Tag Archives: Estonia

Let’s hit the road! Join Google Developers Community Roadshow

Posted by Przemek Pardel, Developer Relations Program Manager, Regional Lead

This summer, Google Developers team is touring 10 countries and 14 cities in Europe in a colorful community bus. We'll be visiting university campuses and technology parks to meet you locally and talk about our programs for developers and start-ups.

Join us to find out how Google supports developer communities. Learn about Google Developer Groups, Women Techmakers program and various ways how we engage with the broader developer community in Europe and around the world.

Our bus will stop in the following locations between 12.00 and 4pm:

  • 4th June, Estonia, Tallinn
  • 6th June, Latvia, Riga
  • 8th June, Lithuania, Vilnius
  • 11th June, Poland, Gdańsk
  • 13th June, Poland, Poznań
  • 15th June, Poland, Kraków
  • 18th June, Slovenia, Ljubljana
  • 19th June, Croatia, Zagreb
  • 21st June, Bulgaria, Sofia

Want to meet us on the way? Sign up for the event in your city here.

What to expect:

  • Information: learn more about how Google supports developer communities around the world, from content, speakers to a global network
  • Network: with other community organizers from your city
  • Workshops: join some of our product workshops on tour (Actions on Google, Google Cloud, Machine Learning), and meet with Google teams
  • Fun: live music, games and more!

Are you interested in starting a new developer community or are you an organizer who would like to join the global Google Community Program? Let us know and receive an invitation-only pass to our private events.

Google Developers team

Let’s hit the road! Join Google Developers Community Roadshow

Posted by Przemek Pardel, Developer Relations Program Manager, Regional Lead

This summer, Google Developers team is touring 10 countries and 14 cities in Europe in a colorful community bus. We'll be visiting university campuses and technology parks to meet you locally and talk about our programs for developers and start-ups.

Join us to find out how Google supports developer communities. Learn about Google Developer Groups, Women Techmakers program and various ways how we engage with the broader developer community in Europe and around the world.

Our bus will stop in the following locations between 12.00 and 4pm:

  • 4th June, Estonia, Tallinn
  • 6th June, Latvia, Riga
  • 8th June, Lithuania, Vilnius
  • 11th June, Poland, Gdańsk
  • 13th June, Poland, Poznań
  • 15th June, Poland, Kraków
  • 18th June, Slovenia, Ljubljana
  • 19th June, Croatia, Zagreb
  • 21st June, Bulgaria, Sofia

Want to meet us on the way? Sign up for the event in your city here.

What to expect:

  • Information: learn more about how Google supports developer communities around the world, from content, speakers to a global network
  • Network: with other community organizers from your city
  • Workshops: join some of our product workshops on tour (Actions on Google, Google Cloud, Machine Learning), and meet with Google teams
  • Fun: live music, games and more!

Are you interested in starting a new developer community or are you an organizer who would like to join the global Google Community Program? Let us know and receive an invitation-only pass to our private events.

Google Developers team

Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Baltic Way

Twenty-five years ago, on this week, two million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands to form a human chain for freedom. We’re celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way with a customized logo our 'doodles made specially for the three countries.



The Baltic Way was a remarkable non-violent protest. It brought together almost a third of the three Baltic nations population seeking independence. ’The demonstrators created a 600km long human chain, starting from Tallinn in Estonia, going through Riga in Latvia and finishing in Vilnius in Lithuania.



Baltic Googlers themselves came up with the idea for the Baltic Way doodle. Many have very vivid and strong memories about the Baltic Way. Although Vytautas was only eight years old, he remembers his grandparents bringing him to the human chain near Vilnius Cathedral. "I joined hands with my grandma and a stranger. The real magic moment for me was when the light airplanes flew over the heads and dispersed a huge cloud of flowers - way better than any firework I've seen before! I'm proud I can say "I was also part of it!”

In Latvia, Laura remembers people singing songs, and "many of them, including me and my parents, were crying - all for the freedom of Baltics. Regimantas was six years old and still remembers how "we had to wait for instructions through an old radio on when we should all stand together, holding each other hand.” Gabriele says her parents were in Germany. During the event, they stopped on a freeway near Berlin -and joined their hands and sang the national anthem of Lithuania. "Germans stopped their cars to find out what was happening and joined hands together once they got to know about the Baltic Way. It was a unique sense of brotherhood of nations.”

Many of our Baltic team work from our European headquarters in Dublin. They met up this week to share and enjoy songs, dance performances, sport games and just have a good time together. Together with the Lord Mayor of Dublin and diplomatic and community representatives, they joined hands with participants to form a human chain through the heart of Dublin.

Posted by Google Baltics team

Become a cartographer: help us improve Europe’s maps

Maps are no longer static paper records, but living, breathing representations of our world. Places around us are constantly changing — while mountains don’t move, roads are rerouted, homes are built, shops open and close. Many times, the best way to keep Google Maps fresh and up to date is by allowing anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection to contribute to the map using their knowledge of the areas they know best. So we’re delighted that Google Map Maker is now available for budding cartographers to edit our maps of Greece, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

With Map Maker, everyone can contribute your local expertise to make an even more comprehensive, useful and interesting map. Begin in your town or village and try adding the outlines or ‘footprints’ of local shops, restaurants and other businesses. Then help enrich the maps of national parks, or add leisure facilities and historic landmarks. If you enjoy the great outdoors, try adding campsites, beautiful beaches or your favorite cycling paths.



Whether you add a biking route through Tallinn or a landmark in Vilnius, each improvement to the map will help locals and tourists alike better understand the area and discover new things to do. Once approved, your contributions will appear on Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Maps for mobile.


The map of Korčula, Croatia, often cited as the birthplace of Marco Polo, before and after Map Maker edits

To get started, visit our Google Map Maker community forum and see the Help Centre for tips and tricks, or watch mapping in real-time with Map Maker Pulse. Happy mapping!

Posted by Nicole Drobeck, Map Maker Community Manager

Promoting transparency around Europe

When eight technology companies presented a plan this month to reform government surveillance, a key request concerned transparency. At Google, we were the first company to publish a transparency report detailing the requests we receive from governments around the world to bring down content or hand over information on users.

But Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine instead if all the requests for information on Internet users and for takedowns of web content in a country could be published. This would give a much more effective picture of the state of Internet freedom. As the year draws to a close, we’re happy to report that Panoptykon, a Polish NGO, published this month a preliminary Internet transparency report for Poland and Fores, a Stockholm-based think tank, issued a study in Sweden.

In Poland and Sweden, we helped initiate these transparency efforts and supported them financially. NGOs in six other European countries are working on national transparency reports. Our Estonian-supported transparency coalition already published a report last spring. In addition, university researchers in Hong Kong moved ahead over the summer with their own report. In Strasbourg, the Council of Europe recently held an important conference on the subject and hopefully will move ahead to present a series of recommendations on transparency for its 47 members.

Each transparency campaign takes a different approach - we hope this process of experimentation will help all of us learn. The Estonian effort, titled Project 451, focuses on content removals, not government surveillance, because the authors believe this is the most important issue in their country. The name of Project “451″ refers to HTTP Status Code 451, defined as “unavailable for legal reasons” and the report found that many web platforms were taking legal content down due to fears of legal liability.

The new Polish and Swedish reports attempt to shed light on government requests for information on users. Fores contacted 339 Swedish authorities and found that more than a third had requested data about users or takedowns of user-uploaded content. Panoptykon uncovered that Polish telcos received 1.76 million requests for user information in 2012, while Internet companies polled received approximately 7,500. In addition, Panoptykon discovered that many Polish government requests for information on users were based on a flawed or unclear legal basis.

Admittedly, both the Swedish and Polish reports remain incomplete. Not all Internet companies participated. Much relevant data must be missing. Like with our own Google report, we hope to continue filling in the holes in the future. Our aim is to see this campaign gather momentum because the bottom line is transparency is essential to a debate over government surveillance powers.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa