You may have heard that csv,conf,v3 is happening again this year, May 2nd and 3rd, in Portland, Oregon! We have a really great line-up of speakers from across the world on a set of topics ranging from the democratization of data analysis and election mapping to the very timely subject of emoji data science (?). But what’s a conference without a workshop or two? To answer that rhetorical question, we are excited to announce a stream at the csv,conf,v3 called Data Tables (data-tables.csv), and everyone is invited!

Data Tables

csv,conf,v3 is the place to hear stories about data sharing and data analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source. In past events, attendees left with their heads buzzing full of new ideas, tools, and data domains to explore but had to wait until returning home to try them out. This time we thought: why wait? Data Tables (data-tables.csv) is an open hacking space at csv,conf,v3 for hands-on, collaborative data work with a mix between facilitator-led sessions and sessions loosely organized around data themes, for example, agricultural or cultural heritage data. The idea is to learn about a tool, hack on a problem, or explore a new dataset in a group setting. We are running sessions (each about 1.5 hours long) concurrently with the talks; csv,conf,v3 attendees are free to drop by a Data Tables session of their choosing and take off in time for their next talk.

Data Tables is tables, one facilitator-led, and the rest organized around data themes. There will be a series of sessions at the facilitator-led table over the course of the conference, at least one each morning and one each afternoon, which will seek to introduce interested attendees to a given technology, tool, or platform. For the other tables, we hope to enable people to come and do some hacking on a real data problem, discover some new or novel tools for those problems, without a hackathon-like commitment of producing some working thing after these 2 days. We expect people to come and go, but have fun and interact over a real dataset along the way.  We are coordinating on the data-tables.csv repo on GitHub

Participants in last year’s csv,conf pre-event workshop

If you are passionate about data and the applications it has in our society, follow @csvconference this week on Twitter for updates.  For questions, please email csv-conf-coord@googlegroups.com or join the public slack channel https://csvconf-slackin.herokuapp.com/.

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Dan Fowler contributes to various projects at Open Knowledge and currently serves as developer advocate helping to connect a community of makers and doers around open data with the technology work conducted by Open Knowledge International. He has a Master’s degree in Information and Communication Technologies for Development from Royal Holloway, University of London and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Princeton University. Between degrees, he worked as a sysadmin for an investment bank in New York.