Towards a data culture in organisations
Data workshops for all
Some people don’t like data
It’s going to come as a shock to some of you, but some people in your organisation don’t like data. They don’t feel confident gathering or analysing data and they don’t feel able to factor data and evidence into decision making.
This is a problem
Some organisations ignore the problem and carry on leaving data and evidence out of decisions, using it, selectively, using it just as a marketing and fundraising tool.
Some organisations sidestep the problem and hire specialist data analysts or scientists to crunch the numbers and throw new insights and ideas into the organisation.
Some organisations decide that the people themselves are a problem and push them through training courses on using Excel or PowerBI. But none of these gets to the heart of the problem.
In fact the best way to get to the heart of this problem, like so many, is to talk about it.
It’s good to talk
For organisations to become more data savvy, ultimately, the whole team, trustees, managers, workers, volunteers, all need to be more confident and fluent in thinking about and using data.
If only there were a way to structure those conversations.
Luckily there is.
Data Culture
The Data Culture project from the Data Basic team at MIT is a set of workshops and some online tools designed to give anybody and everybody in your organisation confidence with different aspects of data. These workshops are fun and accessible, involving (for example) sculpture, storytelling, and songwriting.
Work through the full programme and, without knowing it, you will have seen and understood questions around data collection biases, algorithmic decision making, networked datasets and a whole host more.
People who have been through the Data Culture process are in a much stronger position to talk to data analyst teams about their work and to understand and request the sort of specialist training that will work for them.
It’s great and it is available for free, online, right now.
Data Basic Wales
But that is not all.
Of course, any public service could go and use the materials right now, but Data Culture was developed in the USA with non-profits. Some of the approaches and datasets don’t resonate that well with public services and, of course, we’d like to be able to provide everything in Welsh alongside English.
We need your help
Last autumn we ran some initial workshops to test the materials with Welsh public servants and to start to explore any tweaks that might make the material work better for public servants in Wales. Now we are looking for volunteers to take part in a larger scale trial. If this sounds like your sort of thing, please contact Suzanne Draper at Data Cymru.
We hope to provide a remixed, tested, bilingual set of materials for public services in Wales by the end of 2020.
How amazing would it be if we could make these workshops available to all public servants across Wales?