The Data Poets' Society is a Twitter joke that grew into a group who meet every couple of months to talk about data, visualisation and storytelling. We are scientists, artists, journalists, software developers, business professionals, students, museum folk, historians and geographers. We don't do formal talks. Instead we have a brief show and tell at the start of each meeting and spend the rest of the time sharing anecdotes and ideas over drinks and food.
At our first meeting we compiled a list of things we wanted to get out of Auckland Data Poets' Society. The numbers in brackets indicate how many votes an item received.
- (8) "Art" of data visualisation.
- (6) Seeing other peoples' stuff.
- (5) Telling stories with data.
- (5) Making stuff.
- (4) Understanding the craft*.
- (4) Exploring possible concepts.
- (3) A community of people.
- (3) Working with people from other disciplines.
- (2) Learning how to do stuff myself.
- (2) Having fun.
- (2) Communicating by mixing words with numbers.
- (2) Getting stuff used / articulating value.
- (2) Enabling "everyday people" to understand data.
- (2) Working with artists**.
- (1) How to engage an audience.
- (1) Getting a practical application out of this.
- (1) "Learn all the things!"
. * Someone added "beer" to this sentence after the fact. Noted for posterity.
. ** The photograph only shows one dot for this entry, but I personally added the second vote.