November 8th & 9th, 2024
Love SeaGL and want to help out? Get Involved

News

Why SeaGL?
September 09, 2020

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.

Meet our Keynoters: VM (Vicky) Brasseur
September 08, 2020

SeaGL 2020 is less than two months away. We are thrilled to be able to start revealing our lineup of awesome keynote presenters and to give you the opportunity to get to know all about their amazing achievements through a series of interviews. Our first keynoter is VM (Vicky) Brasseur.

VM (Vicky) Brasseur is an award-winning free/open source advocate and corporate strategist, international keynote speaker, and writer. She’s the author of Forge Your Future with Open Source, the only book detailing how to contribute to free/open source (FOSS) projects. Aside from articles in various publications, she also writes about FOSS, business, and their intersection on her blog.

You’ve literally written the book on Open Source! What did you learn in this process, and can we look forward to more books from you on the horizon? What lessons do you hope people walk away with after reading it?

Writing a book is no small feat and I won’t diminish that, but the content itself comprises generations of knowledge and best practices. A lot of the credit for the book should go to those who came before me and developed those practices through trial, error, and a lot of work. The community did the hard work. All I did was write it down.

I’ve learned that the process of writing the book takes a lot longer than you’d expect. Scope creep: it’s not just for software. You need to keep your work focused. Also similar to software, it’s important to have someone else review your work. The book is so much better because of the feedback from the technical reviewers. I’m so grateful to them for all of their insights, and especially to my friend and editor Brian MacDonald for helping to keep me on task and on topic.

There are two things I’d like people to take away from the book, one each for different audiences. For contributors—potential or otherwise—I want you to recognise that you can contribute, you do belong in FOSS, that FOSS needs you whatever your skillset, and that you can and should take the time to ensure that your efforts help you as much as they help FOSS. The book helps with these things so you have a better chance of being successful with your contributions and overall FOSS experience.

Secondly, for maintainers—who can learn a lot from the book, too—I want you to rediscover the newbie mindset. Many maintainers have been doing FOSS for a long time and have lost the perspective of someone new to our world. Reading the book can help to regain some of that so you can identify ways to make your project more welcoming and easier to use and contribute to, opening the door to better sustainability for your project and the entire ecosystem.

As for whether there are other books on the horizon… I have some ideas that I’m tossing around but if I say something publicly people will hold me to it and I’m ready for that sort of commitment quite yet.

From something you said in a recent blog post, it seems like one of your interests is extending the idea of open projects beyond coding and into other areas. How have you seen this progressing over time? What do you think the future of this idea is?

There are signs that the ethos of open is spreading to other areas. You have open seeds for instance, a movement for collecting and sharing crop seeds that are unencumbered by patents; and open access, where libraries and research institutions are ensuring access to research. I could probably fill a book with case studies of how openness is being embraced across the world (but I won’t 😉).

We need to remember is that needing to open up things like research, seeds, and source code is a relatively new concept. Access to research used to be free and open…if you were a rich, white man. Previously it was common practice to set aside a portion of a harvest as seeds for the next year, and to trade seeds with other farmers. At the dawn of software source code, as most of us probably know, used to be shared freely between computer operators and even manufacturers. It’s only recently that all of these things have become more difficult to share.

While I’m not going to put on my rose-coloured glasses and stamp my little princess foot to demand a return to those halcyon days of (mythical) sharing perfection, I do think that we should reevaluate the default use and distribution models common today. Upon reflection, we may find that many of them are based more on fear or greed than anything else, and that there may be a better way to approach them.

Unfortunately I’m not optimistic that this will happen any time soon. There are some inspiring examples—like libraries throwing off the shackles of ridiculously expensive journal access or TOR publishing going DRM-free for their books—but overall we’re seeing more resources locked behind paywalls and restrictive EULAs, not less. The reopening of our resources will take a lot of attention and diligence, and if it happens at all it will be piecemeal. One farmer choosing open seeds. One university choosing open access. One publisher choosing DRM-free. Each one is a baby step, but those are still steps and move us all toward a more open and sustainable future.

How and when did you get involved in FOSS? What attracted you?

Like many of us who went to university in the 1990s, I spent a great deal of time in the computer lab. While I mostly played on various MUDs/MUSHes/MUCKs/BBSs (as one did in those days), I also toodled around Usenet, Archie, and Gopher. It was on Gopher where my friends and I discovered Project Gutenberg. Documents and books? Just out there for free? Because…sharing is good and helps everyone? While the lab attendant was busy scolding me for blocking the dot matrix printer by printing out Alice in Wonderland, I was busy falling down my own rabbit hole of free culture. This naturally led to discovering Free Software by way of Usenet and the rest is history.

At the time I was a science major, so the idea of freely sharing and distributing research felt natural. What hadn’t occurred to me before that moment was that this sharing, if applied to other areas, could benefit even more people than ever before. Scientists stood on the shoulders of those who came before them, so why shouldn’t others? The power of sharing work to enable and lift up others became a fundamental part of my belief system from there on out. Unfortunately I think we in FOSS often lose sight of that part of the mission: using software to empower and lift up people who otherwise might not have the opportunity.

What FOSS thing are you currently involved with that you think is great, but that people might not be aware of?

It’s not ready to launch quite yet, but I’ve been working on a catalog of governance documents from all over the FOSS world. This sounds like a sleep-inducing project for most people reading this, I realise, but it has the potential to make it a lot easier to establish governance in a FOSS project or even to research various governance models and elements. Trust me, the umpteenth time you need to find examples of privacy or voting or trademark policies as you launch or scale up a FOSS project (as I have), you’ll wish that this resource already existed. I used to make the most progress on the catalog during long plane flights, but since the pandemic started and travel stopped I’ve had to fit it in between my other tasks. It’s getting really close to launch, but as we all know that last 20% of any project somehow ends up taking 80% of the time.

What is something interesting about you that most people might not be aware of?

One of my bachelor’s degrees is in Latin, but that’s mostly because my uni didn’t offer a degree in Ancient Greek. I have four years of university-level training in Latin but five and a half in Ancient Greek. Had that job offer in tech not landed in my lap in the late 90s, I’d have headed to grad school for Classics instead, eventually becoming a papyrologist.

Of those two languages, Latin is the one that still gets the most direct workout, mostly from people asking me to translate phrases from English so they can put them on a patch, seal, or tattoo to look more impressive. The Greek training, however, is used every single day of my life. The teachings of that professor rewrote how my brain works and I’ve never looked at the world the same again. Thank you, Carl. I think about you all the time. You’re wonderful and have changed my life for the better.

Not sure about a topic? We can help!
August 26, 2020

With the Call For Proposals extended, we thought we’d take a moment to brainstorm a few topics that we’d love to see proposed for the event, but so far haven’t seen a large response in the CFP.

Hardware

If you look in the section “About” SeaGL, you’ll see right there that free / libre / open hardware is mentioned as one of the things we’re seeking to raise awareness and knowledge about. This can range from RISC-V and OpenPOWER to the Raspberry Pi, which has open components and is used by many open source projects. Open hardware talks always do well at SeaGL and offer a change of pace from what is otherwise a conference largely focused on software, so we’d love to see them!

Privacy and social good

With 2020 bringing a lot of change to our lives, and SeaGL’s commitment to social good and causes like Black Lives Matter, many SeaGL attendees are curious about where privacy fits into open technology.

Whether you know something about open data sets, the intersection of privacy and protesting, or how we can stay safe when we enable contact tracing for COVID-19 on our devices, these are topics that have touched all of our lives this year. We’re looking forward to to hearing your expertise.

Software foundations

Are you involved with a software foundation? Or have you had a recent experience with them that you’d like to share? Whether you are working on a project within a foundation, or have first hand experience with the inner workings of one, a lot of projects have started moving to this model and there’s a lot of curiosity around the benefits and trade-offs of having your project supported and promoted by one.

Performance Art

Heck yeah, that’s right, we want art at this year’s SeaGL! If it can fit into 30m, let’s see it :) Beat poetry about voter rights? Mathematically generated art? A video game you can stream in less than ~20m? If what you have in mind is reasonably Safe-For-Work, let’s talk! If you have any questions about this, please reach out and we’d LOVE to help, at cfp-help@seagl.org.

  • “Reasonably safe for work” for SeaGL includes talking about LGBTQ topics, labor rights, and as always, computer/device hacking! We take a pretty critically broad view of what is safe, because what keeps marginalized members of our community safe is what keeps us all safe.

Have too many ideas?

We have good news, you can submit multiple proposals! But if you’re an experienced speaker, we also encourage you to reach out to others in your network who may have expertise with one of your ideas. We love seeing a mix of new and experienced speakers at SeaGL, and encouragement from a seasoned speaker like yourself can go a long way to support the next generation.

Still not sure?

Feel free to refer back to our initial CFP for a long list of talk topic suggestions. We will also be continuing to offer CFP Office Hours every Wednesday at noon PDT in #seagl on irc.freenode.net. You can also email cfp-help@seagl.org at any time for help/guidance with your proposal. We are here to help.

Call For Proposals Extended to September 9, 2020
August 20, 2020

First, we would like to thank everyone who has taken time to submit a talk as part of our Call For Proposals.

With that said, we realize that these are not normal times. Many people have been (rightfully) distracted dealing with an international pandemic and fighting against racism. If you are like us, you might have a hard time believing that August has almost come to an end, and we have reached our previously announced CFP deadline of August 19. Hopefully, you have already submitted your proposals, but if not, there is no need to worry.

We are extending our Call For Proposals until Wednesday, September 9 11:59pm PDT

Our hope is that this will allow everyone ample time to submit their talk proposals (or to submit additional proposals). We will also be continuing to offer CFP Office Hours every Wednesday at noon PDT in #seagl on irc.freenode.net. You can also email cfp-help@seagl.org at any time for help/guidance with your proposal. We are here to help.

Call For Speaker Proposals: SeaGL 2020
July 14, 2020

UPDATE - The CFP deadline was extended to Wednesday, September 9th. See CFP extension for complete info. Speaker notifications will go out by the end of September, with the schedule published shortly after. - UPDATE

We are more than excited to invite you to speak at SeaGL 2020! The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL) is a grassroots technical conference dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free / libre / open source software and hardware. This year it will be held remotely for the first time, as we all cope with the global pandemic.

Our speakers play an essential role in the success of the conference. We welcome speakers of all backgrounds who have things they would like to share. Because we’re a community-focused event based in Seattle, we are a great venue for US Pacific Northwest related stuff, but in this unusual year it will be extra-easy for you to present from almost anywhere in the world.

We especially encourage first-time and inexperienced speakers: this is a friendly place to give that first talk. We are currently doing weekly proposal review/feedback sessions as well as email proposal review and feedback. Please bring us your talk ideas and proposals and we’ll help you polish them before you submit them to the CFP. See the Office Hours section of our Speaker’s Guide below for details.

CFP Dates

  • CFP Closes: August 19, 2020 - Midnight PDT
  • Speaker Notifications: September 11, 2020
  • Schedule Published: September 25, 2020
  • SeaGL!: November 13th and 14th, 2020

You can submit your talk proposal here, but we recommend taking a look at our Speaker’s Guide below first for important information.

Code of Conduct

All speakers and attendees of SeaGL must agree and adhere to the SeaGL Code of Conduct for the safety and enjoyment of all organizers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees. We ask that all prospective speakers review and confirm their willingness to abide by the Code of Conduct terms and expectations when interacting with SeaGL.

All members of the SeaGL Program Committee have agreed to operate according to the SeaGL Code of Practice.

Speaker’s Guide

Here’s some more detailed information about submitting your talk proposal to SeaGL 2020.

Talk Format and Timing

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 2020 because the online medium will make 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.

Audience Profile

SeaGL attendees are a diverse lot: in gender, race, and age, but also in technical background and open source involvement. The conference is a friendly one, with people eager to hear personal stories both of open source success and informative failure. The attendees have a high interest in open source community, particularly in ideas for promoting diversity, inclusiveness, and cooperation.

Talk Topics

We encourage almost any topic related to open source that you have a personal engagement with. We have created a list of topic tags you might choose to tag your proposal with — 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!

How To Submit

Important Note: Our conference software doesn’t currently support concealed reviews (talk authors are hidden from reviewers), but we do the best we can to review everything concealed anyway. For that reason, you must not include your name in your submitted abstract. The reviewers may reject proposals whose abstracts include author names.

When you are ready, submit your talk proposal to our conference management software here. The web form will ask you for your name, the title of your talk, and an abstract of less than 500 words that does not contain your name. The web form will also ask you to indicate whether this is your first time speaking, and whether you identify as a member of a group historically underrepresented at technical conferences. Once you have prepared and submitted this information, you may be asked for a bit more information to help identify the intended audience of your talk.

Talk Ideas

Not sure what to propose? Here are some ideas you might use for inspiration.

  • How to get involved in free and open source software
  • DevOps, system administration, infrastructure, CI/CD
  • Career tips and strategies
  • Web development tools and techniques
  • Free and open source licensing and policy issues for users and/or developers
  • Hardware, Embedded Linux, Internet of Things
  • Cloud and distributed services
  • Building free and open source communities
  • Using free software at home, work, or school
  • Free and open source relating to online security and privacy
  • Writing testable open code; testing in general
  • Effective documentation patterns and strategies
  • Free and open software on non-GNU/Linux platforms (Windows, MacOS, etc) These are just ideas: we would love to hear about anything that you think would be interesting to new or seasoned Free/Libre/Open source fans!

Resources and Help

Never presented at a conference or meetup before? Presented but still not feeling confident? It’s OK: even the most experienced conference presenters aren’t necessarily confident at this stuff. VM Brasseur’s Public Speaking repository has collected a lot of resources to help you level up your conference presenting.

Please Note: We always end up being unable to invite a bunch of really great talks. It’s not you, it’s us: we have a limited number of speaking slots and need to draft and balance the conference program. If we turn you down this year, we encourage you to try again in the future (here and elsewhere).

Don’t let fear of rejection stop you from proposing. Please run your talk idea by us — we need you!

Office Hours: Proposal Help and Mentoring

Want to propose a talk but want feedback on your idea, proposal wording, talk title or just on how to deal with nerves? The Speaker Committee is running regular office hours online. We’ll do everything we can to help you be successful with your proposal and presentation, from brainstorming to quick reviews to detailed walkthroughs.

Office hours will be held every Wednesday at 12pm Pacific between July 13 and August 19.

Office hours are held in the #seagl IRC channel on Freenode IRC. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with IRC. You can join IRC via this webchat interface: choose a nickname, and you’re good to go! If you’d like assistance outside of the office hours, please email us at cfp-help@seagl.org.

Final Note

It is easy but wrong to believe that you need to be some kind of professional presenter to give a good talk. SeaGL is a friendly audience who wants to hear your story! Heck, we won’t even have a conference without people like you to talk to us — that’s literally what this event is. Fancy slides and skilled oratory are nice, but all you really need to do is to tell people something interesting and/or fun. Don’t be shy. (If you are shy, check in at our Office Hours for advice on how to tell some friendly strangers a story with less stress — a good way to turn strangers into friends.)

We want your talk proposal! Sorry to sound all demanding and like that, but we couldn’t be more excited and pleased to work with you. Submit early, submit often!.

Finally, please find the plaintext link to our submission software here: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2020

Program Committee Code of Practice
July 13, 2020

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
  • Rachel Kelly
  • Alison Yu
  • Megan Guiney
  • Bart Massey
  • Lyz Joseph

Code of Practice

This is what we believe in and how we operate as we go about our business of building the best possible program and schedule for SeaGL.

As members of the SeaGL program committee and proposal reviewers, aside from the SeaGL Code of Conduct, we also agree to operate according to these values and statements:

Values

We believe in the importance and power of free and open source software.

We believe in putting the needs of our audience and our community before our needs or those of our employers.

We believe in boosting the voices of others above our own.

We believe in mentoring and helping to create the speakers, leaders, and contributors of the future.

We believe in supporting diversity in thoughts and experiences in the talks and speakers we select for SeaGL.

We believe in creating and protecting a SeaGL environment that welcomes all people in safety and comfort.

But what does that mean? Like, practically?

How are these values reflected in how we operate as program committee members and reviewers? There could be many different ways, obviously, but here are some examples of what we will do our best to do:

  • Promote the CFP to all our communities
  • Seek out unreached/underrepresented/underserved communities and advocate for them and their talks
  • As time allows, assist people with their proposals, making it easy for them to propose and what they propose a higher quality
  • Do our best to do all initial reviews without knowing who submitted them, within the constraints of the system
  • Only vote on talks we feel qualified to review
  • Abstain from voting on talks where we made substantial contributions to the the proposal (but we can advocate during the review call)
  • As much as possible, don’t allow our personal or professional biases (or those of our employer) to influence our talk reviews
  • After proposals are accepted, and as time allows, assist people with their talks to help ensure that what they deliver is valuable to the audience

We’re all pleased to have the opportunity to serve the SeaGL community and share this Code of Practice with you. It’s our hope that we can serve as a model for other free and open source events, who can publish their own Codes of Practice.

To help with that, don’t forget that everything published here on the SeaGL website is licensed CC BY-SA. We encourage you to copy, modify, and redistribute this Code of Practice however you and your event need.

Black Lives Matter
June 12, 2020

SeaGL condemns racism in all its forms, systemic, personal, and otherwise. The organizers of SeaGL recognize the ongoing harm being done to the Black community and seek to support Black members of our community directly. To that end, we have allotted honoraria for all Black speakers at SeaGL 2020. We are also looking into the possibility of scholarships or other monetary support mechanisms for Black members of the FLOSS world. We are currently strategizing how best to support and amplify our sister technical organizations who focus on non-white members of our community — we welcome your suggestions of organizations to partner with and support!

In addition, we strive to not only make our community inclusive, but also to enforce BETTER behavior from our white community members. None of us are free from blame, including the nearly all-white organizing staff, and we are redoubling our efforts to combat institutional racism in the tech industry. Our goal is for SeaGL to be an equitable conference by seeking out BIPOC voices, and supporting the Black FLOSS community in every way we can.

Furthermore, we condemn in the strongest of terms, the actions of the Seattle Police Department’s unprovoked violence against the people of Seattle, particularly versus its Black community. We wholeheartedly support the collaborative spirit of the Capitol Hill protests. Our priority has always been to underserved and underprivileged communities, and we want to ensure that for anyone attending SeaGL, or participating in SeaGL-adjacent activities, there is agreement on this point. We recognize that all actions are political, and we will continue to stand by our Code of Conduct in our continuing effort to make SeaGL as free from racism as possible.

Thank you,
SeaGL Staff

Keynote Nominations needed for 2020
May 19, 2020

We need YOU! To help us select keynoters for SeaGL 2020! Please use our form to nominate a keynote speaker. We are looking for open source community members with experiences and stories to share. We are, as always, looking for new candidates who have not keynoted before, who have a different perspective to share. Our community is vast, therefore our keynotes must represent our community.

Submissions are anonymous and you can fill in the (very short) form for as many wonderful humans as you’d like to nominate, one form per nomination. This form will be open til May 24, 2020.

So, please, share

  • your pie in the sky picks
  • your mentor from your local user group
  • someone who has advocated for open source outside of traditional tech
  • someone who has worked on bringing open source to traditionally proprietary-only models
  • someone who has challenged social norms in open source
  • someone who has lifted others up who have challenged those norms
  • your tinker friend
  • your friend known for shitposting clever tweeting
  • someone in your office who recently showed you a shortcut through your favorite tools

And anyone else you think would make a terrific guest of honor at our community-focused open source conference! You can let us know right here. SeaGL will take place virtually and all over the world, November 13 & 14 2020.

SeaGL going virtual due to COVID-19 aka Novel Coronavirus
May 05, 2020

tl;dr

  • SeaGL will be virtual
  • November 13-14, 2020
  • Volunteer at volunteer@seagl.org

We have made the exciting decision to take SeaGL entirely virtual. We are happy to follow in the footsteps of other terrific open source conferences who also want to keep our communities together during this time. The coronavirus has outlasted early predictions, so we are taking steps to ensure the longevity of SeaGL as a community in the event that we are still (or again) under shelter-in-place orders or need to avoid gatherings.

The committees are in deep discussion as to what this means, and we are throwing everything on the table to consider how to truly make this a community event for our speakers, attendees, volunteers, as well as the student walk-ins we welcome from Seattle Central College, our generous physical host. We discussed planning a hybrid event, but landed on full-virtual as that will be the easiest to plan for and predict, particularly for our speakers and keynotes who will know exactly the format they’ll be presenting in when they submit their talk. We want folks to have as much preparation and information as we possibly can offer, and that meant cementing this critical detail.

So! We are so excited to pilot a great virtual event that is community-driven, and we are so excited to have you along for the ride! We’re all new to this, but we really feel like SeaGL is the perfect conference for this adaptation - we’re already free, and the conference is now in its eighth year. Our legacy and our community are what we are. Keep your ears open and watch the twitter at @SeaGL for more info as we get closer to the date, which remains November 13-14, 2020. If you have anything you’d like to share, you can tweet at us up there or message us on IRC at #seagl on freenode, and info@seagl.org.

Also, we are looking for volunteers! Most immediately, we are looking for folks for the Program committee - you’ll be joining a fairly well-oiled machine, given discrete tasks, and get a view of how we run the program. We’re also looking for a dedicated social media human, as getting the word out will be more important than ever, and some dedication on this role will make a wonderful difference. We’ll also need room moderators for talks, and we want to hear your dreams for making an amazing virtual event. Please email us at volunteer@seagl.org to get started, whether for moderation, program, or general volunteer.

So watch this space as always, and until then, please take care of each other, check in, safely, with your neighbors, drink lots of water, and check if your favorite restaurant will do a curbside pickup!

SeaGL update as pertaining to COVID-19 aka Novel Coronavirus
March 20, 2020

Hi everyone, we’d like to give an estimation of what comes for SeaGL during the global pandemic. We are keeping a close eye on it and it may come to pass that we’ll have to postpone or cancel SeaGL 2020, as so many conferences, like our sister conference Linux Fest Northwest, have had to do.

We will give several months’ notice in the event we have to cancel.

However, we’re not ready to make that call yet. We will have more details soon, and we’re also working on a potential virtual solution in the event that it’s not safe to congregate (as it is unsafe to do so now, 20 March). In short, we’re working on an alternate plan, potentially multiple alternate plans. We’ll have more plans as the situation unfolds.

Until then, please take care of each other, check in, safely, with your neighbors, drink lots of water, and check if your favorite restaurant will do a curbside pickup!