Montreal Girl Geek Dinners on Artv's "Mange Ta Ville"

A BIG thanks to Evelyne Morin-Uhl and her team at Artv for making a great Dinner even better.

The interview was done in French and took place during the November Montreal Girl Geek Dinner with Janina Szkut.

(click on image to link to video)

January Dinner - Jennifer Bell from Visible Government

What if you could:

- Know what was happening inside government?
- Know what people were working on?- Know how money was being spent?
- Help people inside government do their jobs?

Jennifer Bell from VisibleGovernment.ca is our speaker for January and will be presenting on the topic of online tools for government transparency.

This presentation will demonstrate examples from around the world of how government data, published in open, structured formats, can improve the quality of society. Insight into VisibleGovernment.ca's pilot projects in Canada will be covered and details provided on how you get  involved.

Jennifer has a background in launching software start-ups. She was recently on the seed management team of Tungle Corp., named one of Canada's top web 2.0 startups to watch. Prior to that she was a software developer, architect and product manager for Nimcat Networks, which was sold in 2004 for $43M.

Details for January's Montreal Girl Geek Dinner are as follows:

Tuesday, January 20, 2009
6:00pm - 8:00pm
Caffe Della Posta
361 rue Bernard Ouest

A slice of pizza, a chic sweater and a lot of transparency

Nicely nestled amidst a gathering of first time GGD attendees at Café Brodino’s, it was clear that Michelle Blanc’s topic of online transparency was timely. In fact, it sparked many secondary discussions related to the often-unclear concept of online transparency.

Michelle fielded questions such as: How far should you go? How much is enough or worse yet, not enough?

It’s obvious that the need for corporate transparency on the web is not a luxury and that reputation management is becoming an industry onto itself.

Michelle cited and distinguished between first-rate transparency efforts and of course, included the glaringly bad ones.

Here are some highlights from her presentation (thanks Michelle for your hard copy!):

Les internautes coincent les entreprises plus que jamais

• les entreprises ne peuvent plus sous-estimer les internautes et leurs pouvoir de reconnaître la vérité
  

Le manque de transparence - c'est grave !

• le cas de Dow Chemical qu'il ont "ajuster" des informations sur le déversement d'hydrocarbures Exxon Valdez sur le site Wikipedia
• l'art du secrét est disparu pour toujours
• le cauchmare de Dell concernant leur service à la clientele

La transparence et génération Y - ils savent qu'est ce qu'ils veulent !

• 39 % des 18-24 ans américains considéront quitter leur emplois si l'entreprise bloque accès à Facebook et un autre 21 % seront dégoutés d'une telle pratique
  

La transparence communautaire - un résultat positif

• 1993 - CISCO afficha tous les défauts (bugs) connus des ses logiciels et pièces d'équipments
• 1995-2000 - les ventes de CISCO ont augmenté de 600 % mais les effectifs de support client n'ont que doublé

L'évolution du Marketing

• version 1.0 - le branding et la création des premiers sites sur l'intérnet
  
• version 1.5 - la segmentation et la personalization
• version 2.0 - les conversations et les communautés

Confiance des consommateurs se trouve entre les amis et la famille

• le "Word of Mouth" est maintenant un élément important au branding

Deux types de transparences

• Transparence radicale
  
• Transparence synthétique et les "ghost writer"
  

Les avantages de la transparence

• Améliore la diffusion de la communication
• Humanisation du sujet
• Effet catharsis
  
• Personal expression and ‘coming out’
  

Michelle also discussed the true definition of passion.

Passion:

• Drives personal brand
• Is rarely aligned with what is popular
• Is hard to fake
• Includes mistakes and failure
• Means helping others recognize it
• Requires work and thought
• Is not a "me too" game

Passion is often linked to being true-to-yourself but an even larger piece of that is bringing something to the table. Michelle indicated that anyone can agree with a point of view but having the courage to oppose with substantiation is more valuable and is a further catalyst for growth.

Finally, Michelle spoke briefly about her pride and joy "Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires". Several key players in Web 2.0 such as, Tristan Péloquin, Marie-Chantale Turgeon, Claude Malaison, Mario Asselin, Sylvain Carle, Philippe Martin, Marc Snyder and Martin Ouellette contributed to the book which is available for purchase at: http://pourquoibloguer.com/

Thanks again to Michelle for a wonderful and informative presentation.