We've been around for more than half a year, so it's time to make some minor adjustments, present news and take a look back on what’s been happening so far. So let's do it!

New Website

You may have noticed minor changes on our website. In addition to rewriting a few texts, we rewrote the website to utilize a static page generator called Nikola (link in the footer of the page). Thanks to this, we can now focus more on content - you can look forward to topics related to future lightning talks, community events and more, we also plan a small guide for beginners in cybersecurity.

A Few Glances Into the Past Six Months

From the outside, it may look like nothing much is happening with us, but we are still a very young association of volunteers and we are still doing rather invisible work with the technical, administrative and people backbone of the association.

However, we still managed to organize two meetings in Prague during the first six months, where about fifteen of us arrived. And after the summer, we are preparing another one, for which we would love to plan a small interesting schedule and we expect that more than twenty of us will meet. We would be happy if you could give us recommendations for quiet places in Prague for up to thirty people, where projection technology and at least a bar with beverages would be available, and in the best case, vegan options.

We also organized the first CyberLadies Lightning talk (available on YouTube) on the subject of the EU AI Act, which already has the first hundred views, and we are happy to see the growing number of subscribers. We are preparing another talk for August, probably on the subject of SOC (Security Operations Center), and we will technically improve it in comparison to the first one.

Now we get to the area of ​​social networks. To date, there are 188 of us on Discord, of which 84 are verified - that means they have introduced themselves and have the rights to write to channels. Our LinkedIn is followed by 190 people, Mastodon 64, Instagram 63 - which are not bad numbers at all for a small association like we are.

We are very happy with Discord - the members are starting to spontaneously ask questions and have fun with each other, which was our main goal from the beginning - to create a community so that we are not alone in our field. Debates revolve around vulnerabilities and incidents, we naturally have a channel for memes, there’s a venting channel where we can complain about our professional woes and there are many more channels to talk about various professional topics.

We've also launched a community calendar where you can add events anonymously (and we'll publish them after our review). The events should be related to IT and cybersecurity, preferably specifically aimed at women (but this is not a rule), and ideally take place in the Czech Republic or Europe. The calendar is at akce.cyberladies.cz and you can follow it on Mastodon, add it via the URL to your calendar applications, or even insert it as a widget on your website. The next three events are now also displayed on our main page.

Our members also travel to conferences and spread awareness about us among the technical communities. We even have the first merch in the form of stickers with our logo - watch out for the events we attend and you may get some when you approach us!

Plans For the Next Few Months

In addition to the things indicated in the previous part (further meetings and talks, tools for beginners in the field), we are also preparing various little things, such as a "cybersecurity photoshoot", so that we have a stock of our own illustrative photos for free use. We would like the photoshoot to be informal, so that it doesn't result in classic tense photos with a laptop, and we don't yet know how many of us will fit in the photoshoot - we will publish the proposition in due time.

Other, so far more nebulous plans include the creation of several public git repositories, where we could also put basic, community-created, manuals about cybersecurity topics.

And last but not least, we want to work to have our Discord community more alive - spark more discussions, we are thinking about adding regular "club rooms" for juniors to talk with senior CyberGals and CyberLadies and much more, so that you all feel at home with us.

A Final Word

Thank you for being with us! We remain open to various forms of cooperation. Do you have the time and willingness to help us with organizational matters? Do you want to start organizing your own CyberLadies meetings in your city or are you just missing something from us? We will be very happy if you contact us with anything that goes well with the vision of our association.