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Women Techmakers Vienna 2015 Conference

The second edition of Women Techmakers Vienna took place on the 7th March 2015. For this one day event me and my team worked voluntarily 4 months. Rather short organizing time and still the event was a full success! This was due to our driving motivation and commitment to the topic. Read more about the composing team on our website.
The success of the event was due to a combination of different factors. Fist of all was probably the motivation of the team, the wonderful venue at the Microsoft Vienna Office and the interest in the topic of the event which came from the community and the participants.
The agenda of the day was split in 3 tracks: talks, adult workshop and kids workshops.

WTM15 schedule
We tried to invite speakers from each STEM field. The only one we didn’t manage to find was someone with Mathematical background. Instead of this talked we decided to go for a social aspect talk which was the first one opening the conference. We also looked to keep the talks rather technical but combined with personal experiences. The final Panel Discussion was intended for more sharing and QA session with our speakers.  The Discussion Panel session exceeded my personal expectations because we managed to create a comfort place where our participants also started to share, ask questions and add advice. It left me personally with an inner satisfaction about the community in Vienna which is interested in gender issues. A lot of positive energy was transferred and exchanged at the conference day.

Some statements from our participants:

  • “my kids loved the children workshop!!!”
  • “Was a great event, much more than I expected, will definitely like to be part of the next event.”
  • “it was a very nice event to network”
  • “great job! I had a great time, met wonderful people, and there was a lot of food for thought. I am looking forward to WTM 2016!”

For this event we decided to try something new: offer workshops for children. I met Horst Jens a while ago and he offers programming courses for children. He teaches kids how to program through games. Read more on his website spielend-programmieren.at.  We had a round 17 kids at the morning and afternoon workshops and a lot of positive feedback.

WTM15 participants ratio

At the main event we had 78 people attending. We were trying hard to attract a 50%-50% gender balance. Talking to the participants we understood that the name of the event had a lot to do with the higher number of females attending. There was a bias from the beginning such that people thought the event was female only. The goals we set out to reach, from the gender perspective were:

  • 100% female speakers
  • 50%-50% gender balanced participants
  • at least some girls in the children workshops

You can read more about our Vision, Mission and Values we created for our event on the dedicated Women Techmakers Page on my website.

WTMVIE in the Press:

Sponsors:

sponsors #WTM15

Introduction to Semantic Web

Hitchhiker’s guide to the Semantic Web

What? There is more to the web than what we know? But why? What is semantic web? Why do we need it? How does it look like? How do we use it? Where is this applicable? What does linked data got to do with it? Is this the future of web?

I was invited in March 2015 at the Women Techmakers Istanbul event where I got to hold an introduction about Semantic Web.


“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”  Tim Berners-Lee [1]

————

[1] The Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, Scientific American, 2001

Data Statistics View Project

Today is my last day at my Project Assistent job at Vienna University of Technology. I did some summing up of my work and polished the TwitterAPI and also the Data Statistics View code. I want to share my implemnetation of the Data Statistics View code. This was done with html, php, javascript and SQL.  The project can be used for any data types stored in a SQL database.

One of my tasks at university was to download data from the Twitter public stream and analyse it. This work was easier with a tool that allows visualizing the number of downloads per hour/day/month.
The API I used to download tweets  is the one based on Adam Green’s implementation called 140dev. He also has a visualizing tool for the downloaded tweets. However this has less to do with numbers rather much more with the tweet texts.

The code for my implementation can be found on my GitHub repository.
It contains simple bar charts of the number of tweets downloaded.

Bar chart example
 

Working with the Twitter public stream I navigated a lot of questions which I found or did not find answeres to:

  • How can one download tweets only for a specific country?
  • When is the rate limit reached?
  • If the rate limit is reached how loang do I have to wait until I can download again?
  • Why do some Twitter user accounts work and some do not?

And so on…

My time at university was only one part about these and the rest I will probably tell in another post.

AngularJS Workshop

During the Code Week Vienna 2014 , Google Developer Group(GDG) Women Vienna organized an AngularJS beginners workshop. I had the honor to be the trainer of the workshop.

The experience of delivering a training is entirely new compared to learning a tutorial on your own. Already in the preparation of the tutorial I learned a lot. I also got some feedback from the participants and mostly I noticed while I was presenting what was missing. I wrote down what went wrong and also what was good. From the feedback and my own observations I came up with a new improved presentation and more organized tutorials.


Skeleton application : Angular seed
Tutorial page: Intro to AngularJS
Tutorial code: https://github.com/theRealImy/testAngular
Project work: https://github.com/edemguru/angularWorkshop

What is Women Techmakers?

About Women Techmakers

Women Techmakers Vienna is part of an international event series initiated by Google whose goal is to make women in tech more visible and to help build a better understanding community. (read more on www.womentechmakers.com) The consequences of gender discrimination in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers are often overlooked, despite them affecting men and women equally. Gender differences very often lay at the core of gender issues in STEM, and so it is important that these differences are understood and embraced by both genders so that we can achieve equality. Right now gender discrimination is a topic mostly consumed by women and discussed most of the time only between women, thus we would like to shift this conversation so that men are also included. Through this we will be able to create the right environment, programs and policies where women in technology can thrive. Fully committed to the cause and in conjunction with International Women’s Day (8th of March) each year, Women Techmakers event series is back in Vienna to address such topics, and moreover, offer presentations and technical workshops from renowned people in STEM.

Women Techmakers Vienna

The first event Women Techmakers Vienna (www.womentechmakers.at) was successfully held in March 2014. Each year, since then, we have one big conference in March where our growing community is meeting.

The content consist of presentations from role models in STEM and technical workshops. We aim to have a diverse participant profile in terms of gender, age and background knowledge.

WTMVIE would also like to act as an intermediate, presenting actively engaged Viennese communities focused on empowering women in STEM. Their events, workshops or other similar gatherings will be gladly promoted on our channels. The WTMVIE community can make use of it to improve their overall knowledge in one of the STEM fields.

Vision”Equality & diversity in STEM regardless of gender”

Mission

“Raise awareness of gender equality & diversity issues in STEM through the power of example. We create an open environment where challenges can be understood and means to overcome them will be provided.”

Values

  • Respect
  • Trust
  • Fairness
  • Embrace differences
  • Sharing & Supporting
  • Improvement


Online community followers covering main social media channels

Interesting blog posts

GDG Summit & Google I/O 2014

Overview

The first Google I/O was held in March 2008. This year Google had its 7th conference. A constant topic on these conferences is Android. Other topics include products that Google has been working on: Google Maps, Google TV, Google Music, Google+, Google Now and so on. These conferences are the highlight of the year, where the “googlers” get to show off their hard work of the past year. They manage to amaze and push the technological boundaries every year and raise issues of the not so far future. This year, I was one of the lucky ones to receive a Google I/O ticket which “teleported” me to California to attend the Google Developer Group (GDG) Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View and the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

First of all: what is Google Developer Group Summit?

GDGs are groups of people “who are interested in Google’s developer technology; everything from the AndroidChrome, Drive and Google Cloud to product APIs like the Cast APIMaps API and YouTube API“. GDG members volunteer and organize tech talks, events like code sprints, hackathons and much more. The Summit is the event where some of the members of such groups, which are world wide, get together and share their experience. There are 500+ GDGs in 100+ countries to date. These GDG communities are supervised by some people who work at Google. They work in Google Developer Relations as Developer Community Advocates. However, GDGs are independent local groups which choose which events they want to hold and what to talk about in their meetings. Next you see the map of all teh GDGDs in the world.

GDG


GDG Summit 2014

The 2014 GDG Summit was held at the Googleplex in Mountain View and it was a 3 day event. We were 350+ participants from all over the world, from South America to New Zeeland (see the above picture). The first day was “arrival day”. We were offered pickup shuttles from the San Francisco Airport which brought us to the hotel where we were hosted. At the hotel, everyone could check in and register for the GDG Summit by taking their name badge. Each organizer was sharing a hotel room with another participant. The official program started only the second day earlier in the morning. We were taken with the shuttles to the Googleplex where breakfast was organized, outdoors this year. Afterwards we moved to our conference room where we had different sessions.Googleplex

We started with a short overview of the past events we organized in different GDGs  and went into specifics for the Women Techmakers (WTM) events. The WTM events were held in 49 countries during the month of March. We reached 10.000 developers from which 70% were female participants. 82% of the speakers of this events were women.
Another session was about Engaging organizers. We talked about motivators, the cycle of membership, rewards and recognition for different roles that organizers have in the GDGs and about solving conflicts. A very interesting chart of types of members is shown in the next figure.

model Next we had a round of lightning talks:
1. Getting money through Fund Raising
2. GDG mentorship Initiative
3. Attracting and training volunteers
4. Google community ecosystems: we are all connected
5. Cross Chapter collaborations
6. Organizing a pre-event for the Start-up weekend (in Dublin)
7. GDG Metrics
8. Collaborations with other organizations
9. Programming – for kids
10. What we learned from devFest13 (GDG Lviv)
11. Africa Android challenge
12. tech for social good
13. GDG[X] – a new GDG App
14. Massive Games over Google Cloud
15. Content is king but distribution is queen
16. Renderscript for Android

The full agenda of the conference can be seen here.

The first conference day was closed with dinner and a Talent Show organized by the participants themselves in the room where we had the sessions. Dinner was proceeded by a cultural sharing of everyone’s local food or drinks and swag from their different organized events over the last year. It was a multitude of colorful pieces of culture combined with different personalities of wonderful people. The Talent Show was a hit with live music and dancing in a cozy, comfortable environment created over the day.

InFrontOfAndroid

The second day, we were taken again with the shuttles to the Googleplex Campus where we had breakfast. The second day was dedicated to unconference sessions where you could choose the discussion topics you wanted to attend. We also had time to visit the Google Store on Campus and have lunch (this time at the actual Google cafeteria which has great food). After a Google Glass Design session we got in our shuttles and got to San Francisco. In town we had time to check in at our hotels and most important check in at the Moscone Center for the Google I/O. At the registration I got a name badge with NFC, a T-shirt and a water bottle with the I/O logo on it. People had different evening events or just rested in their rooms but the women that participated at the GDG Summit were invited to a special Women Techmakers Dinner. At the dinner I found out that in the restaurant were over 500 women from different volunteering organizations from the Bay Area: PyLadies, RubyGirls… and of course GDG Women (from all over the world). It was this event where I met Megan Smith from Google [X] who ignited interesting women topics among us. It was amazing to see how we all connect on different issues or challenges we have in our professions no matter which country we were from.

More about the GDG Summit can be read on the official event website.


Google I/O 2014

At the Google I/O we were offered each morning breakfast at the ground floor, in the big hall. There were a lot of tables organized and buffet food on the margin. The lunch was the same, except with more people standing in line. On the first day, everyone was standing in line outside to enter the keynote. The line got quite long. As GDG members we had a separate waiting area. This year it was in front of the press entrance. We got to enter the keynote hall before the line of the people outside. We had reserved seats right after the press line.

Keynote

To be there live and on great seats awaiting the countdown was already super exciting. At this keynote, Larry Page did not get on stage to talk but I did see him enter the hall. During the event there were two manifestations. The first one was a woman who stood up in the front row and held a placard with something written on it. She was complaining about the real estate situation in San Francisco due to Tech companies. And the second person was a guy who started to shout quite loud disturbing the current speaker on stage. He was shouting something like “Google is building killer robots”. Both people were removed by staff. At the second guy someone from the public shouted back “Go home!” as a reply to his accusations.  The keynote was exciting for me also because of these disturbances.

During the rest of the conference more presentations and talks were held. You could chose what you are interested in and join. I had two personal favorite presentations. One was about “The Pirates” who work on projects like Tango and ARA which I was interested in. The second talk I liked most was the “Biologically inspired models of intelligence”. I like Ray Kurzweil’s presentation about the future of technology which I felt was missing from the keynote. Last year Larry Page answered some questions which involved this point of view.

GoogleGlass

Besides the talks, there were different stands organized where shorter talks or presentations were taking place. There also was a codeLabs corner and a Google Glass corner at the ground floor. Also, on the second floor there was a company corner with Duolingo, Runntastic and some more. At Runntastic you could win a Google Glass if you held the record in squats over the conference days. At the Google Glass corner one could try Glass and take a virtual tour of the history of so called glass wear. One could also buy the Google Glass there. At the Android Car station one could try out the new presented innovation at the keynote. For GDGers there was a GDG Lounge organized, where we could hang out, share ideas or experiences from the ongoing conference or watch live some of the talks on big screens.

After the first day, there was a dinner party organized outside in a garden like place in the center of San Francisco. There was a silent disco and life music. The food and drinks were served from different food stands and for free. To chill and network there were beds and comfortable corners placed on the grass. The atmosphere was great and the view was amazing looking over the close skyscrapers covered in mist.


AfterParty CozyPlaceAfterParty
On the second day we received our Android Wear. You could choose between a Samsung and an LG watch. Both were looking great! I chose the LG Watch. In order for the LG watch and the cardboard gadget to properly work one needed a good phone which had at least NFC or Android v 4.3.

After the second day, as GDGers, we were all invited for dinner at the Google San Francisco office. After eating we had a party corner with music and dancing. People who left sooner for the airport said goodbye sooner and the rest said goodbye when the party ended at around 23:00.  The next morning/day you could still meet GDGers in San Francisco, either shopping or sight seeing. Some people decided to stay longer or make a US trip out of it.

GDG


Closing

Now in Vienna, after almost 2 weeks after the event, the GDG G+ community is full of pictures and posts about what we all 350+ people experienced. The GDG developers already started releasing the first apps for the Android Wear. We received “Thank you for participation” E-mails where we were asked for feedback. And the GDGers already start planning their new events and talk about new dev challenges.

Follow the local communities on Facebook:

GDG Vienna

Women Techmakers Vienna

Social Media in Austria

Overview

There are a lot of statistics done for Social Media Data out there, especially for the USA users. I set out to write down a collection of these statistics for Austria. Besides this, I was also interested in finding out what can be done with Social Media Data in general.

Firsts things first, to start from the beginning, maybe it would be good to have an overview of what kind of Social Media is out there. A very good and complete overview can be downloaded at Overdrive Interactive. Not all the mentioned Social Media Platforms and Networks in the overview are used in Austria and not all of the data can be collected and used. The most recent overview statistic that I found for Austria is from CREVO Marketing & Media KG. The chart shows the number of unique users for each Social Media Platform in Austria in 2012.

Social Media Platform in Austria in 2012
Some current numbers about the most used Social Media Platforms in Austria look like these:

Social Media Platform Users Users for AT Gender specific Users Gender specific Users for AT
Twitter „Twitter users are only 18% of internet users and 14% of the overall adult population“ [1]645,750,000 Users [2] 117.431 Users68.109 active Accounts* 44.623 writing Accounts* 18.788 reading Accounts*[3] *date from 13.03.2014 „Twitter does not collect gender-based information nor return it in the API“ [4] „Natural language processing (bag of words); some words are statistically more likely to appear in a female tweet, but obviously there are no guarantees.“ [4]
Instagram ~ 150 Users million ? ? ?
Facebook 1,310,000,000 Users [2] 3.240.000 Users [3] „Facebook skews slightly toward women. But it is more gender neutral than Pinterest and Google+.“ [5] 1.580.000 Women 1.660.000 Men 2.800.000 between 14 and 49 [3]
LinkedIn 200 million Users [6] 245.000 members from Austria „Men (24%) are more likely to use LinkedIn than women (19%)“ [7]In 2011 – 76% of Users were men 24% women [8]
XING 6,1 million Users  in German speaking space [6] 2011 – 70% of Users were men, 30% women [8]
Pinterest 21 Mil. Unique Users ~ 0.8 million Users „Women are four times more likely to be Pinterest users than men.“ [9]

What is definitely missing is some statistics about Instagram in Austria.  Unfortunately I could not find anything accurate enough to post.


Social Media Data generated Topics

First of all, we can make a lot of User Statistics

  • Gender specific user statistics for different Social Media Platforms can be seen on a chart from The Statistics Portal done in 2013 for the US population.

Gender specific user statistics for different Social Media Platforms

Social Media Users by Generation in US 2010

  • Time spend on Social Media Platforms from Desktop of Mobile devices is presented in a Statista chart for US users in 2013


Social Network Activity: Mobile vs. Desktop for US in 2013

Election statistics can be done from Twitter data.

  • This is shown in a 2014 European Parliament election statistic done by twitminster.co.uk

Europe Parliament 2014 Estimations

Event prediction

Internet censorship

Youtube censorship worl history


Platform Specific Topics

From Facebook date

  • Create Social Graphs

Facebook Social Graph

On Twitter data

  • Map trending words in a specific area and of a specific timeline

Twitter trending words

Hate words heat map

  • Create a map of Tweets by Self-Identified Bankers and Artists in New York City from floatingsheep.org

Tweets by Self-Identified Bankers and Artists in New York City

Twitter posts refering to cheap beer

Mapping racism from Twitter posts

Top 15 Twitter Users Austria 2014

  • Or one could use Twitter to build an own story on Storify.com

From data posted on Flickr, Twitter and Instagram

We can answer questions like:

  • How many users of these platforms post pictures?
  • How many users of these platforms post geotagged posts and where are they?

These answers we can find on an example project from arcgis.com

Geotagged posts

Whit these being said, I will finish my examples. Feel free to leave me a comment if you know of any other such projects or any ideas you can think of for which you can use Social Media Data for.