Data Visualization Society

Being able to kind of put everything that already exists, like in a place where people can find it, has been one thing that we really wanted to do.

Hi everyone. Welcome to a new episode of Data stories. My name is Enrico Bertini and I am a professor at NYU in New York City, where I do research in data visualization.

Yeah, and my name is Moritz Farne and I'm an independent designer of data visualizations. And actually I work as a self employed truth and beauty operator out of my office here in the countryside in the beautiful north of Germany.

Yes. And on this podcast we talk about data visualization, analysis and generally the role data plays in our lives. And usually we do that with a guest we invite on the show.

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Yes. And thanks to everyone who has already joined our Patreon or sent one time donations. That's always, always a joy to receive new notifications about people who sign up or help us out. So let's get started. The topic today is a really interesting one. I was really looking forward to this one. We are going to talk about a recent big thing in data visualization, the data Visualization Society. And we have the three funding members joining us today to talk about the data Visualization Society. We have Amy sizzle. Hi Amy. Hi, Molly Petit. Hi Molly.

Yes. And thanks to everyone who has already joined our Patreon or sent one time donations. That's always, always a joy to receive new notifications about people who sign up or help us out. So let's get started. The topic today is a really interesting one. I was really looking forward to this one. We are going to talk about a recent big thing in data visualization, the data Visualization Society. And we have the three funding members joining us today to talk about the data Visualization Society. We have Amy sizzle. Hi Amy. Hi, Molly Petit. Hi Molly.

Hey there.

And Elijah Meeks. Hey Elijah.

Hi Mika.

So as usual, we ask our guests to introduce themselves. So can you tell us a little bit about what is your background, the main interests, and then we can dive right in into the data visualization society.

Hi, I'm Amy Cecil. I'm a graphic designer specializing in data visualization. I have a master's degree in information visualization from Mica. I'm a two time information is beautiful award winner. I've worked for the federal government and for the nonprofit the Sunlight foundation and built data visualization style guides for both of those organizations. And I'm a founding member of the data Visualization Society. I'm happy to be here.

Great. Molly?

Yeah. Hi, I'm Molly. I am a data visualization designer and developer. I work as a freelancer. Some of my recent clients were ACLU, Illinois, New Yorker, Northwestern University, currently doing some work with g two crowd and I founded and organized the local Chicago Dataviz community meetup, and excited to be here.

Great. Elijah.

So I'm Elijah Meeks. I'm a senior data visualization engineer at Netflix. Before that I worked in the digital humanities and did a bunch of large scale, sort of interactive scholarly works. I write a lot about data visualization, I talk a lot about data visualization, and I tweet frustrating comments at people about data visualization. That's pretty much my modus operandi.

Great. Fantastic. So just in case any of our listeners doesn't know what the data visualization society is yet, which I doubt, can you briefly introduce the data visualization society? What is it exactly?

Great. Fantastic. So just in case any of our listeners doesn't know what the data visualization society is yet, which I doubt, can you briefly introduce the data visualization society? What is it exactly?

Sure. So the data visualization society is sort of a community to meaningly connect with other people in Dataviz. And it's a place to find data visualization resources, like a list of meetup groups all over the world or a jobs board with data visualization posts. We wanted to create a place for someone who was earlier in their career to get started, understand what skills they need, where resources are, and find ways to grow and mentor and be mentored. We wanted other people's experiences getting into data visualization to be better than our own. And that's really the core why we wanted to start this.

Yeah, yeah. And it's been so interesting to see this thing happening and having a big success. So what was the main impetus behind it? How did you come up with this idea that we needed something like a data visualization society?

So I think there's been a lot of conversation around types of convergence that are going on in data visualization for the last couple of years. You know, we had a conversation on data stories, talking about how the experience of data visualization professionals was a bit different from the experience of freelancers and journalists. And I think that the reason why we were having a conversation, why these conversations have been happening, is because there's less and less distinction between the different fields. I would argue there's less and less distinction between the different tools and there's less and less distinction between the different audiences. And so that conversation ties into these conversations that have been ongoing about critical discourse and whether or not how to give and take criticism properly, accessibility and research, and just general themes that are about sort of broader, holistic view of data visualization that's not focused on certain tool defined communities or audience defined communities. And so I sort of offered up in that third wave data visualization talk that I gave at Tapestry this idea that we needed to formalize this and build up some kind of resources to support people who were in the field and especially people who were getting into the field. And then after that talk, I got tracked down by Amy and Molly and we sort of started talking about this at the time there. And it was, you know, one of these, you know how these conversations are at a conference where you're like, oh, my God, this is a great idea. We should change the entire world. Except what ended up happening.

Who are you against?

Right, exactly. No, it's literally, except what happened one week later was that, like, Amy and Molly are incredibly hardworking and I'm happy to come along for the ride. And literally we had this conversation in November and then in February we launched it and it was just incredible. And we expected 400, 500 people maybe in the first month or two. And we've had 5000 members sign up. And I know that a lot of those members are signing up just because of the whole fear of missing out thing. But it just has been an incredible response.

Yeah. But still just mobilizing 5000 people who say, yeah, I'm interested in what's going on in the data visualization society. Regardless how much they contributed. It's amazing.

No, it's bonkers.

I remember you were quite surprised yourself, I think, in the first few days, like, and just had trouble even like handling this flood of people.

We didn't even know what to do right when it came to signing up for the slack. We were sitting here saying, well, we're gonna have to only put 250 to 500 people per day because we can't sign up 2500 people. You know, I think it was 2500 people who signed up in the first two weeks and we couldn't just drop them all in slack at once.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to confess that if you would have told me, oh, we have this great idea of creating a data visualization society, I would have totally killed your idea. Come on, guys, who needs that, right?

So it was luckily he found us, Amy and Molly.

Yeah. So, but that's exactly the point. Maybe also. So I think it's clear. You seem to have hit like something of interest. And what do you think? What's the key thing that the society provides that maybe did not exist before? I mean, Elijah, you mentioned already a lot of the existing communities were tool centric. There was a very active D3 slack. There were D3 meetups. There's a very active Tableau community. Molly, what do you think? What else contributes to the big success?

Yeah, totally. That is one of the things that we think it adds that maybe wasn't around before. Tool agnostic dataviz outlet. That's beyond Twitter, that's long term, that's more conversational, that's less hierarchical, where people can easily connect with each other and share projects and resources, no matter how, quote unquote, dataviz famous they are. Someone with ten Twitter followers might get very little response if they posted a cool project they've done on Twitter. But if you can post it in the share channel in Dataviz society, it'll get attention. If it's awesome, because it's awesome, not because you're well known or you have followers. So that was one thing that we think was a value add that people get a lot out of, and then another thing, which was kind of a simpler thing, was, yeah, there are already so many kind of resources out there, but when someone's first starting out, like, when I first started out, I didn't know where to find this stuff. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know what conferences there were and, or I didn't even know that there was a date of his jobs board till earlier this year. And that was thanks to Amy. I had no idea that existed. And so part of there's no central.

Registry, you find flowing data at some point. You find the database board at some point.

Right.

There's no central point where to start.

Exactly.

That's a good point, actually.

Yeah.

It takes time. And I think I ended up just at some point, as I got to know more Dataviz people, I would just ask them. I'd be like, okay, what are all the conferences? What are all the things I.

Secret whisper networks.

Yeah. And so being able to kind of put everything that already exists, like, in a place where people can find it has been one thing that we really wanted to do, and that seems like a simple task, but for someone new, coming in is going to make a lot of difference.

Yeah. And that's my feeling, too. Like, I cannot follow everything on the slack. It's such a huge thing. It's like thousands of messages. But my feeling was, too, it's a lot of newcomers or, like, serious newcomers, like, who've been doing it for a year or two, and I. Whose names I never heard, but who do often amazing work. Right. And who are really often very passionate about specific aspects of data visualization. And I think that's. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there with the. Yeah, just finally, there's a central place for the people just getting started, but not being totally fresh, but having some knowledge, but now wanting to do the next step. Right.

Yeah. And that's my feeling, too. Like, I cannot follow everything on the slack. It's such a huge thing. It's like thousands of messages. But my feeling was, too, it's a lot of newcomers or, like, serious newcomers, like, who've been doing it for a year or two, and I. Whose names I never heard, but who do often amazing work. Right. And who are really often very passionate about specific aspects of data visualization. And I think that's. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there with the. Yeah, just finally, there's a central place for the people just getting started, but not being totally fresh, but having some knowledge, but now wanting to do the next step. Right.

I just wanted to highlight something. We always talk about how positive and supportive and welcoming the data visualization community is. And, you know, sometimes it doesn't feel that way because it seems like when you're on Twitter, Twitter promotes the voices of people who are extremely well established. And what we saw when we opened up the slack was that somebody would ask a question and some guy named Alberto would answer. Some guy named Moritz would answer. You know, Enrico, you were right in there with people. I had felt the same thing that you did more with people who I hadn't heard of, who were doing amazing work, and everybody was just right there. So I feel like to a certain degree, we were constrained by the methods that we had to communicate with each other because they had with them, they sort of smuggled with them these bad qualities that the community actually didn't reflect. And at times I thought maybe it was the community. I mean, I've been critical of the community from time to time, and just seeing how people interacted on slack and how egalitarian. Everybody interacted on slack and just was amazing.

And then there are a couple other things actually, too, that I think that Amy, Elijah might want to talk about, about things that have that Dataviz society has provided. Like there's like, critique channel, which is actually, it's really great. And the medium post, did you guys wanna talk about that a little bit? Yeah.

And then there are a couple other things actually, too, that I think that Amy, Elijah might want to talk about, about things that have that Dataviz society has provided. Like there's like, critique channel, which is actually, it's really great. And the medium post, did you guys wanna talk about that a little bit? Yeah.

Maybe we can talk about the slack, which seems to be the main place where everybody meets. Right, and how you organized it, where you have lots of moderators as well, or facilitators. And maybe walk us a bit through how this jungle of information there.

Sure. So I think the most visible thing to a lot of people is the slack, because it is everyone together and there's a lot of chatter in there, but that's not the only thing that's there. We have a website that we're continuing to put information up. We have a medium publication which distills a lot of stuff from the slack and also other voices. We have an email newsletter, which is coming out more regularly so people can get information pushed to them that way. It's not just this conversational slack, although that's a big part of it. So it's organized. The three of us are sort of the core heart drive behind this thing right now, but we also have a large group of volunteers who we call facilitators that are helping us push this thing forward and make decisions for slack. There's two moderators for every channel. They help keep an eye on things, and that has been huge. It's another set of eyes, more enthusiasm to keep discussions going. So people in the community stepping up, taking a more active role to help build the community, has been great, and we're slowly adding more structure.

So, and you also have, I really like this activity where you try to summarize some of the things happening there in a set of medium posts. Right? So how does this work? How do you decide when something is worth moving to a medium post?

So one of the things that goes on, one of the fears I think that folks had when they first started out was they saw this slack and they saw the enormous number of people there and just how fast it was moving to. And we all heard the same thing from the beginning. Everybody noticed it because Slack puts it in front of your face as soon as it happens. Once you get over 10,000 messages, then you have to pay some absurd licensing fee to slack to get access to older messages early on. Anybody who's had experience with slack, like I have with a large slack community, like the D3 J's, slack, knew that that was coming. And so what we wanted to do was for two reasons. One, to sort of keep a memory of conversations. We wanted to make sure to prompt folks to try to write things and distill the thoughts that were going on. But also the conversations are great, and a lot of material shows up in them that are great. But I'm still a firm believer that in that process of writing and distilling, then you actually identify value in those conversations and insights that are going to be useful for the whole community. So we never wanted this to be sort of an enclosed space that only a person who signed up could take part in. We wanted to have something that allowed us to express whatever learnings were discovered there, but also to elevate voices of these early career professionals, to allow them the chance to write about these things and somehow draw a through line between the points that folks were making. And I think that that's been working out amazingly well. I'm kind of shocked at just how many medium pieces, how many essays we've managed to put together. And it's only been two months. That's the other thing that kind of strikes me. I feel like it's been a long time. Sometimes it feels like it's been too long, that data visualization society has been around, and it's literally only been two months. But we've got a couple of dozen original essays on data visualization now. And so the way that that works is that we try to get folks, writers to do one of two things, either to basically transcribe conversations and attribute and sort of trim and edit them. And the other is to take, and what I prefer is to try to distill out of them rather than just sort of reporting on the conversations, trying themselves to add a layer of meaning on top of that. And that's starting to work out more and more and it depends on sort of the subject area. Probably the most vibrant channel we have as far as the medium publication goes is that historical data visualization channel, where we just have a lot of motivated and experienced writers who are super interested in the wealth of historical data visualization. And they've been putting out just a lot of amazing work.

Yeah, yeah. You've been rearranging the slack channels quite a bit, trying to kind of like. That's something I really like. You try to evolve it over time as you learn more about what works, what doesn't work. Right. So I like this kind of very flexible.

A lot of gardening involves structure.

Right. I don't know how you do it. Right. I mean you still have regular jobs, right?

I mean for now we do. We'll see how long.

For now. Yeah.

When they realize how long you spend on the slack, this fight soon be over.

I definitely got into slack and did some serious gardening the other day and came up with a. A easier to follow structure. And so I think it's very helpful for people who are just jumping into it so that there's different channels for different topics like accessibility data, art historical vis text analysis, even teaching data vis.

Yeah, yeah.

And then there's channels to connect different groups of people. So people who work in government or freelancers and people in different locations like Africa or Europe or DC. And even specific language speaking channels like Spanish speaking.

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I have to resist the temptation of spending two or 3 hours just going through everything. Right. I think for the first few weeks I added on my regular slack that I have on the desktop and then I had to delete it and just access from the webs. Otherwise I would just check every hour or so. But it's great. And I've seen a lot of different things happening and probably many have just miss them. But I'm pretty sure there are a few ones. I was curious to hear from you. What are the main highlights so far? Right. I have seen myself a lot of really interesting things happening. Are there any special, I don't know, anecdotes or things that you're particularly proud of? I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I have to resist the temptation of spending two or 3 hours just going through everything. Right. I think for the first few weeks I added on my regular slack that I have on the desktop and then I had to delete it and just access from the webs. Otherwise I would just check every hour or so. But it's great. And I've seen a lot of different things happening and probably many have just miss them. But I'm pretty sure there are a few ones. I was curious to hear from you. What are the main highlights so far? Right. I have seen myself a lot of really interesting things happening. Are there any special, I don't know, anecdotes or things that you're particularly proud of? I don't know.

Well, I think that, for me, it goes back to what Moritz was saying a while back, which is that I think what's most exciting is that you see a lot of names that you have that I, for one, have never seen before, and you see them showing off their work, and it's just amazing work. And then interacting with other folks and pointing them to resources and using tools you've never heard of to make data visualization that oftentimes looks the same as the stuff that you've been making with some other completely different set of tools. And so that's super exciting. And then, more specifically, you know, early on, we, we knew that one of the things we wanted to push was for better structured critique. And so we had a critique channel, and almost immediately, Amy had this great idea to say, well, it's structured critique. So here I'm going to give you a list of what you're supposed to ask for when you're asking for feedback.

I love that. Yeah. It's a ten minute straight kind of thing.

Yeah. And we just did it. And we didn't know whether or not anybody would even post in that channel. And, you know, people would post, and sometimes they wouldn't post with those questions answered. And we'd say very gently, hey, make sure that you fill out this little form. And people do. And the feedback they gave has been amazing, and they've helped people just get better at their work. And I think that just environmentally, it's been so positive all over the place that what it's done is it started to foster these questions of how can we be even more actively engaged with helping people to get better at their practice. So one of the things that we've been talking about almost since the beginning, because it came up early and it's come up often, is trying to arrange mentorship programs and trying to arrange ways to sort of evaluate teaching programs and educational resources and things like that, because people have asked for that and people have helped with that. And it's just such a, an incredibly supportive environment that I'm just shocked. I mean, it's amazing just how self organized and supportive it has been.

Some other things that I found really exciting, too, is that almost immediately there was a lot of excitement about people creating local community groups. Maybe people are finding other people in their same city that they didn't know, that are also in Dataviz. And very quickly, these kind of local dataviz society meetups were starting. And so that was really excitement, or that was exciting to see all this excitement about these local groups, because part of Dataviz society, part of the goal is to help foster a community, and so fostering local community is also part of that. And then it's also been really exciting to see kind of the newbie excitement. So, like, there's been a lot of people who are coming in who are new in Dataviz and, you know, they're immediately able to have a voice and make contributions and there's a lot of excitement in the newbie channel and so it's exciting to see their excitement.

Yeah, yeah. It's really, you have a really substantial group of people together now who are really excited about the whole thing. I think that can go a really long way. That's really fantastic.

What do you guys, we wanted to know what you guys thought. What did you think was the most exciting thing to come out of it?

For me, it was basically what you already said. I was like, oh, my God, there are so many amazing people I've never heard of. That was the biggest thing. And it made me aware of how limited Twitter is instantly. Right. And, yeah, and it made me so excited. It's like, oh, my God, Datavis is so much bigger and I never had a way to appreciate how many more amazing people are out there and I am here to learn from them and it's great. Right. That was the biggest thing for me. And I'm still very excited about that. And the local chapters as well. I think next week I'm going to participate to the first one. It's not the first one, it's the second one in New York City. I couldn't go to the first one. I don't know anyone there. Right. It's going to be all new people and I do know data visualization people in New York, as you may imagine. Right. So super exciting. Great. That's the thing I love the most. There are other things. I like the fact that you have an academia channel. I had to.

I had to because I'm a failed academic, Enrico. I'm always thinking about my PhD. That could have been.

I've been trying to convince more academics to join it. I've not been very successful. So let's see.

I love the data art channel as well. This one's super nice.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, one of the things that I love, Moritz, before I hear what you thought was most interesting was that when we have the introductions channel and I try to go and sort of respond to people who've been introducing themselves and we'll see somebody who's you know, the CTO of plotly or the director of this or the head of that. And what I love is telling them, hey, go over to the career advice channel and tell people what kind of people you're looking for and what kind of interviews you're giving and all of this, and just trying to get folks who are in these leadership positions to sort of speak in a socratic sense to the community. And that to me, is an amazing opportunity for folks on both sides because I feel like, you know, there's a lot of early career folks who don't know what's expected of them. And then, frankly, I think there's a lot of leadership folks who don't quite haven't really thought critically or structurally about what kind of people they're looking to hire. And so I think that that's something that I'd like to see promoted more exhaustively in the future. Yeah, but Moritz, what have you noticed? What was the most sort of prominent thing that you noticed about this little phenomenon?

You know, one of the things that I love, Moritz, before I hear what you thought was most interesting was that when we have the introductions channel and I try to go and sort of respond to people who've been introducing themselves and we'll see somebody who's you know, the CTO of plotly or the director of this or the head of that. And what I love is telling them, hey, go over to the career advice channel and tell people what kind of people you're looking for and what kind of interviews you're giving and all of this, and just trying to get folks who are in these leadership positions to sort of speak in a socratic sense to the community. And that to me, is an amazing opportunity for folks on both sides because I feel like, you know, there's a lot of early career folks who don't know what's expected of them. And then, frankly, I think there's a lot of leadership folks who don't quite haven't really thought critically or structurally about what kind of people they're looking to hire. And so I think that that's something that I'd like to see promoted more exhaustively in the future. Yeah, but Moritz, what have you noticed? What was the most sort of prominent thing that you noticed about this little phenomenon?

I was pretty surprised how slack savvy everybody is. So everybody's threading nicely, everybody is riding the right length. So I think we've come a long way there. And people like, take it serious also to be good with slack, which is interesting. And yeah, I just really enjoy the introductions channel, the data art channel, as I said, there's super specific ones like dynamic data mapping, teaching. It's like weather, climate. I'm super into climate visualization right now, so I really enjoy these little. And it's just 1015 people there, but, and they are really into that topic. So I enjoy that specificity. Yeah.

I was having a conversation about using UMAP in a network visualization layout, and I just thought to myself, where else could you have this extremely specific conversation with somebody who's actually just as interested as you are in it?

It's a good place to geek out on anything database, for sure.

Yeah, we all have these little niches, and you have now found ten other people who have the same little niche as you, and it's great. And you just feel, you feel validated in a way that you sort of wouldn't in this broader community because you have found your people.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. I want to come back to something, Elijah, you touched upon before, or also we've been discussing about slack and medium, which is on the one hand the openness and on the other hand the platform aspect. Because one thing I've been thinking about, and what I've been also a bit skeptical in the beginning is that, well, with slack and all these services, you have to sign up and you have to register, and it is closed because it's not part of the open web. So you can just link to a slack conversation. And so I'm thinking a bit now. I think it's amazing how the momentum is in the community, but thinking long term, I think about. Okay, do you have any plans to move the most valuable resources to the open web and make them also editable on the open web? Because my concern personally, I'm much more convinced by now that we need to own our own platforms and cannot rely on sites like MySpace or Facebook, which might go away at some point. No, but it's really because I've seen it happen by now. I mean, that's a bit like old man talking, but I've seen platforms go away, and I'd love to have your stuff stick around for decades. So what are your thoughts currently on how you can make this platform sustainable? Or maybe you're not even thinking about that because you're still so busy keeping up with the current momentum. But did you discuss this, or what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. I want to come back to something, Elijah, you touched upon before, or also we've been discussing about slack and medium, which is on the one hand the openness and on the other hand the platform aspect. Because one thing I've been thinking about, and what I've been also a bit skeptical in the beginning is that, well, with slack and all these services, you have to sign up and you have to register, and it is closed because it's not part of the open web. So you can just link to a slack conversation. And so I'm thinking a bit now. I think it's amazing how the momentum is in the community, but thinking long term, I think about. Okay, do you have any plans to move the most valuable resources to the open web and make them also editable on the open web? Because my concern personally, I'm much more convinced by now that we need to own our own platforms and cannot rely on sites like MySpace or Facebook, which might go away at some point. No, but it's really because I've seen it happen by now. I mean, that's a bit like old man talking, but I've seen platforms go away, and I'd love to have your stuff stick around for decades. So what are your thoughts currently on how you can make this platform sustainable? Or maybe you're not even thinking about that because you're still so busy keeping up with the current momentum. But did you discuss this, or what are your thoughts on that?

It's something that's been talked about for sure. There has been. There was a call for people who wanted to think through this and think through some of the different tools that we could potentially use for communication. So there has been dialogue around kind of the pros and cons of a variety of different tools and communication platforms. Right now, though, there's actually. There's a lot of things that are really good about Slacken and that people have expressed they really like about it. One is the kind of what we talked about before, about being able to kind of just show up and not be someone that someone knows, but be able to post something and have it noticed if it's awesome. But then there's also been some people who expressed that they really liked it because this private forum allowed them to participate when they don't feel comfortable, for different reasons, to put their information out there in a Google and, like, public way. So it allowed them to feel more comfortable. It also helps us to enforce the code of conduct a lot easier. And. Yeah, so that's. I mean, what we're at right now is we're thinking through it, but do you guys have anything to add? Amy?

Elijah, just a little bit more on the privacy ness of Slack is it allows us to create a safe space and to really control that space in a way that the other public forums don't. So you see a lot more abuse on Twitter or on Reddit, and that really hasn't happened in this community because we have that group of monitors and because we can limit who has access to it. Elijah, do you want to talk more about.

Elijah, just a little bit more on the privacy ness of Slack is it allows us to create a safe space and to really control that space in a way that the other public forums don't. So you see a lot more abuse on Twitter or on Reddit, and that really hasn't happened in this community because we have that group of monitors and because we can limit who has access to it. Elijah, do you want to talk more about.

Yeah, I mean, so I agree, and I think everyone agrees with you, Moritz. I think that there's always a fear that you're the product. Right. On all of these platforms, people have said that for a long time, our original decision to go with medium and Slack was ease of use and accessibility like that, it was going to be easy for us to set up and maintain. And folks had some level of familiarity with it, and they, you know, and these companies have, as their product, have leveraged the ability to make these things easier and more visible. That said, almost as soon as we started, people showed up and said, well, why don't we have a discord, and why don't we have a discourse, and why can't this be public, and why can't this be searchable? And I don't want this to stay here. And so we've been evaluating that almost from the very beginning. There's some discussions about how to take the slack content and perhaps put it out on a forum. But then to get back to Amy and Molly's point, what we've actually heard from, in a couple of cases, especially when we were doing the medium distillations, was we actually heard from members who said, I don't want my name on this publication. I don't want my words.

It's a bit weird to just dump chat logs somewhere. I agree. That's not the right thing to do either.

Yeah.

So the problem, I think, is that it's not just being the product or not. I think that's maybe not even the most important thing. But I think the main thing is it's a conversational medium that's also very transient, and the contents just disappear if you don't have a paid plan. Right.

There's two things about that. One is that some folks find that transience to be empowering, and that was interesting, and I was surprised by that.

And for the privacy aspect of.

Yeah, and the other thing is, what I've discovered is you can that the archives, the Slack archives are actually full archives no matter what. And so it would actually be technically rather trivial for me to just set up a slack archive viewer right now and people could go and browse through the archives. But the problem is, is that we can't constrain that to members only. And so this becomes this question of who are you providing this for? And what are they using it for? And that's what's tremendously challenging. And we would love, as Amy was saying, and Molly, we'd love ideas for how to address that. My current idea for how to address that is to try to ramp up this distillation and summarization process, because I think that's the best of what's coming out of this, right. Is people's voices and people's ideas, not necessarily their exact words, in a moment when they were chatting on slack during work time about off topic things or something like that. But that's not 100% working. Like, it's working where we have people who have the energy and the time and the inclination to write. And so it's definitely something we need to solve.

Right, right.

And I'd also actually want to add, because, Elijah, you said, you know, there were a lot of people that spoke out against like slack or wanting to use discourse. I would say that when that conversation happened, there was actually also quite a bit of people speaking out, saying, actually, I think this is great. And I like what this has been, what this has provided that I haven't found in other. So it's not just been one side kind of pushing.

Yeah. And as you said, I think the speed of getting so many people together and establishing this culture this quickly, I wouldn't know where that would have worked this quickly anywhere.

That would have been hard.

But I'm thinking of the data visualization Society, and if this is your also the thing you want to achieve, then I think it's got to have some public aspects that don't just go away, but are more persistent and more reliable than this fast moving community, which probably will always be an important part. But maybe you need to establish a few other playgrounds in parallel. Yeah, it's exciting. And why not just see what happens now? You have so many people together, and as long as you sort of guide the discussion the right way, good things will happen, I guess. Right? Yeah.

It's a little bit like having a conversation at a conference, which is sort of how this whole thing started. It's a place to have those conversations with people all over the world, and it's a little ephemeral. It goes away, but you still have the connection that comes out of it, and you can save parts of it and take those best parts and make them more permanent.

I mean, Moritz, let me give you a data point. Since we're data people. On many days, half of the conversations, and there have been 50,000 plus messages on slack, half of the conversations are direct messages. Oh, wow. So what's going on with the data visualization society is that there's a public conversation. That's a fire hose. But then what else is going on is people are connecting and. And networking with each other to an enormous degree, and we can't, to be very, very clear, we do not have a plan that allows us to archive or see or do anything with those private conversations. So please continue to have them. But I think that that really, really emphasizes Molly's point that this is, you know, this is a place where people are connecting and really making meaningful ties professionally, along with having interesting public geek out conversations.

Yeah, I mean, I think it needs the full spectrum, like from the private one on one chat to the, you know, to the maybe wiki or some other public content where newcomers, as you said in the beginning, can find the ten best resources to getting started with data visualization. Right. So I guess that's the mix. Will, in the end, be the most important thing. Yeah.

Yeah. So, and as we, like, continue to drive to publish more medium pieces and then pull together more content on our website, I think that you'll see those things building.

So. And I think what I was curious to hear is also what are your plans for the future? I think you also set up a Patreon account, so you are receiving funding for the dvs. So what's the plan there? I guess that if you have some funding, maybe there are things that you can enable that otherwise would probably be too hard to do without funding. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more. What's your plan there?

So. And I think what I was curious to hear is also what are your plans for the future? I think you also set up a Patreon account, so you are receiving funding for the dvs. So what's the plan there? I guess that if you have some funding, maybe there are things that you can enable that otherwise would probably be too hard to do without funding. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more. What's your plan there?

Sure. We're working on continuing to formalize the organization. We're looking into how to become a legal nonprofit in the US. And so some of that fee will feed into lawyer fees and fees for other legal requirements for that, we're going to put out. Elijah did a great data visualization survey for 2017 and 2018 in the field. So we're going to do one for 2019. We're going to pull together people and have this broader audience of over 5000 people that we can get to invite to take this survey of the field. We're also going to provide a little bit of incentive for people who take it. So I think that will increase our response rate to what he previously had. We're going to work on creating a mentoring program later this year. We've worked on highlighting members to showcase other people in the community. So our Patreon basically covers our basic costs, like hosting, domain name email marketing. When we started, that was all coming out of me and Elijah and Molly's pockets. So this has been great to not just fund this with our own money and our own time, but to have some support from the community in doing that.

That's how data stories started and evolved as well.

So we can share.

Yeah, we now have stickers.

Yeah, that's what I was about to say. Right. You have really nice graphics and stickers you've been sending around. That's really cool. I like it. And personalized. Right? Can you explain that?

So, yeah, we put some of that money back into creating swag. So the logo is a.

Remember, you're on the radio. So describe it.

So the logo is three triangles, each one pertaining to data visualization or society. And so the logo for the organization is an average of all of the members self ranking in these three skills. And so every person who signed up and who completed this survey has their own mini. We've called them badges, their own data visualization badge, which represents their ranking of themselves over nine areas in these three categories. And then all of that data feeds back into the shape of the one for the organization. So the logo literally reflects the members, which is not a thing that logos do to this extent with data.

So you can have your own personalized logo. Right. So I think, was it you, Elijah, who created a visualization with actual icons for the whole community? There are a few ones that are completely black. And it was like what was happening there?

So every couple or three weeks, we have a data visualization society challenge. We're on number two right now, where we try to expose data from what membership or this latest one has been the conversations that have been happening on slack. And so for the first one, which was the first 3500 members or something a long time ago, when we only had 3500 members, and we asked our members to visualize them. And so people came up with a lot of different representations. And because we had these three values that you could visualize. And the visualization I did was that each member was turned into a little dungeons and dragons style adventurer. And their sword was based on their visualization skill, and their shield was based on their data skill, and their hat was based on their society skill. And then the color of their shirt and the color of their pants were based on their latitude and longitude. So they made 3500 tiny little adventurers. And what I found out, unexpectedly, was when somebody didn't put any answers in, then it looked like they weren't holding or carrying anything. So they looked like they were just going to punch you which I thought was cute. But then if they didn't put their location in, there were null values for Latin long and so entirely unintentionally it made those people look like they were little ninjas. And so I just left it in there because it was such a. It was such a fun little. Yeah. So I did that. And then just recently for Easter, we sent out data driven Easter eggs to all the members too. So you got an Easter egg that was decorated based on your. How you self ranked. And then it also had a yolk and an egg white that the color was based on your number one and number two skills. We're having a great time.

Had some fun with this, with this data.

Are you sure you still have your own jobs? Right? You still have your own jobs?

Yeah, to this point.

Yeah. These challenges are cool. I really enjoy it. I always love it. Like different visualizations of the same data set.

I could.

Have you guys done any of the challenges?

No. I did look into the registration data set a bit because I was just curious, but I just did some exploratory analysis. No designs. Yeah, I think we have to wrap up soon. Time is flying. But just as a final question, how can people join and where can they find you? And maybe why should they join if somebody's still on the fence? I'm sure some of our listeners would be interested in joining.

No. I did look into the registration data set a bit because I was just curious, but I just did some exploratory analysis. No designs. Yeah, I think we have to wrap up soon. Time is flying. But just as a final question, how can people join and where can they find you? And maybe why should they join if somebody's still on the fence? I'm sure some of our listeners would be interested in joining.

You can join the data Visualization Society by going to data visualizationsociety.com. there's a big blue join button. When you click that button, you'll be presented with a form that asks you to rate yourself on those nine skills that we were talking about that we were using for the generative badges, and also say where you are and to say whether or not you want to receive a newsletter or be registered for the slack. Every one of these answers is optional. So one of the bits of pushback we had was that this was an onerous requirement to join the community. So we tried to make it more clear that you don't have to rate yourself. You can end up a ninja just like we were talking about. It's great. But you do have to give us an email address because we can't email you or invite you onto the slacken without an email address. So that's going to kind of be a requirement. And then once you join, what does that mean? Well, it means you'll get an email newsletter from us. It may be every two or three or four weeks. And you'll also be allowed to take part in the conversations on the slack with thousands of other data visualization members. And then from there you'll probably make all sorts of amazing connections. You'll be able to talk to IIB award winners like Moritz and Amy and they'll tell you how to win awards. And then the next thing you know, you'll be in London and you'll be celebrating and you'll be wealthy and famous and proud. Proud of yourself.

I think there's some truth in your life.

That's the clear trajectory.

I'm just trying to help you poor people who need the data visualization.

I think that was convincing. Yeah. For anybody still on the fence, I think that should have done it, right? Yeah, no, but just had to the introductions channel and first browse through and see the whole variety of people there and just write a little introduction. There you go.

If you've already joined and you want to support us further, you can donate to our Patreon. There's a link at the bottom of our website and if you donate, we will send you some data visualization society stickers with our logo.

Yeah. And generally I think it's always great if you enjoy something and you draw some value out of it while it supports the people running it and the whole community. I think that's always a good idea. Cool. Super curious to see how this will develop. I think you're off to a great start. Maybe we should check back in a year or two to see how it has developed and. Yeah, super nice and just amazing what you were able to set up here.

Well, thanks for the opportunity, guys.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, thanks.

Thank you.

Bye bye. Thank you.

Bye bye. Hey, folks, thanks for listening to data stories again. Before you leave, a few last notes, this show is now completely crowdfunded, so you can support us by going on Patreon. That's patreon.com Datastories. And if you can spend a couple of minutes reading us on iTunes, that would be extremely helpful for the show.

Bye bye. Hey, folks, thanks for listening to data stories again. Before you leave, a few last notes, this show is now completely crowdfunded, so you can support us by going on Patreon. That's patreon.com Datastories. And if you can spend a couple of minutes reading us on iTunes, that would be extremely helpful for the show.

And here's also some information on the many ways you can get news directly from us. We of course, on twitter@twitter.com. Datastories. We have a Facebook page@Facebook.com. datastoriespodcast all in one word. And we also have a slack channel where you can chat with us directly. And to sign up, you can go to our home page, datastory eas, and there is a button at the bottom of the page.

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So one last thing we want to tell you is that we love to get in touch with our listeners, especially if you want to suggest a way to improve the show or amazing people you want us to invite or even projects you want us to talk about.

Yeah, absolutely. And don't hesitate to get in touch with us. It's always a great thing to hear from you. So see you next time, and thanks for listening to data stories.