Problems - Kaylea Champion
- Introducing FOSS Culture at Universities - Suraj Kumar Mahto
- Let’s Make Games with Rust - Elijah C. Voigt
- Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other - Deb Nicholson
- Oops! I Became an Open Source Maintainer - Mariatta Wijaya
- Open Source on the Mainframe in 1960, 1999, and Today - Elizabeth K. Joseph
- Overclocking for your Mind and Body - Rowin Andruscavage
- Patently Obvious - Neal McGovern
- Porting GW-BASIC back to Z80 - Leandro Pereira
- Rise Up for Free Software in Schools - Mariah Villarreal
- Scheduling your Open Source Project - Ben Cotton
- Self-Hosting with Traefik and Docker - Matt McGraw
- Software Freedom through Collective Action - Aaron Wolf
- Stand-Up Comedy about FLOSS - Sumana Harihareswara
- The Open Digital Photography Workflow - Stephen Wilson
- The United States’ History with Free Software and What We Can Do to Improve the Future - Amanda Sopkin
- Time for Action: How to build D&I in your project - Justin W. Flory and Bhagyashree (Bee)
- When does a service take away your software freedom? - Ian Kelling
- Keynote - VM Brasseur
- Keynote - Kathy Giori
- Keynote - Daniel Pono
- Keynote - Máirín Duffy
SeaGL is right around the corner (November 13-14). We’ve previously announced that VM (Vicky) Brasseur and Máirín Duffy will be keynoting. We are now happy to announce Kathy Giori will be part of our keynote lineup this year! We’ve asked Kathy a few questions to allow SeaGL attendees to get to know her ahead of her talk.
What does equity of access mean to you, and what challenges and strengths have you experienced in making FOSS projects accessible to newcomers?
The MicroBlocks project goal behind “equity of access” means that we want to create a learning tool for physical computing, and a community of support around it, that has a chance of eventually reaching EVERY child. That means MicroBlocks must be free and open source software, translatable to any language. It has to support affordable and readily available hardware. We want all students to have a chance to explore physical computing, not just wealthier school districts, or extracurricular clubs, or only english-speaking youth.
What inspired you to get into hardware hacking? What was your favorite early project in that vein?
I got really lucky and while being presented with a high school scholarship from a local company, was offered a summer job in “test engineering”. I accepted and got to test digital control panels, learning how to read schematics so I could debug problems. When I found a problem, I was able to fix it by soldering, or wire-wrapping, or whatever. Eventually I was programming EEPROMS using assembly language to created automated test programs. That first summer job, before even starting college, led me to major in EE. I think my first “hobby” hack was trying to debug my alarm-clock-radio when it had stopped working correctly. One of its transistors had burned/worn out. Back then, the schematics for the hardware came with the product. That openly available schematic and my knowledge of being able to test voltages here and there and across the transistor allowed me to fix my own radio.
Similarly, how and when did you get involved in FOSS? What attracted you?
I had been using computers and programming since an early age and never thought about or learned the value/meaning of FOSS, until I ran a startup with friends in 1999. We were focused on using and producing FOSS solutions. I learned to install and run Linux on a Sony laptop. We ran Linux servers, wrote cgi perl scripts to build web pages, and used VNC to let our users gain access to a “Linux desktop on the net” (through a browser or VNC client or Palm VII). Since then I’ve been at companies big and small, but always pushed for open source approaches. When open source is embraced by and used in industry, along with the community, it becomes a win-win for innovation.
What FOSS thing are you currently involved with that you think is great, but that people might not be aware of?
MicroBlocks
and
WebThings – it’s a project that I worked on while at Mozilla. Unfortunately they no longer have the resources to fund it, so it is being spun out so it can continue in the community. I’m investigating some mission-aligned fiscal sponsorship. I will provide the latest updates during my talk.
What is something interesting about you that most people might not be aware of?
Getting struck by lightning. Fortunately I wasn’t hurt because I was inside a hardened Learjet (it got struck, and conducted the energy from wing to tail). The Learjet was instrumented with many sensors including electric field mills, the data from which I was in charge of analyzing. We were intentionally flying in and around storms in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral, to study the electrification of cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) clouds to determine if we could come up with criteria related to cloud height or radar parameters or anything else that could help determine go/nogo criteria for rocket launches.
Is there anything else you want to share?
Just words of thanks for this opportunity. :)
A fun and important part of building Free Software communities is working with other groups.
This is especially true for Free Software conferences, which are gathering places for many FOSS projects, communities and advocates.
Conferences play an important role in sharing ideas, building friendships and sharing enthusiasm.
SeaGL wishes to work with other organizations to foster broad, welcoming, and diverse communities.
That’s why SeaGL created an Ambassador initiative to invest in those connections among free and open groups.
Would you like to help?
Volunteers are needed to serve as SeaGL Ambassadors.
Ambassadors will provide communication between SeaGL and other organizations.
Ambassadors will also be able to connect with each other.
Our goal is to build a strong network of partners in free and open communities.
SeaGL is an annual grass-roots, community-built Free Software conference.
As such, our primary mission is to build a diverse community through collaboration, mentoring and openness.
By partnering with other communities, SeaGL and partner communities can collaborate in ways that allow us all to do more together.
This is the spirit of collaborative development.
SeaGL uses a mailing list as its main form of communication with Ambassadors.
To volunteer your organization as a partner or to join as an Ambassador, self-subscribe by emailing ambassadors+subscribe (at) SeaGL.org or contact us at participate (at) SeaGL.org.
SeaGL is approaching fast, and we need your help! SeaGL is a completely volunteer run conference,
and with our new new technical landscape we’re going to need some extra hands. Please signup
using our Nextcloud webform
if you’re interested in volunteering. We will then send you information about volunteer training sessions (about an hour) and signing up for specific sessions.
Here’s what we need help with:
Help Desk
Be in our Help Desk IRC channel to answer common questions about registration, recording, talk
tracks, etc. We will provide FAQ fact sheet that will hopefully answer most questions, and give you
direct contact info for SeaGL staff in case a question comes up you can’t answer.
Talk Emcee
Host the talk!
- Be in a dedicated video call with the speaker
- Be in the talk 10 minutes before it starts to chat with the speaker, get name pronunciation + preferences, etc.
- Introduce the speaker if they’d like
- Give speaker time cues if they’d like
- Questions will be asked in the track IRC channel. Ask questions aloud to speaker on video call
during Q&A.
- Enforce Code of Conduct in IRC channel
- Escalate to SeaGL staff if needed
All volunteers will be trained on the Code of Conduct and on their roles 2 weeks before the
conference - if you’d like to volunteer, we will do everything we can to ensure you feel prepared
before the conference!
Please signup if you would like to volunteer. Feel free to email participate@seagl.org if volunteering or have questions. We’re happy to have you help whenever works for your schedule. SeaGL could not happen without our volunteers, and we would love to have you be a part of our community!
Continuing our Meet our Keynoters blog series, it is our pleasure to announce our next keynoter, Máirín Duffy.
Máirín is a senior principal interaction designer at Red Hat as well as the team lead for Fedora’s community design team. A recipient of the 2016 O’Reilly Open Source Award, Máirín has over a decade of expertise in user experience and design in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. Her portfolio includes a wide range of designs for FLOSS including the ChRIS project, Mailman/Hyperkitty, Anaconda, numerous components of the Fedora project infrastructure, Spacewalk, virt-manager, the GNOME desktop, as well as other projects such as the
SELinux and Container Coloring Books.
You are the artist behind the SELinux Coloring Book. Was that as fun to make as it sounds like? Can we expect more coloring books in the future?
Yes, that was an extremely fun project! I’ve worked with Dan Walsh on a number of these so far - The SELinux Coloring Book, The Containers Coloring Book, and the Container Commandos Coloring Book. Dan is a really brilliant engineer and the whole idea was his - he had been using the dogs & cats analogy in his SELinux talks for some time, and wanted some illustrations for an adaptation he was writing for an opensource.com article. He came to me for help, and as the illustrations came along he had the idea to package it up as a coloring book. It’s been an awesome collaboration with him and the books are still quite popular as hand outs (now as virtual PDF handouts, but all the same otherwise!)
I also wrote the script for and mentored a couple of interns on an Ansible coloring book, and the final version of that should be coming out in the next couple of months or so. Finally, my intern from this past summer Madeline has been working on another new one that should be coming out in the next couple of months or so, Event-Driven-Architecture (EDA) and the Three Dwarves. Her illustration skills are really next-level, so I’m anticipating that one will be a big hit! You can follow the progress on that in the GitHub repo.
We also may have another one coming down the line around container security. No solid plans yet, but attaching a teaser. :)
As a UX Designer at Red Hat you’ve been part of improving the FOSS user experience over many years. What’s the biggest positive change you’ve seen in FOSS UX recently?
I think the biggest positive change in FOSS user experience recently is just the number of practitioners who are out there, working with open source projects. I think it’s fantastic to see - I also think it’s part of open source generally being the new default way to go in software. We have more projects starting up as open source, and UX as a practice is more and more recognized as important in the software development community, so those projects as a matter of course are bringing designers on board.
What I would like to see more of is designers working even further into upstream project leadership and getting a seat at the table at that level. I think we are on track to get there, and it’ll further accelerate the improvement of the FOSS user experience.
How and when did you get involved in FOSS? What attracted you?
I was raised in a technologically savvy family well before that was really a thing in the 1980s and 1990s; I remember playing Smurfs Paint ‘n Play on a Coleco ADAM while a preschooler and imagining someday I’d be a computer artist for video games!
When I was in high school, my brother commuted to the state university and studied computer science. At the time, our house only had one phone line, and I was a teenager so that phone line was tied up. A lot. This was often an impediment to my brother’s ability to telnet into his school to compile his homework. He came home with a copy of Red Hat Linux one day and installed it on the family computer so he could use gcc. I loved playing with the desktop, redesigning it and customizing it to my liking - because it was open source, there was a much greater ability to do cool things with it than you had with Microsoft Windows 98 which was the dominant desktop of the time. These were pre-GNOME days, and the aesthetics and generally usability left a lot to be desired. I wanted to help make it better and thought with my own creative background that I had skills that would be worthwhile to contribute.
While I didn’t fully understand or was even aware of the GNU Manifesto or The Cathedral and the Bazaar at the time, I did understand that Microsoft’s monopoly on desktop computing was a widespread problem and it would be better to have usable alternatives. The general concept around free software being an essential freedom for users was a lesson I learned early on in my college career, when I became a whiz with a creative tool called Macromedia Director. I used it for projects my freshman year of college that by my senior year had completely bitrotted due to Macromedia changing focus to Flash and then getting bought out by Adobe. That these extremely expensive tools, both in the cost of the software and the cost of the training to use them, would fall over with no recourse for all of those users who’d bought into it really convinced me of the importance of software freedom for users.
Due to the economic downturn (dotcom bust and September 11th) before I graduated with my computer science degree, there were no jobs to be had. I ended up staying on for grad school and studied Human-Computer Interaction. I used and loved Linux throughout my career in school (going so far as to doggedly use OpenOffice Calc for my physics projects that had been written for Excel), and was definitely thinking that I could apply HCI principles to open source software to further improve it. I ended up doing an internship with Red Hat’s desktop team in the summer during my graduate program and that experience really got me on the right track to become a contributor. I met people face to face rather than over IRC and mailing lists, and the Red Hat folks were wonderful mentors in helping me get involved in upstream projects. I came back to work as a full-time Red Hatter after graduation - if it was open source and needed design, I was happy to work on it, so I’ve always had tons of brilliant opportunities at Red Hat!
What FOSS thing are you currently involved with that you think is great, but that people might not be aware of?
I think the ChRIS project definitely fits this description. ChRIS is a fantastic open source project that is working towards improving healthcare and enabling medical researchers to use many of the amazing (and open source!) medical image processing tools that exist to further advance medicine. I think ChRIS as a project also really illustrates well the point that having the open source technology isn’t enough - it has to be usable, and it has to provide a reasonable user experience to really make an impact. You will learn much more about this project at my keynote. :)
What is something interesting about you that most people might not be aware of?
Tá Gaeilge beagan agam agus ba mhaith liom aon duine a labhairt liom faoi Open Source nó Linux nó UX i nGaeilge am ar bith! I’m an intermediate-level Irish learner (I write my first name in Irish) and I’d love to talk with anybody about open source or Linux or UX in Irish anytime :)
Another tidbit - I only use FOSS to create my designs, all these years. My main tools are Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, KdenLive on a Fedora Linux desktop. I haven’t used any of the Adobe tools in almost 15 years!
Is there anything else you want to share?
I’m really looking forward to SeaGL!
UPDATE - TeaGL signup deadline extended to Monday, October 19th, use the TeaGL signup to participate in our first virtual TeaGL tea celebration! - UPDATE
If you’re a SeaGL regular, or a SeaGL newbie who really loves trying new tea, this news is for you. The 3rd annual TeaGL is moving online, with a virtual tea time AND an online tea swap. The past two years, SeaGL community members have brought enough of their favorite tea (black, white, green, herbal, whatever!) to share, turning Saturday into the most relaxing (and caffeinated) day of the conference.
We’re excited to bring this SeaGL favorite to the 2020 virtual conference in the form of tea
swapping. That’s right: sign up to participate, and you will both send someone your favorite tea and
receive someone else’s favorite.
If you’d like to participate please sign up
here by October 9th at 11:59pm.
Concerned about privacy? We have an anonymi-tea mode that will ensure your TeaGL trade pal doesn’t
know your name or address details.
We’re excited to continue this SeaGL tradition, and look forward to seeing what teas y’all bring to
the tea-ble. Until then, pinkies up!
Update: Meet Patch! Patch’s pronouns are they/them. Patch loves french fries, photos, and of course free software.
Have you ever wondered what our glorious inflatable seagull is named? Currently, it’s anonymous! To
give our feathered friend a name, we’ve been hosting a naming contest on
Twitter and Mastodon for the past
month and are now down to just TWO delightful names: C’gul and Patch. This is proving to be the
premier tournament of any kind this year, and this final match may be the most watched sports-ish
event this Summer. Olympics, shmolympics.
We need YOUR help choosing a name! Vote
now for your favorite and
help christen our seagull!
by VM (Vicky) Brasseur
There was one final question in the keynote interview that the team sent me:
As a long-time contributor to the SeaGL ecosystem (thank you!), how do you view SeaGL in relation to the many other fine FOSS conferences and events you participate in? What strengths of SeaGL keep you coming back?
This question, “Why SeaGL?”, is important enough that it deserves its own post. (Full disclosure: while I haven’t had the time to do so the past couple of years, in the past I was a member of the SeaGL organising committee.)
I’ve spoken at and attended FOSS events of all sorts and feel qualified to say that SeaGL is special. Of all the events out there, SeaGL is the only one I’ve found with a singular focus on bringing FOSS to more people, and bringing more people to FOSS. While other events do a good job of this, SeaGL may be the most welcoming conference I know.
There are a lot of free and open source software (FOSS) events in the world. Some of them are dedicated to supporting and bringing together specific communities, like Fedora Flock or GUADEC. Others, like All Things Open or FOSDEM are more general and are there to support and provide training on many FOSS projects. Then there are the corporate events like Open Source Summit that bring together business interests and help them learn how to integrate FOSS into their companies more successfully.
SeaGL is now and always has been free-as-in-beer to attend. If you can get to the event—which is easier than ever—you can learn from and speak with some of the brightest minds in the FOSS world and it won’t cost you a cent. This is by design. Having the money to attend a conference prevents many from participating in FOSS and diminishes the entire movement. SeaGL has removed the financial burden and is able to welcome everyone to learn about free and open technologies and communities. It’s able to do this thanks to the generous support of its sponsors.
In normal times, SeaGL takes place over two days at Seattle Central College. SeaGL schedules the event so at least one of the days occurs during classes, then flings open the doors and welcomes curious students who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn about FOSS, let alone attend a tech conference. To ensure even more people are able to attend, SeaGL has provided childcare so attendees don’t have to choose between taking care of their family or getting the FOSS training that can help them in their careers.
Of all the events I’ve seen, SeaGL is the most dedicated to supporting and bringing new conference speakers to the FOSS world. Most events aim to bring in and promote big name speakers to help attract attendees. SeaGL prefers to recruit and mentor new speakers, believing that everyone has something of value to share in FOSS. The program committee operates according to a code of practice and is prepared to provide any and all assistance to help bring new voices to the free software movement. Half of the keynote slots are reserved for people who have never stood on a keynote stage before, spotlighting the unsung heroes of FOSS.
People of all genders, races, colours, and religions (operating system and otherwise) are safe at SeaGL. Want to present a talk about a free software tool you built on Windows? You’re welcome here! How you coordinated a Pride Week event using FOSS? Splendid! We want to hear it! A case study on how optimising your free software project for accessibility increased usage across all vectors? Fascinating! Tell us more!
However much the media declares that “FOSS has won,” SeaGL recognises that until everyone is able to enjoy the Four Freedoms, the free software movement will still have a lot of work to do. It does its part by being a welcoming and inclusive event. The one thing that is not welcome at SeaGL is hatred. SeaGL believes in and enforces its Code of Conduct to ensure that all speakers and attendees will not be harassed or made to feel unwelcome or unsafe.
Underlying it all is SeaGL’s fundamental belief that Free Software is for Everyone. Many conferences will do some of these things, but I’ve seen no other conference that does them all, let alone as well. SeaGL isn’t doing this for itself. It’s not trying to be the biggest or most buzz-worthy event. It’s doing the wood chopping and water carrying needed to help build and support the next generation of FOSS advocates, and that’s a pretty powerful thing.