This edition, the speakers were outstanding women for their work with data in disciplines such as journalism, social innovation, art and culture or technology.
The community DataBeers Malaga held last Thursday 29 November in Le Grand Café Centro the thirteenth meeting since it started at the end of 2015. As a welcome to Talent Woman, a macro-event that aims to make the female talent in Science and Technology visible and that Malaga has chosen for its premiere in Spain, there were five presentations, all by women, on projects based on big data, data analysis or data visualization in social innovation, technology, art and culture or journalism.
The initiative, which has the support, among others, of the Malaga City Council, ITRS and San Miguel, aims to show that there are more and more professionals, entrepreneurs, researchers and teachers, technologists or not, who innovate and use data to resolve issues or respond to social demands. "It was not expensive to locate women for the talks, it followed the trajectory of many and even with some had already collaborated," says Maria Sanchez, coordinator of the event, Professor of Journalism at the UMA and responsible for innovation projects and teacher training at the UNIA. A few months ago another Databeers Malaga was made with female speakers in its entirety and that have passed through the event, in addition, women of recognized national and international prestige, as Mar Cabra, coordinator of the Papers of Panama, which shared for the first time in the third Databeers Malaga in 2016 and for which would receive, months later, a Pulitzer. Adding, now, forces with Talent Woman has been achieved, notes Sanchez, to gather more female audience than ever and expand the community.
With an informal format, the scheme has been similar to other events. After some time dedicated to networking among the attendees, Sara Sarabia and Cristina Savage, co-director of La Casa Amarilla and designer and teacher of workshops at the Picasso Museum in Malaga, respectively, were in charge of opening the talks with an analysis of the scarce presence of women in art and culture. They were followed by Nerea Luis Mingueza, gender expert at the COTEC Foundation, doctoral candidate in Artificial Intelligence at Carlos III in Madrid and founder of the congress on new technologies T3chFest, with her argument based on data on the importance of diversity in the scientific-technological field.
After her, Yolanda Rueda, president of the Cibervoluntari Foundation explained how they are using technologies and data in different projects to meet real needs and generate innovation and social change, while Elisa Martín Garijo, director of Innovation and Technology at IBM, presented a project that used information from social networks and colors to represent the emotions of an audience through the lighting of a party in Lanzarote. The event was completed with an intervention on the usefulness of small data for citizens, by video due to its inability to travel for health reasons, Nagore de los Rios, journalist by training, known for being the founder of Irekia, the first open government platform in Spain, and today entrepreneur with Data Driven Communication, a company that mixes their two passions, big data and communication.
Precisely bringing data closer to people, technical or not, is the philosophy of Databeers, a non-profit event whose community in Malaga was a pioneer, when it emerged at the end of 2015 from the idea initially developed in Medialab Madrid and today has a presence in several European and Latin American cities.
In addition to ITRS and the Malaga City Council, sponsors, it is possible thanks to the collaboration of photographer Koke Pérez, Diario Sur and San Miguel. Precisely the place chosen, Le Grand Café Centro, is one of the two "TapStation" that the brand has in the city, and offers different varieties of draught beers inspired by the style of different cities in the world, among others, the floral aroma of hops in Delhi or the sweet touch of malata in London.