Open Data Camp 7: Reflections
A weekend of the important stuff in London
I went to the seventh Open Data Camp in London on 2 and 3 November. It was my second Open Data Camp. Some brilliant, passionate people who I know from the internet organise the event. I was looking forward to seeing friendly familiar faces, meeting new folks, and in opportunities to think about how the expertise of this data community could inform my work in a sector and context that’s unfamiliar to me. I am the Head of Data Science at Citizens Advice, and it’s a new job.
I wrote about last year’s Open Data Camp in Aberdeen. It feels at once like yesterday and a lifetime ago. Things have changed significantly for me in the past year, but many people in this community have provided strong support and been a reassuring constant.
Open Data Camp is an unconference and attendees pitched sessions at the start of each day. I went to 9 sessions, which is a full programme, but note that there were 41 sessions¹ in total so there were many more conversations going on than it was possible for me to attend. There were a couple of sessions in particular that it was a wrench to miss, but thanks to the live blogging by the fantastic Drawnalism crew the notes are available:
- Pauline’s session on building a data ecosystem in a low-tech environment.
- Edafe’s session on decolonialising data.
General thoughts
The venue (Geovation’s space) was excellent.
The food was great, particularly the pizza on Saturday night.
I think it’s noteworthy that this was the first time the event has been held in London (UK). I live in London, so it was convenient for me. However, I enjoyed being away from home for the event last year because I think it helped me to focus more, and I look forward to going somewhere else next time.
There are so many things in the data world that I know literally nothing about.
Much of what I picked up over the weekend was directly relevant to my work and I started putting that learning into practice on Monday. Oh, and this event is free.
I felt like I didn’t catch up enough with enough people but hey I usually feel like that.
Help me out, folks
I pitched and ran a session on Saturday with the title ‘open data for and from charities’ and I thought it would be about open data in the charity sector and what the potential was but it ended up being more about people telling me how I might approach my new job. This was extremely helpful. There was a fair amount of talk about me making a great deal of cake, but also plenty that wasn’t about baking.
My challenge is to effectively meet the data needs of a large network with a high degree of autonomy and a wide variety of circumstances, in addition to meeting the data needs of the central organisation. I’m thinking on where the incentives are for getting the data right — they could be in the wrong place.
There was advice about empowering people, even training ‘citizen data scientists’, and building advocates or champions across the organisation. I also heard that there’s a community gap in the sector related to data, so maybe I could contribute to addressing that.
Strategy
The session I went to on data strategy was fascinating. It was led by Anne and here are the notes. My main takeaway thought was the tension where there is a desire for certainty (for example of outcome, or needs met, or return on investment), but data doesn’t always sit well with that approach. I don’t know how to get around this, because I have sympathy with that desire for certainty or even focused purpose. It is difficult to justify things which might come across as speculative, and perhaps there’s a need to develop new ways of telling data stories.
In this session I heard “thinking of data as a one-off thing is the big mistake.”
Data literacy
I thought Mor’s session on ‘data literacy for whom?’ was excellent, with high energy, great facilitation, and a practical output. There are so many sources and resources that I knew nothing about. Check out the Twitter thread and links here:
Women, non-binary people and data
The most powerful session of the weekend for me was pitched by Pauline, and run by Tracey and Hillary. The session was centred around ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ by Caroline Criado Perez. It started with a discussion of the book, but then went into other examples of data bias in public life, with negative and sometimes tragic circumstances.
If you don’t purposefully think about everyone the default will be for men.
I find there’s something really powerful about anchoring the conversation with examples, although of course I hope we can move towards the unintended bad outcomes not happening in the first place.
This session also had a good discussion about collecting demographic data, the impact on the quality of survey results, and whether the people commissioning surveys understood that high volume of responses isn’t necessarily the most important thing to focus on.
Learning from our mistakes
I ran a session in the last time slot on the Sunday, when the event is getting smaller and people are tired². We spoke as a group about times we had failed, and what we learned as a result. Here are the notes.
There is something interesting about the attitude to failure in the UK, maybe particularly in public service, as something we don’t countenance or talk about, rather than something to learn from. I appreciated the openness of the group, and there were some interesting thoughts about the differences between technology / software ‘failing fast’ and so on compared with the different approaches that data work can require.
To summarise: It was a great event, and time well spent. Thank you so much to everybody involved in making it happen.
Thanks for reading. I recommend Graham’s write up of the weekend too:
Footnotes
¹ I think that’s right.
² This kind of event is exhausting. I have no idea how the organisers manage. I am glad that I had a flask of restorative tea with me.
