The Munich Chapter of Women in Big Data organised an afterwork event at Usercentrics on a cold night in November.  Usercentrics is in the heart of Munich and was surrounded at that time by the typical Bavarian Christmas markets. Our members started arriving around 7pm, with people joining the event in a total Christmas festive spirit.

We kicked off the event with an introduction on Women in Big Data by Astrid Neumann and  Pat Piritburana, explaining our global mission and our local events.

Our first speaker was Hanna Waldenmaier, Head of Customer & Partner Management at Usercentrics, who spoke about Consent Management. Specifically, she explained the Usercentrics Consent Management Platform (CMP), which helps companies to collect, manage and document their users’ consents in a legally compliant way. Despite GDPR and the recent ECJ ruling, personalized marketing and tracking are still possible if a valid consent has been given. Therefore, a professional Consent Management becomes a “must-have” for every website operator. Hanna showed examples and use cases of how using clean and compliant data can help businesses.

The next speaker was Dr. Stefan Bornemann, COO, Business Development at wetter.com. “Wetter” is German for “weather”, and wetter.com is not only the leading online-platform for weather forecasts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but also a provider for big data and predictive analytics solutions. In his talk, Stefan provided interesting insights into the new business unit and answered the questions such as why apple cake sells best on rainy days and what meteorologists and data scientists have in common. Definitely food for thought about how to make better business with weather data!

The last presenter was Katharina Brass, Business Consultant, Coach, and also a member of the Women in Big Data Munich Chapter team. Katharina talked about mindfulness, Big Data, and how to find our Inner Balance. We are currently bombarded with data from different sources every second, which challenges our wellbeing. Katharina shared interesting facts about our continuous and growing use of social media, correlating it with the decreasing time we share with our family and friends or spend taking care of ourselves. She then led the audience in a meditation focused on raising mindfulness about what is happening around us. We could all feel the impact, even though it was for a short time. She explained why consciousness and mindfulness are important to enable us to connect to ourselves. It helps to be clear about what we want, and how it benefits us to avoid being totally distracted by the data that bombards us. A very different approach to Big Data which was really interesting!

 

Our presenters and organizers

We networked in the offices of Usercentrics until late in the night and enjoyed meeting the people of our chapter again.