What I learned by incubating a data geeks community in Riyadh
Spending close to a decade in Riyadh, I always knew it was hard to mobilize people here. Part of it has to do with the mood/concerns of the authorities but also partly due to the soul of the city. Saudis make up a very social society, yet mostly introvert. Lately, things are changing and Saudi Arabia as a whole is undergoing rapid disruptions. One of them have been the rapid rise of meetups around the country especially in Riyadh. The lack of typical entertainment venues, relaxed working environments could be factors but overall the drive especially among the youth to create a space for themselves and to grow at a personal and professional level is probably a safer bet for this rise.
Also, www.meetup.com came along and has had a fairly decent reception in Riyadh. Nevertheless, when I first registered the Riyadh Data Geeks on meetup, I was not expecting that 7 months later, we would have successfully carried out over 25 sessions and 5 hackathons with over 750+ members and 9 speakers. Within this time frame we also experienced a dull summer vacation season and two holiday seasons yet the enthusiasm of the community and reception especially from the youth has been phenomenal. We carried out talks around four main themes:
- Analytical Techniques & Data Mining
- Big Data Management & Technologies
- Visualization & Communication
- Tools and Infrastructure
More info on the sessions at the meetup page:
Yesterday, I stepped down from the leadership team as part of a rotation with 4 other co-organizers already taking care of everything. It has been a thoroughly learning experience and I found several key findings:
1. Content is king: People will only attend more than once if they find the content well worth their time. The content has to have something new for the audience and geared towards them. The content also needs to be consumable by the weakest member in the audience. Most big data talks can get pretty queer pretty quick. The goal is to make it easy to digest; that’s why one specific segment of the audience attended for. Its not about you the speaker, its all about the audience.
2. Teach swimming in the pool: Great content alone will not survive in the era of MOOCs, forums and great internet connectivity. There has to be an engagement model that immerses the audience in the topic. We did this by organizing hackathons along the line of ‘School of Data’ where people from all walks of life would be fully immersed in an end to end analytics exercise for a couple of hours. This lets each person identify her/his strengths and ‘areas of improvement’.
3. Have an online community to complement: Having face to face sessions is all great but all the knowledge sharing is not retained if people don’t follow up and follow through. We catered to this by forming a community on Slack called Data Geeks Arabia that let us be in touch throughout the week and also to carry over discussions and experiments after the talks. This also gave a sticky factor and our content caught the mind share. Although the number of active numbers have been a small portion of the total, the engagement from this group has increased due to more interactions and shared context.
4. Diversify the speaker pool: Most meetups end up with having either a strong reliance on only guest speakers or having just a pool of selected speakers most of the times making it look like a practice ground for these speakers. Remember, its about the audience and they like fresh perspectives and new takes. I also observed that once a person speaks for the first time, that person is now initiated and keeps coming for more. Speaking also lets us use ‘The Protege Effect’; learners who teach eventually learn better.
5. Clear Roadmap and consistent schedule: For most part of the 7 months, our calendar had atleast the next 4 sessions (monthly) planned and scheduled. This lets members prepare in advance on what to expect and can schedule accordingly. This also lets a natural thematic approach towards sessions where each session somehow interconnects with a previous one. On top of these, it also lets us commit a successful first speaker session by putting his/her talk out there and giving him/her ample time to prepare. We also made our weekly sessions consistent, every Tuesdays 6pm–8pm. Hackathons are last Saturdays every month 9am-1pm. This comes from Agile techniques: consistency reduces complexity.
6. Topic relevance and timing: Our hackathons usually derive the next set of weekly sessions as people collaboratively decide which area they want to know more and improve on. This lets sessions be aligned with people’s personal learning paths and topics of interest in most cases. Topic relevance also means to great a gradual increase in complexity and depth of subjects by starting with the bare essentials based on the lowest denominator among the memberships and then moving upwards. Timing of topics based on what is required and relevant is amazing. Therefore, we haven’t touched on ‘Deep Learning’ yet, like a product ahead of its time, the audience and the market may not be ready for it yet. On the other hand, ability to carry out data analysis with sound statistical reasoning and ability to process data are what people need day to day.
7. Word of mouth is a great growth strategy: Don’t spend resources on advertising and digital marketing yet as long as natural growth through word of mouth advertising is working. This directly relates to point 1 as well. Great content will likely lead to a great meetup experience that will in turn likely create a positive clout and people will bring friends and peers. This is where the importance of mind share comes in as well. Remember the online community on Slack?
8. Incubate a team by getting out of the way: Most great communities thrive in flat structures in flexible and self-organizing models and when people have no red tape to get permissions to innovate or try something new. This is inspired from the emerging concepts of Holocracy. For us, this mindset not only brought us immediate benefits in the way we take memberships, carry out event management or strike new partnerships with venue providers and sponsors, it also helped us refine our hackathon model. Overall, this also leads to a very smooth succession planning as well; the community is not about individuals but rather the whole and transitions become seamless and unnoticeable. Personally, this is a very radical concept for the typical style of management seen here but is a growing trend as more success comes its way.
9. Keep rotating volunteers: Passing on the baton is a vital part of making sure that the community sustains long term growth and development. Unless you are Linus Trovalds or Guido van Rossum, its usually not a great idea to stick around in charge for long. Rotation lets fresher ideas and gradual transitions better executed. I should have stepped down last month, imho.
10. Solve real problems: Under the current national agenda, where Saudi Arabia is looking to a post oil economy and under the Vision 2030, becoming data driven and optimization of businesses is vital to its success. This requires an army of data professionals in the region but above all a culture of data driven decision making or rational decision making. Being a data driven is an attitude that requires deep cultural change management at the roots of influence at every organization at the region. And not many are doing much about it. The purpose of the community is addressing this very need, creating grass root awareness of all aspects of data and giving people the opportunity to become real practitioners instead of relying on some (not all) third party, dare I say ‘status quo’ consultants who overnight become experts of nearly every emerging subject matter. In the rise of the maker economy, one’s affiliations don’t matter as much as one’s actual accomplishments. And Riyadh Data Geeks focuses on that by running these real hackathons with real data sets either from local companies or those contributed to the international public domain. Bill Gross presents it well, its all about Timing!
Final words, The Saudi leadership has realized what we do too and they have now partnered with MiSK Hackathons from England and as of now, their inaugural Saudi version of the MiSK Hackathon is under way with a reasonable prize money of $100,000 to innovate.
If you or your organization likes us to run a hackathon for you or are interested to improve the data competencies in your organization, our doors are open.
