---
layout: post
title: 'Announcing the SeaGL 2020 theme ...'
status: publish
type: post
published: yes
categories: news
tags: '2020'
---

Planning volunteer run conferences such as SeaGL always takes a lot of ongoing work from a dedicated core. It also takes a lot of people to volunteer during the conference itself.

For SeaGL, our focus remains on our community, especially our attendees and speakers. They're why we put on the conference. That is you, you are why we make SeaGL every year. You are our focus as the programming team selects talks and builds the [schedule](/news/2020/10/26/program-2020), also as SeaGL decides what features we're going to offer.

Two years ago that focus led us to add no cost [day care](/news/2018/10/04/Free_Childcare_Free_Lunch) ( also thanks to a generous sponsor to pay for it ).

We decided in April go virtual this year as it was the responsible thing. We want a great experience for our community and that doesn't happen if you can't attend or if you have to risk your health to do so.

We wanted to make sure speakers and attendees had time to plan for remote attendance rather than making it a surprise. This is why we spent the last 7 months working on remote conference experience.

Our theme was also decided fairly early on, one to highlight our focus on you, our community.

As we approach the conference starting in less than a week, it is time to unveil that theme.

\*drum roll\*

Don't peek :)

The SeaGL 2020 theme is ...

"OSI Layer 8: freeing the people"

Going virtual this year added a new layer for us and a new dependency on networking (the OSI model) to make our talks available. The top of that model is the presentation layer. But, for us, our presentations aren't our focus. You, our community, are.

We love our presenters and we're so happy to have a wonderfully diverse, dedicated group of people helping us provide some fantastic content. We're also happy to have new speakers who've never spoken for us and perhaps never at a conference before. New voice bring new perspectives and new experience.

Through all the changes we've for SeaGL this year, through all the new features we needed for delivering the content, we wanted to keep our focus on helping you, the people.

A number of posts will be released in the coming days about our tech stack for delivering the conference experience. We will cover the work we put in to use FLOSS for most things attendees interact with. We will celebrate how easy some tasks were due to amazing FLOSS tools.

This year we continued our tea swapping tradition by adding a virtual tea exchange for TeaGL, using a Nextcloud form for the signup. As part of our commitment to privacy we included an anonymi-tea option. We also used Kdenlive to create our [TeaGL toasts](https://mastodon.social/@SeaGL/105049083765428489). Please post one if you'd like to participate. We continue to use FLOSS for our conference planning system (OSEM).

We're using another Nextcloud form for the volunteer signup. See our [call for volunteers](/news/2020/10/05/call-for-volunteers) if you'd like to hlpe. We have two training sessions left.

We look forward to seeing all of you on Friday and Saturday, November 13th and 14th, to celebrate you, our esteemed guests, at [SeaGL 2020](/news/2020/10/26/program-2020).
