November 21: Advanced Scraping Webinar (4 hours)

Please note this webinar requires prerequisite knowledge of the command line and programming. 

The participant should be comfortable using the command line to run scripts and software. They should be familiar with the fundamentals of computer programming and have a working Python installation on their computer. They do not need to be a Python expert – a willingness to learn and programming experience in another language is enough to follow this webinar.

The webinar session will cover:

• Python tools for scraping social media data from Telegram and other platforms, including official and unofficial APIs
• Python libraries for data analysis
• Examples of analyzing social media data and post content over time
• Tools for building a network diagram visualization from POST data

To sign up, please follow this link: https://gist.github.com/trislee/ef36e68869ff776d2d4616499c27a999

This script will retrieve the registration link to the paid webinar for social media scraping. 

To ensure every participant gets the most out of the webinar, we require that each participant is familiar with the very basics of Python (configuring an environment, installing packages, running scripts).

By being able to run this script (using Python version 3.x) and getting the correct webinar link, you’re demonstrating that you meet those requirements.

If you have no idea what a Python environment is, or how to run this script, don’t worry! We offer beginner-level programming and command-line webinars, too.

Payment Note

If you register and select Stripe (credit card) or Paypal, you must pay when you start the payment process. Otherwise, Eventzilla will lock you out and we will have to manually delete and restart your registration. Wait to open the payment tab until you have your card or PayPal information ready to go!

Alternatively, you can choose “bank transfer” and pay later — many of our participants whose employers sponsor them choose this option. 

Costs and VAT

For our webinars, we charge a rate of 250 EUR/person per 4-hour block, plus any applicable VAT and fees. 

The ticket price is inclusive of 21% VAT (tax). All participants personally paying for this course are subject to the Dutch VAT. However, if a company (e.g. your employer) is paying for the course, they may be exempt from the VAT charge.

• If the company is based in the European Union, please write the VAT number during the registration process and an invoice sans VAT will be issued.
• If the company is based in the United States or Canada, there is no added VAT.
• If the company is based in other countries, please write any VAT number (if available) and a correct billing address and we will issue an invoice per the VAT regulations for the respective country.

Additional fees included in the ticket price are detailed on the Eventzilla page. Please reach out to us at workshops@bellingcat.com if you have any questions about the VAT fees and regulations.

Cancellation

Please look closely at the cancellation and event policies before you take the leap. We run all of these training sessions on Zoom in a private webinar room, with one or two trainers present to help with both the webinar itself and any questions the participants have.

Also, please note the times — about half of our training is Europe-time friendly, and the other half is more US/Canada-time friendly. If you are in California, you probably don’t want to sign up for an event that is at 10am Amsterdam and 1am Pacific time!

Screening

We manually approve all applications after registration on Eventzilla. We do basic due diligence checks on our participants to be sure that our trainers and other participants are comfortable with their participation. Members of any military or intelligence service are not permitted registration at our workshops, and we allow government employees in on a case-by-case basis to be sure there aren’t any serious ethical issues. We also restrict access to our workshops from members of police forces, but make some exceptions depending on participants’ areas of responsibilities.

For example, in past workshops, we have approved the participation of government employees working on issues around election integrity and security, while we have rejected the participation of those working for state migration services tasked with information gathering around deportations. For police officers, we have approved the applications of those working on issues of child exploitation and trafficking but rejected those who work for departments where there have been publicized cases of surveillance and abuse. We also conduct basic due diligence for non-government employees to be sure both the participant and their employer do not have a track record that would clearly make our trainers and other participants uncomfortable with providing training in research techniques that could be abused.

That said, the vast majority of participants are approved without any issues.