Communicating with data

No matter how technical data infrastructure and analysis gets, for me it’s always about people: using data to start a conversation, aid understanding, illustrate a conclusion. At the current rate of technological development more and more data is being shared and published, so the data is ‘findable’ — but it also needs to be viewable and explorable, and for a wider audience than the experts and enthusiasts who already know how to handle datsets.

As someone who’s regularly consuming and using data, once I’ve found a dataset my first question is usually “Is this what I was looking for? does it contain what I need?” followed by “What does it look like in summary? What does a quick pivot table or simple chart tell me about the shape of the data?”. So a friendly interface for visualising and exploring the attributes of a new dataset seems like the best gift we could give to anyone who’s just getting started with data analysis.

It feels like the resources mainly benefit the people who already have the skills, the resources and the influence, and that needs balancing with the needs of people who want to investigate issues but maybe don’t have the data or tech background to dive straight in. From my role in local government, I know we have a lot of data we could be making more use of, whether it’s intended to be published as open data or just to be better used and shared inside the council; so tools that give my public sector colleagues an easy starting platform to handle and manage data will help to boost skills and confidence on the publication front as well.

That’s why I’m working on The Data Place; using open source tech and tools to give people the best possible interface with the data that interests them, so they can interact with it and explore it and work out how to use it. It’s time to democratise access to the information, and see what different people can do with it.