 Live from Houston, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now your host, Jeff Brick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Brick here. We are live in Houston, Texas at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015. It's a big conference here in Houston. I don't know how many years it's been going on. At least nine, over 12,000 people talking about women really in computer science. There's recruiting going on. There's tech tracks going on. There's big companies, little companies. It's quite a show and we're really excited to be here with the full CUBE production. And our next guest is Kalea Identity Woman and also the founder of She's Geeky. Kalea, welcome. Thank you. So what is Identity Woman? It's a blog. That's right. And I was the only woman I'd met working on digital identity. So I figured that should be the name of my blog. And then it kind of stuck where people in my industry just started calling me that. Like, hey, Identity Woman. I was like, okay, I'll own it. If it works right, you know it works good. So you have been a speaker here and you had a presentation earlier today. So we'd love to understand a little bit more what was your presentation about? What were you educating the people here at Grace Hopper? So I actually spoke yesterday and it was focused on a personal data ecosystem where the data flows are actually ethical and aligned with our interests as human beings. So how do we re-center all of this data that we're generating as we live our lives back to us and then have businesses orient around us instead of the current dominant models where we put all this information out. It's bought and sold by other parties without our awareness and consent and comes back and affects our lives. So can we rewire the existing data ecosystem, existing data flows so that we have our own personal clouds that collect all our geolocation data, all of our texts, all of the things we post in different social networks that they own, how do we re-center it to us and then have businesses connect to our data under our terms and conditions and still enable the types of, still enable businesses to make money. You're not going after any big, big issues there. No, no. That is tremendous. I mean, that's a boil the ocean kind of opportunity, I guess, so where do you start? I mean, that is such a, I think it makes a ton of sense. I think at the fundamental junction of all this that happened is that these companies understood the value of our data more than we necessarily understood the value and we were making a value exchange, not a money exchange, for here's our data and you're going to provide some service. But clearly there's much more value as evidenced by the value of these companies that have the data than necessarily people either understood or maybe knew that they were exchanging. So where do you start on that mission? That is a huge mission. So the first step was to an is and what I did in my talk is outlined some ethical market models. So a market model as opposed to a specific business model for a company within a market model, you can have many different business models function, right? So the first one was vendor relationship management. So how do I as an individual have the tools to manage the vendors I deal with rather than them doing customer relationship management to me? So a dashboard where all the different vendors that I interact with, my cable company, my phone company, my dishwasher company, my smart thing company, they all send the data to my dashboard instead of me having to go to all their platforms. That's a starting point for that aspect. Another is infomediary services. So this is like a really old concept. John Hegel put it out there in that game in 1997. So how do we have smart agents that know a ton about us and go out into the marketplace and get good deals for us? We could have this, but right now we end up giving all of our own personal information away and then say we are looking at buying a house and getting a mortgage or buying a car or a life event like having a baby or getting married. Then all that stuff sort of stalks us around the web forever even after we've made those purchases or those life events have happened. So someone could build these infomediary services and help us get the benefits of the market without leaking all of specifically who we are. And then what about just kind of the Yula problem, right? I mean, every time we get a software update on our phones it's click to accept and if you open it you've basically consented and I don't know maybe the lawyers amongst us go down and read it but most of us say I don't read it, I click on it and Lord knows what's in that thing. Contracts of adhesion which are what those are when you just have to click on it and it becomes true. They're actually a huge issue and I think we need to look to the courts and our legislative bodies to address those because they're not functional, right? But that's, and you're right in sort of getting to the point that we need to rewire the legal architecture in which the data flows that we're producing happen as well, like it's not just a technical problem that I'm highlighting with this vision. Oh for sure, no it's not a technical problem at all, right? Well it's both, right? We need new technical architectures to enable these types of ecosystems. So persistent data linking and fine-grained access control like this entity can see this little piece of data about me but not everything but we also need the legal agreements that underlie that to be in our favor not the favor of just the companies. Right, right. So what are you doing now on this effort? What is kind of your current activity? So I founded the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium five years ago. We've brought together almost 40 companies from around the world who are working on this. Most of them are startups. We're expanding to other larger companies now. And we worked with the World Economic Forum on their Rethinking Personal Data Project. So we're active in engaging with governments and connecting the startups and now connecting to larger companies who want to explore these new models that quite frankly are going to be hopefully very successful and really disruptive to the Googles and the Facebooks of the world. Yeah, it seems like you should be in Europe getting started over there because obviously they've already got kind of a different level of laws when it comes to personal information and privacy. There's several successful companies in our consortium based in Europe for that reason. Yeah. Okay, so that's a big problem that you can solve. Big opportunity, right? Big problems to make big opportunities but you're also involved in She's Geeky. So what is She's Geeky? She's Geeky is a women's technology and STEM unconference that I founded in 2007. And really it sprung out of the work that I was doing traveling to many different sectors of technology so open source and nonprofit tech and security technology conferences and noticing how few women were in many of those industries but also there was few opportunities to cross pollinate across industries. And so what would it look like if we invited all the different women in tech groups and women from a huge range of industries together to spend the weekend talking to each other? And in 2007 we had our first one and we've been doing them ever since. This year we have five across the country. And one of the things I got from this conference with its huge scale was actually a renewed enthusiasm to go back and work with the executive producer, Cass, on growing She's Geeky more because women need opportunities to network locally and on an annual basis because we're losing women, right? So this conference and much of the energy has been focused on the pipeline, which is getting women into the industry. Our conference has its strengths in supporting women connecting to each other and staying in the industry. The retention piece, because it's come up time and time again over the last three days, right? You got to work on the pipeline but you also got to work on the retention. They're two very different problems. And also return. So quite a few women have come to She's Geeky as a starting point for re-entering the industry, back to industry for whatever reason that they left. It's not just some women burn out and leave not because they had children because the cultural experience was so bad. And She's Geeky gives them an opportunity to network with women who are still in industry and find good places to go back to. Right. Well, and I think yesterday in Sheryl Sandberg's keynote she talked about the small leaning groups and really the importance of having a peer network that you get together with at some frequency. So it's just really a support mechanism as much as anything else. Yeah. And our conference is kind of maxed out at about 200 women. Okay. And the community that comes back year after year is really, it has a wonderful energy and a great inspirational quality to it for those women who get re-energized to stay in what can sometimes be really difficult work environment. Right, right. So what are some of the cities that you guys have had chose at? So the Bay Area, we're still working on finding a venue but it's coming up at the end of January. Okay. We just had Salt Lake City. We had Seattle in April of this year. I think we're doing DC. We've done New York, Minneapolis, St. Paul. And we're looking to grow to more cities. And where can people find out more information about it? At she's geeky.org. She's geeky.org. All right, awesome. Well, good luck with that. I think there's clearly no shortage of demand based on the tremendous growth of this conference. And this conference changes venues every year. It is, like you said, it's a once a year big event so there's clearly opportunities to get people together on a small and more frequent basis. Well, awesome. The identity woman. She's been in the cube. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks so much. Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick. You are watching theCUBE live from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Houston, Texas. Next week will be Adele World. The week after that will be at Oracle Open World. So keep it tuned right here at SiliconANGLE.TV. We'll see you next time. Jeff Frick signing off from Grace Hopper Celebration of Computing.