We are pleased to announce the full details for both SELF 2019 and SELF 2020.

SELF 2019 (FB event link) will be held June 14-16, 2019 at the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel in Charlotte, NC. We would like to thank our initial launch sponsors who agreed with us all the way back just after SELF 2018 to sponsor: Oracle/MySQL, Percona, Fedora, Linode, PogoLinux, Altispeed, and The Ask Noah Show. Our call for speakers is open immediately. We will announce an initial wave of accepted talks on March 31st, with RFP closing and final schedule announced on April 15th. To have your talk considered please have it in no later than April 14th 11:59 PM ET. To have it considered for early decision, please have it in no later than March 30th 11:59 PM ET. Our sponsor prospectus for 2019 is up as well if you wish to sponsor. Our room block is open, and as usual hurry, the rooms go very fast. We’re pleased to tentatively announce the following special events as part of SELF 2019: LPI Exams, Ham Radio Testing, Ham Radio Exam Cram, GPG Key Signing, Fiber Track, Zero To DBA, Geeks With Guns, the /dev/random track, and of course the Craft Beer Bottle Share / LAN gaming / whatever our legendary evening parties are morphing into these days. Our propaganda is up and the job board and carpool/room share pages are cleaned up and awaiting submissions. In previous years we have been only in one wing of the Sheraton hotel. Going forward starting this year we now have the entire hotel. This means content expansion and a more serious LAN Party and all sorts of other things are being discussed. So make sure you show up to SELF 2019 and make your voice heard if you fancy (more of this or that) in SELF 2020. And similarly vote in our super short 2 question survey about our theme for 2020 and talk content going forward. 🙂

SELF 2020 (FB event link) will be held June 12-14, 2020 at the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel in Charlotte, NC. Note that while we have already opened our call for speakers, from here forward RFP is being pushed back. RFP will close January 31st, 2020. We have released a draft sponsor prospectus as well. We have a room block open, however the Sheraton will not accept bookings further than a year out. So while this link is good and valid you cannot use it just yet. We’ll send out a reminder email or two about the hotel when the link is working, as the only other time we’ve made a hotel block available this early it booked out shockingly fast (was over 80% gone before the new year).

The website has been updated (look, we switched to WordPress blocks and nothing is on fire …. yet), reorganized, and expanded to match with some changes announced at the 2018 keynote. Of particular note are the following pages:

In addition, changes are coming to how we publish videos and audio. We will no longer be using YouTube as the be all end all for releases, due to YouTube’s oppressive automated copyright enforcement. We had pretty much an entire year worth of videos flagged by YouTube due to the music used in our sponsor ads. We appealed this decision since our sponsors, to the best of our knowledge, appropriately licensed the music in question. YouTube refused to reinstate a single video, and this appeals process takes a month for each video. While our new method of placing sponsors in videos (static image) doesn’t run afoul of YouTube’s copyright robot, it also doesn’t inspire confidence in the platform as a place for long term meaningful and open dialog. As such, we are working to backport the entire updated A/V portfolio (a sobering number of terabytes) to Archive.org as well as Vimeo as alternatives to YouTube, particularly in some European countries like Germany where we’ve had our videos removed wholesale. We’ll still be using YouTube as the means to stream for our remote attendees for now, but we’re looking into having multiple services should YouTube become a pain to deal with in this area as well.