Data Collective Coworking
Data Collective Coworking
2024-08-07
Agenda
- …
- Check-out and next steps
- ⏭️ Next steps
- Write-up the vision / dream(s)
- Start concrete project of digital garden
- Refactor / clean / update old Datahub notes
- David to move data eng notes and merge
- [Philip] Podcast outline …
- Coworking session (arranged)
Pre-meeting notes
David
- Who is the target / audience of the digital garden?
- Listing the big problems of the audience / ecosystem
- What can we document that help with that?
- David's resources:
- Open Data thoughts: https://publish.obsidian.md/davidgasquez/Open+Data
- Idealistic principles for a coop/project: https://github.com/datonic/hub#-principles
- Data Notes: https://handbook.davidgasquez.com/Data/Data+Culture
- Dashboards: https://handbook.davidgasquez.com/Data/Dashboards
- This is all focused on data-eng
- Layout of the digital garden (outline)
- Minimal set of inital notes
- Outline those notes
Rufus
- Rufus' dream:
- Data by and for the people
- More egalitarian society through data
- Curate data insights with others. OWID, PUDL style
- We should share more!
Setup issue
Existing issue: https://github.com/datopian/datahub/issues/1240
- Locating existing material: we have to dig around in the history of https://github.com/datopian/datahub-next (i.e. before release in march we had all this stuff setup in notes and docs that we probably want to migrate out …) ✅2024-08-07 it's here https://github.com/datopian/datahub-next/tree/1b61e7e2320851f17724e53c865d514383d14006/content and this branch https://github.com/datopian/datahub-next/commits/v3-alpha-april-2023
Aside: Rufus distracted by reading David's wonderful resources
Aside: https://dragondreaming.org as a mode for dreaming together and planning.
Dream Circle
- [Rufus] A Mondragon for Data A data collective / cooperative building data infrastructure and curating datasets. Like Mondragon in sense of both of its idealistic start with 5 people and what it could beocme in 50y e.g. 80,000 people and 260 different cooperatives in a network.
- Sustainable cooperative-like businesses that can do all of this work and sustain it over time and at some scale
- [David] Empower communities with open data that helps them make better decisions. Local communities know what they want and need for their lives and i want to help them with data to make choices.
- [Both] A base/group with like-minded people that enjoy data (and with a focus on data) who have broad interests and social awareness
- And be in an environment that works with my style (it can be diverse) e.g. "slow"
- High quality environment (maybe some strictness on joining)
- [David] Help the way the world produces, share, consume and collaborate on open datasets.
- [Rufus] Democratising data: making power of data – both tooling and data itself - available to more people (and not just avaialble in the Google sense ie. as consumers of the result but as participants ie. can actually look stuff up, find the source etc)
- [David] Working on a framework / protocols that helps people to use state of art data tools for open data.
- E.g: It is now possible to explore 10 to 100m data points in your browser: https://idl.uw.edu/mosaic/examples/flights-10m.html
- [Rufus] Curate data and data-driven insights with others. Actually get hands dirty. Do data-informed sensemaking for ourselves and the world. Aka an alternative "collective" version of Our World in Data (where new people can join and we aren't based inside Univ of Oxford 😉)
- [David] Which problems are people problem and where can data help a lot. "Sensemaking about where data makes a difference"
- [Rufus] Creating a (Cooperative) "Data Agency with a Difference" (evolution of previous point where this is an actual (cooperative) enterprise - both important in sustaining the former and an evolution of the former)
- [David] Designing incentives and monetization strategies [for data] that scale and work across communities 🔥
- [Rufus] Playing with DAOs etc both for previous point and Mondragon and Data Agency etc (e.g. "(cooperative) spotify for data" using remuneration rights style stuff)
- [David] Embody our values Do all of it in a way that reflects our values
- Create an exceptional culture that includes the collective / cooperative aspect and democratising data … and perhaps more transformative aspects.
- Walk our talk … / do what we preach
- [Rufus] Data by, with and for the people 😉. Big dream: we one day replace Google (not in service of search but in terms of the data side of things) or Bloomberg or X with a much more democratic, egalitarian – and innovative – approach.
Extra: example of n0.computer & iroh where they have a strict joining process.
Summary by Claude
A collaborative initiative focused on democratizing data and empowering communities through open data solutions. The key aspects are:
- Data Collective: Building a cooperative-like organization for data infrastructure and curation, inspired by the Mondragon Corporation model.
- Community Empowerment: Providing open data to help local communities make informed decisions.
- Open Data Framework: Developing protocols and tools to improve the production, sharing, consumption, and collaboration on open datasets.
- Data-Driven Insights: Curating and creating data-informed analyses, similar to "Our World in Data" but with a more inclusive, collaborative approach.
- Cooperative Data Agency: Establishing a sustainable, values-driven enterprise that offers data services with a focus on cooperation and democratization.
- Innovative Monetization: Exploring new incentive structures and monetization strategies for data across communities.
- Long-Term Vision: Creating a "data treasurehouse" that preserves and curates valuable information over time.
- Values and Culture: Embodying core values of cooperation, democratization, and transparency throughout the project's work and organizational structure.
The ultimate goal is to create a more democratic, egalitarian, and innovative approach to data that could potentially replace or complement existing data giants like Google or Bloomberg.
Summary From ChatGPT
The vision is to create a cooperative data collective inspired by Mondragon, aiming to empower communities through open data, democratize data access and tools, and engage in collaborative data sensemaking. The initiative focuses on building a sustainable and scalable data agency that embodies core values, encourages broad social awareness, and creates an innovative and exceptional culture. By developing advanced frameworks and protocols, and designing effective incentive and monetization strategies, the collective aims to revolutionize the way data is produced, shared, consumed, and collaborated on, fostering a long-term repository of curated data insights.
Consolidated Points
Data Collective/Cooperative Vision
- A Mondragon for Data: Building a sustainable, cooperative-like data infrastructure and curating datasets, inspired by Mondragon's growth and scale.
- Creating a Data Agency with a Difference: Establishing a cooperative enterprise to sustain and evolve the collective.
Community Empowerment and Democratization
- Empower Communities with Open Data: Providing local communities with data to help them make better decisions and improve their lives.
- Democratizing Data: Making data and data tools accessible to everyone, allowing active participation beyond mere consumption.
- Data by, with, and for the People: Aiming to replace large data corporations with a more democratic and innovative approach.
Collaboration and Sensemaking
- Curate Data and Data-Driven Insights: Engaging in hands-on data-informed sensemaking and creating a collaborative version of Our World in Data.
- Base/Group with Like-Minded People: Forming a group focused on data with broad interests and social awareness, in a high-quality and possibly selective environment.
Technological Frameworks and Tools
- Working on Frameworks/Protocols: Developing state-of-the-art tools and protocols to facilitate the use of open data.
- Designing Incentives and Monetization Strategies: Creating scalable and community-wide strategies for data incentives and monetization.
Values and Culture
- Embodying Our Values: Reflecting core values in all activities, creating an exceptional culture, and practicing what is preached.
- Data Treasurehouse/Antiques Shop: Building a long-lasting data repository, emphasizing preservation, patience, and curation.
Innovation and Evolution
- Playing with DAOs and Innovative Models: Experimenting with decentralized autonomous organizations and innovative models like a cooperative Spotify for data.
Philip's dreaming
- Philip: want to work on something that I'm long-term proud of benefitting society. (one of the reason's i got back into academia)
- Incentives stuff is really important and i'm glad you're thinking about it. People are very technical.
- e.g. in academy creating papers counts for something but writing software is not incentivized.
- And it really strongly correlates with what people are doing.
- If you want to make open data better and more used then you have to make the incentives better for that.
- One of the important things i heard in the interviews was the importance of journalists etc [data intermediaries]
- Bring the open data into improving someone's life e.g. open transport data
- Want a tangible improvement.
- improving collaboration
See below on line 163
Brainstorm re ideas long-term
Long-term we can imagine things like the "Mondragon of Data" or "Democratising Google (or Bloomberg)" or "Cooperative Statista"
In all of these, our intuition has converged on fact that to create something impactful means quality and sustainability which means income which means an enterprise.
Specifically we an imagine
- Services cooperative
- Data engineering (building data infrastructure / fabric / management)
- Data analysis / science
- Data concierge (find and preparing data)
- Products (cooperative)
- Data engineering tools (product) cooperative
- Data marketplace (cooperative) - original data collective vision
Inspirations …
- Mondragon
- People behind penpot and taiga
- https://hypha.coop/
- https://catalyst.coop/
Brainstorm for the data collective as art collective
This is where we are starting. A place that people can join in. A place to become more visible. Big vision is in background for long-term.
Walking through the analogies with an art collective
- People with shared interest and practice
- Support for each other in path and efforts
- A place to hangout
- Do "exhibitions together"
- Some degree of shared identity (e.g. exhibitions done under this shared banner)
- Informal (no formal structure), no economic ties
Note and vote
Philip
- Product development, based on data
- Public work, Twitch, Devblogs, sharing numbers / processes (show that alternatives are possible)
- Sponsor open data projects
- Open data workshop / conference, scientific conference style
- Fireside chats
- Creating visibility for open data projects / sucess stories, maybe especially in government, positive incentives for those
- Easy payment infrastructure for open data creators / apps
- David: investigate if running https://www.gitcoin.co/grants-stack/rpgf is possible
David
- Shared vision and view on problems in the space
- What doesn't work with the current tools?
- Spread ideas / memes that help people think about data 🔥
- Curate and promote organizations / individuals aligned with this view
- e.g: "devrel" for open data
- also look for contrarian views?
- Brainstorms for low hanging fruits / MVPs
- Sessions to explore UX issues
- Encourage folks to publish X datasets.
- E.g: https://hoyextremo.com/ is closed source and super helpful
Rufus
- Newsletter (/ blog)
- Various options e.g. TIL, Unsplash for data, …
- Digital garden / wiki / knowledgebase
- Discussion forum - where do we have this (just use discord and then migrate to knowledgebase?)
- Manifesto / opinion pieces / whitepapers on X
- e.g. on data infrastructure
- Start a DAO
- Data collective i.e. Cooperative Statista
- Various datasets to create and share about
Focus list for now …
- Have our knoweldgebase / digital garden - https://datahub.io/notes 🌱
- Fireside chats idea clarified
- Community building (even if just us)
- Coworking space / sessions
- Connection calls
- Newsletter
Digital Garden
- Who is the target / audience of the digital garden? Right now, it can be just us … and it will no doubt grow
- Listing the big problems of the audience / ecosystem This is a great purpose that we can explore
- What can we document that help with that?
- David's resources:
- Open Data thoughts: https://publish.obsidian.md/davidgasquez/Open+Data
- Idealistic principles for a coop/project: https://github.com/datonic/hub#-principles
- Data Notes: https://handbook.davidgasquez.com/Data/Data+Culture
- Dashboards: https://handbook.davidgasquez.com/Data/Dashboards
- This is all focused on data-eng
- Layout of the digital garden (outline)
- Minimal set of inital notes
- Outline those notes
Philip wants
- Lists of datasets by topic …
- https://datahub.io/collections
- github.com/datasets/awesome-data
- https://datenwaben.de/?city=vienna&page=cards
- A way to find related datasets by some axis
- a) find datasets not by data portal or topic but other things as well "show me all data related to cologne, germany", "data about biking" etc
- b) from a dataset, explore related datasets by some axis, e.g. a dataset about rain in cologne is related to temperature in germany by climate, related to biking traffic in cologne by location… create a "web" of datasets over boarders of data portals
Fireside chat / Podcast brainstorms
Name
- Open Problems
- Meta Data
- Meta Meta Data
Format
- Be (or have) a very short version as well, 15 minutes, way easier to digest
- Publish as text and podcast, long term archival + easier to consume
- If done on a coherent topic, interlink the episodes
- Potentially monetize as well, reinvest into speakers, sponsoring open data projects…
Audience
- Is a question, I'd go for people generally interested in open data but not necessarily technical, e.g. could also be journalists or policy makers
Content
- In general aim for long-term content, not episodes that go out of date quickly
- Start with a question, try to answer it with open data
- Pose a question, go out individually and try to answer it with open data / data science
- Come back, present the challenges, what needs to be improved in the open data / what worked well, if we manage to: Answer the question
- Talk about a topic from the data engineering / open data / open government space, potentially inspired by recent news, holidays or similar
- Go out as 3, find sources / build a digital garden on it and then converge and present and discuss the findings
- each with own focus, e.g. one looks into the research direction, one at projects, one at books…
- Similar to stuff to blow your mind podcast
- Go out as 3, find sources / build a digital garden on it and then converge and present and discuss the findings
- Open alternatives to apps / products people use, present and discuss their business model, data they use, challenges they face
- e.g. weather apps using open data, waistline
- Companies using or publishing open data and their business model / reasons for it
- Present open data projects, one person finds a project, prepares to present it in outlines and everyone else relates problems, experiences, other projects
- can focus especially on incentive design and present use-cases and concrete projects where open data was involved (e.g. the EU does a report on this for example)
- Interview people from the open data space / using open data, but this probably does not work as well with three people
Discussion re how this relates to DataHub etc
Rufus share
- To get to sustainability of these efforts we need enterprises …
- DataHub essence for Rufus is curation of data …
- And for that you need people / resources
- …
- Don't want to split or separate across too many things – both personally, and more importantly for building something that can get to critical mass of resource / energy to sustain over long-term and make an impact
General discussion from which some common points arising
- Collective wants to be a clear distinct presence …
- DataHub presents as a product …
- "People join people and/or impact"
Agreements re the experimental collective
- Collective is a new space
- Collective has a relation to DataHub (and other projects that manifest with the e.g.
- Promote DataHub
- Explicit association as a "associated project"
- We do stuff the way collective does it … so e.g. publish datasets and content on DataHub, use the tooling when we can (as we would for other associated initiatives)
- Aspiration for a (cooperative) data marketplace
Concrete next steps
- For now can keep using DataHub discord with a new channel
- Move digital garden to datacollective org or to github.com/datasets (tbd Rufus and David together)
- …