Teamwork and collaboration 💸
The most important skill is finding questions to ask with data, and of data. Learning how to do this and skilling up on data together with others. What kind of roles and responsibilities can we bring to the table?
(C) Digitale Verwaltung Schweiz
"Ask and thou shall receive". There are people in government whose job it is to provide us with data. We can use data request forms and contacts to get their support.
(TransparenZH, City of Zürich) By campaigning for transparency in digital and real-world spaces, we create more opportunities to establish good policies and data sources.
(#covid19mon hackathon) Sometimes governments are too slow to respond, or too inattentive to our individual needs. Community data drives form around inefficiency, and are great ways to learn how online data collection and cleaning works.
(Opendata.swiss) Contributing to these can be a route to deepening your skills, while contributing to meaningful causes.
Data is politics
Sometimes it is also an issue of taking the time to knock on the halls of political influence and state your opinion.
Barnraising open data, hardware, source, content does not happen in a void. Governments and universities are these days keen to support development in more open (even if short-lived) collaboration formats. They call this co-creation and it is becoming an important mandate.
The challenges at a Hackday are a great place to meet students and professionals working in data design. We use the same platform (dribdat) to develop our data skills in this course.
We work in teams, taking on a variety of roles, which can be thought of as a goal/ambition, rather than a pre-defined set of expected skills. Everyone can contribute at least one thing to the team effort.
The results of such Hackdays are prototypes that illustrate data concepts, and the whole process of obtaining and working with a particular kind of data. Some prototypes develop into full-fledged apps, which may get further support and funding.
Cooperating on civic tech initiatives, founding startups, working on research projects and getting crowd-funded are some popular ways to go "beyond the hackday".
With any luck enough joint effort, you will help to create a better world for everyone by supporting the already strong political and scientific will for more open knowledge about vital subjects.
Ginkgo2g CC BY-SA 4.0
Together is how we can keep the data flowing.