Summing up DataViz Conference Make Your Data Speak 2023!
Already a month has passed since our Make Your Data Speak Conference! It is hard to believe that time is passing so quickly — and we are still summarizing and discussing reports. I wanted to disclose my thoughts and expectations to you. And also impressions from the audience and participants of the conference.
The conference was conceived as a bridge between the two spheres — dashboards and information design. Between utility and style, between money and art, between business and society… It seems that there is some opposition or even division between these two groups in the dataviz world. Completely in vain!
We wanted to fix it, and to enrich each side, show the best practices and take it on board.
We had been preparing for the conference for six months; it was an incredible time of networking with the industry, making new contacts, exchanging ideas and making a lot of international calls. During this period I realized how people are different in the dataviz world, how many concepts and visions there are! Even this has greatly inspired me and broadened my horizons!
Within the conference, we also held an Award dedicated to data visualization. The aim was to evaluate and reward professionals, and to hold analysis of works and study sessions — for students. For students, participation was free, but the prizes were small.
The judges for our award were an incredible number of dataviz professionals from a wide variety of industries, countries and companies! All of them had really different approaches: some of them are designers, some of them are dashboarders! They wrote their opinions on the projects, gave them marks, all we had to do was combine the results and wait for the winners!
Thanks to all of them for their hard work!
The award ceremony was held during the conference, which was held in conjunction with the competition in the media field. Read on our “MYDS Award 2023. Data tells stories” and “MYDS Award 2023. Oh, dashboards, my dashboards!” articles about our nominations and the projects that came out as winners — thanks to the participants for their efforts! It was really great!
But let’s get back to the conference!
February 9–10, 2023! I’m thrilled and excited! The online broadcast is starting! So what did these two days of data visualization consist of?
The first day was devoted entirely to presentations by our incredible speakers and discussions, and at the end we handed out our dataviz awards. The second day consisted partly of discussions and presentations, and partly of long, practical, highly specialized workshops.
I have tried to highlight the main areas of the industry, and that the conference has papers from three main blocks: ‘Design and Creativity’, ‘Business Dashboards’, and ‘Methodology in Data Visualization’. In my opinion, I succeeded. There were some incredible things uncovered, and interesting ideas covered in each of the blocks! And even for me, as a person from the world of dashboards rather than the world of data-art, there was something to learn from the presentations on creativity! I was inspired and enriched by the ideas, and I’m sure that the audience and participants of the conference were too.
During the first block, about design and creativity, we discussed firstly with the speakers in a short discussion “Data journalism and Business Intelligence: which tools/technologies are going to be a must-have for professionals in both fields?” — Which side do they see themselves in — business or creative?
Or maybe they see themselves on the edge, like the great Nir Smilga, author of beautiful dataviz projects, for example.
Nir told us afterwards in his speech that you don’t have to choose sides in this battle, that you can stay close to both data and art! Letícia Pozza, CEO at Odd.Studio, in her incredible report, told us about the specifics of data product design — and also noted that method is essential here — whatever the challenges of the project you are facing.
Tiziana Alocci — information designer and data-artist — won our hearts with sounds created from data and data created from sounds, her wonderful and complex data-art projects are incredibly inspiring!
It would seem that anything could be more down-to-earth than supply chain… But the great Manuel Lima, author of several dataviz books, has created a useful and beautiful data product for supply chain, which collects huge amounts of data, making it comprehensible and accessible. The amazing complexity of network charts is fascinating!
Neil Richards, author of the book “Questions in Dataviz”, told us about the curiosity and creativity in data visualization.
There was a special focus on working with social data — we saw interesting presentations from great Tricia Govindasamy, information designer Piero Zagami and wonderful Jacopo Ottaviani — Code for Africa’s CDO — they each presented the importance of social data in their own way. It’s a new, rich world of data, helping people in difficult situations — to live better!
Then Leonardo Nicoletti and Marie Patino from Bloomberg shared a fascinating report on the topic of data making the news! Just a guy from the dashboard world, and where else would I be able to learn such interesting details!?
Although the inspiration is not enough — incredibly practical and useful material was presented by our experts in dashboards and their implementation. This is rather my sphere and as I thought I would not get anything new here — but I was wrong again! Unbelievable. I’m still full of emotion, even after a month has passed!
One of the opening guests at our conference was Andy Cotgreave, one of the authors of the Big Book of Dashboards — with a great talk on what exactly is a dashboard and how to determine its value? I could listen to Andy talking about dashboards — endlessly!
Alex Kolokolov (your humble author) also made a presentation, talking about the importance of interactivity in dashboards in his report “Burn Your Slides!” also that proper implementation of a dashboard is a key part of its success.
Great Sarah Bartlett — founder of #IronQuest — presented us extremely clear about working with dashboards and the importance of dashboards delivering value and not just being — while Prassan Prem’s talk added insights into the main reasons why dashboards fail and the importance of not forgetting the product mindset when implementing such a product.
Wonderful Gomathy Viswanathan from TheMathCompany talked to us about the importance of design in analytics — quite fascinating topic for me — it connects these two worlds — data and design together, as does the whole dataviz industry!
Methodology block was dedicated to different approaches, standards and different formats in data visualization. We started with a short discussion on approaches to implementing BI and data driven culture! It was extremely informative!
We were preceded by BI or DIE podcast host Kai-Uwe Stahl, who introduced us to the world of self-service in large organizations. Igor Garlowski — Data Dune founder — with his incredible presentation reminded us once again that dashboards are not just grouped tables and charts, but are an interactive tool, which requires a different approach. Adewale Yusuf from dbrownconsulting explained the importance of standardization even in such a creative field as data visualization.
And what’s a conference without a block dedicated to practice! Workshops! Obviously, an online workshop does not convey the cosy atmosphere of offline workshops, when you can all get together in a small class and discuss a specific tool or a specific method. But we did a great job — we dived into the world of calculations in with Power BI Consultant Parv Chana, we looked at the best and worst visualization practices with Tableau Jedi Tore Levinsen, the amazing dataviz designer and trainer Weronika Gawarska-Tywonek showed us step by step how to improve visualization. And Gašper Kamenšek from Excel Olympics taught us how to handle data models in Power BI correctly to make your reports fast and clear!
It was a busy two days, wasn’t it?
However, I’m not going to pour my opinion on you endlessly, but rather to share with you the feedback from the audience and participants about our event.
To get feedback on the event — we asked the audience during the conference — how much they liked each presentation and their impressions at the end of the whole event. We also conducted an even more in-depth postal survey. And here are the results:
We adjusted the feedback to a 5-point scale and got the following result:
Total score at the end of the event among spectators and participants = 4.7 out of 5. In later surveys (when people have come to their senses and weighed everything up) = 4.2 out of 5.
If we look in more detail, the results are as follows.
What did the participants and the audience enjoy that they singled out:
- Almost all commented on the excellent selection of speakers and topics, and the lack of idle talk. Well, that’s something to be proud of! I’m glad that we were able to bring such great people together in one place! Thank you so much everyone!
- Incredible deversity of the event — we noticed it ourselves, but some participants and speakers noted it too — I didn’t expect such a wide coverage and haven’t seen it for a long time!
- The audience really enjoyed our discussions! I wasn’t quite sure about the concept, so I didn’t gave it much time, but it was fascinating to watch intelligent people sharing their opinions on a topic of interest to you!
Disliked points (yes, there were cons, and if we want to make this a regular event, we should definitely do some corrections!):
- Changing the event from offline to online has disappointed a lot of people. And us also, of course we would have liked to shake hands with all these incredible people in person, but it turned out to be difficult to get everyone together in Istanbul.
- The technical side was frustrating for many — we had problems with the Zoom, with the backgrounds, and the video quality was not always high. Here we have already worked out the bugs and are testing new platforms.
- Not everyone liked the broad presentation of Tableau and Power BI to the detriment of other tools, probably this is my professional deformation. At the next conference we will have more diversity in the software stack.
Certainly, not only participants’ feedback, but also the team’s opinions were collected for further analysis — how many difficulties were encountered at which stages of the organisation, what points were the participants most concerned about, what utilities and software were letting us down…? This kind of reflection will hopefully help us to create an even better event next year!
Well, it has been a fabulous experience and I will never tire of thanking everyone who has made this event happen — our dedicated judges, brave contestants, incredible speakers, inquisitive and enthusiastic audience, and all our team!
Hopefully, we will definitely do it again next year!
I hope we’ll continue to delight you with interesting content and events throughout the year!
