Volunteer Spotlight: Gail Dawes

Gail is a long term community member who has worked on a variety of different projects in several volunteering roles. We’re glad she took this detour from her original career path of spending all day stood in a chemistry lab!

• Pronouns: She/her
• Roles: Analytics Director at Jagex; Scoping and Impact Committee member. I’ve been involved on and off for seven years, as Data Ambassadors for DataDive projects and a Datacorps project, as well as being on two committees!
• Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gailsdawes

How did you first get into data?

After doing a degree in chemistry, I learned that I didn’t like spending all day standing in a lab, so I went back home to work out what I would do next.

I then got a temp job as a Data Entry Technician in a retail data company, and a colleague suggested that I apply for a role in the company’s data modelling and analytics team. The rest is history. I was fortunate to find a career in data in the early days of big data and data science, and I loved the direct application of scientific techniques, and being able to sit in a comfy office!

What do you wish you’d known when you started to get into data?

It’s easy to focus on the technical aspects of data when you start: I need to learn Python, I need to understand statistics. This is important, but you will learn as you go. The real skills are the translation of what you do - what does it mean? The power of data for me is what it tells us about our world and human behaviour!

What was your first volunteering experience with DataKind UK like?

My first experience was great, I was a Data Ambassador on a DataDive project. We had a fantastic charity to work with who were super excited about the project. The weekend itself was very full-on and incredibly inspiring, I was buzzing for weeks afterwards. We were super happy with the outcome and the charity was thrilled.

What are the most important things you learned while volunteering?

Being a Data Ambassador (DA) is about being the bridge between the volunteers and the charity. Our volunteer community is extremely skilled and they work their socks off. Your role is to guide that work so it’s useful to the charity, and to involve the charity to provide that essential context.

As a DA you are directing traffic, and it can sometimes be difficult to step back from a cool project someone is working on, as you need to be looking across everything.

What is a data project that inspires you?

I was a Data Ambassador for a DataDive weekend where we looked at trying to identify potential signs of corruption in Companies House data.

A DataCorps project continued this piece of work, they expanded on an idea developed as part of the DataDive project. It was inspiring to see how the idea grew into something more complete and was used to find loopholes that led to recommendations to Companies House.

Is there a resource you’d recommend to the community?

Volunteer! Go to a DataDive weekend, sign up to be an Ambassador. You will learn a ton and see loads of new cool tools, models, and techniques that you want to try.

Tell us something completely non-data-related about yourself!

I love cooking. This is why I ended up in chemistry! It’s the same thing really; mixing and heating up ingredients until you get the reaction you need. But, cooking is better than chemistry, as you get to eat the final product. That’s definitely not something I’d recommend in chemistry.