Another big event in 2012 has just been announced: Resonate New Media Festival . On March 16-17 20 speakers from Europe, Asia and North America will come present at the Dom Omladine in Belgrade, Serbia. To the day program of talks, workshops and panel discussions the organizers added an awesome night program with concerts, DJ sets and visual performances. Looks like something you should not miss!

Resonate is setting new standards in the arts industry by creating a new platform for networking, information, knowledge sharing and education. It will bring together distinguished, world class artists, with an opportunity of participating in a forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture. It’s more than just a festival, expert seminar or exhibition of visual arts. It is broad enough to encompass areas ranging from software engineering to visual arts theory, but also to create a bridge between culturally separated segments of the artistic and intellectual scene through a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach.

The list of confirmed participants includes Nicholas Felton, Josh Nimoy, Jer Thorp, Greg J. Smith, Regine Debatty, Champagne Valentine, Niklas Roy, Benjamin Gaulon, Martial Geoffre-Rouland, Karsten Schmidt, FIELD, LAb[au], Rafaël Rozendaal, United Visual Artists, Written Images, Jürg Lehni, WARP, onedotzero and others.

We are happy and proud to support the Resonate 2012 Festival as a media partner and hope you all enjoy this exceptional event.

Students from the greater Berlin area gathered together on Saturday morning around 10am prepared to design and code away for the next 24 hours. The team behind Visualizing.org didn’t leave any wishes open and prepared excellent working conditions at the selected event location Urania. After a brief welcome message from GE the students learned about the data set they will try to make sense of. The data consisted of German demographics and health care statistics. The teams were assigned with the creation of a visualization that reveals true insights from the data and communicates them in an accessible, innovative and elegant way.

The Presentations

Before the student started working, they had the chance to listen to two of Germany’s best visualizers Moritz Stefaner and Gregor Aisch. With their presentations, they shed some light on the craft, process and peril from their daily work.

Moritz had prepared a packed deck of things that would have been helpful to know beforehand. It truly was a collection of golden tipps for newcomers and also some useful reminders for more experienced practitioners. He talked about how position is on of the strongest encoding techniques, what the difficulties are when working with colors and why we should not neclect uderused attributes like texture or hatching. As always he inspired many thoughts and provoked even more laughs with his content and delivery.

Gregor followed with the presentation of his daily routine as a freelance information visualizer. He introduced a process framework inspired by the highly recommended book Visualizing Data by William Cleveland. His iterative process consists of the following three phases:

1. Visualize the data using tools like R, Tableau or any other spreadsheet software to create sketches of what’s important, interesting or hidden in the data.
2. Learn from your results by noting down all your insights from the previous phase and explain your thoughts with the according charts. The duty of articulating your findings helps you to hone the vision for the ultimate/final solution.
3. Transform the data to achieve a more precise and more accessible visualization and therefore to draw clearer picture on the core message.

The Works

Soon after the presentations, the venue was filled with sketches on paper and whiteboards, laptops running calculations and enthusiastic people bouncing ideas off each other. The creative working athmosphere was truly stimulating and so Moritz, Gregor and myself couldn’t resist to start discussing and hacking as well. After an intense night, the teams handed in 11 visualizations that ranged from static information graphics to interactive visualizations. As I am involved in judging the works, I can’t comment on the works just yet, but Moritz sums it up nicely when he tweets: “I am really impressed by some of the works from the Visualizing Marathon Berlin 2011 #goodjob #toughtimesforjudges“. I recommend you have a look and judge for yourself here.

The Berlin chapter closes the 2011 series of the Visualizing Marathons. Charlene Manuel, of Visualizing.org had nothing but admiring words for the students works, efforts and enthusiasm. I assume nothing stands in the way of Visualizing Marathon 2012.

After a lot has been discussed about Swiss open data at the opendata.ch Conference in June, Hannes Gassert, Oleg Lavrovsky, and I felt the time was ripe to bring designers, developers and ideators together to actually build something. We initiated a national two-day hackathon with the name make.opendata.ch, which was took place simultaneously in Zürich and Lausanne on September 30 and October 1 2011. We expected around 30 participants at each location, but were blown away by the response, and in the end over 100 people showed up.

Photos by Frederic Jacobs

Open data is still a fairly fresh topic in Switzerland, and data sources weren’t abundant, but we received a lot of support from both host cities. Lausanne provided data about its buildings and their energy consumption, and thanks to the eZürich initiative, we had access to data sets Zürich has just recently published, including the city’s most recent investment statement.

What Was Made

During the two days we not only had some great inputs from experts and data providers and the opportunity to meet likeminded people, but – in the spirit of the event’s name – the participants made some terrific open data applications:

Where Did My Taxes Go?

Inspired by Where Does My Money Go?, this application calculates where tax money of individual Zürich residents went in 2010. As a special twist, it tells you how long the city could run on your contribution (you’d have to earn quite well to get it over a minute).

What Do Parliamentarians Talk About?

This application visualizes which words Swiss parliamentarians used in their motions. It takes into account data which goes back as far as 1995, so it should show accurately who’s interested in which topics. As elections are just around the corner, it’s a perfectly timed and useful (and sometimes quite hilarious) tool.

Mashing Up Swiss Stats

SwissMap enables you to mash up and compare various statistics of Switzerland. You select data sets via drag and drop, and positively correlated data (at least I guess that’s what it is – there’s no legend, ahem) gets highlighted on a map divided by cantons.

Swiss Army Contaminated Sites

Of course we from Interactive Things also made an application! We mapped a data set of over 1500 sites owned by the Swiss army to show the contamination level for each location and on a county level. Did you know the army sank ammunition in a few of our lakes?

There are many more projects covering topics like transportation, hiking maps, political party support, energy use, and water temperature. Efforts were also made in building open data repositories and licensing. All projects are documented in the make.opendata.ch wiki.

A Step Forward

From an organizer’s perspective, I think make.opendata.ch has been a great success. The amount and quality of the projects is impressing, and more importantly, many creative people who care about open data have been able to connect and build something together. Switzerland’s open data movement definitely has made a step forward, a step whose importance can not be overestimated.

And as a participant it just has been so much fun to work in such a spirited environment.

Many, many thanks to everyone who has helped to make this happen, and to everyone who has participated. You have been awesome. See you at the next make.opendata.ch!

In case you don’t have the luck to be in New York around this time, but want to get a glimpse at what’s happening at the Strata Conference listen up: O’Reilly kindly provides live broadcasts from keynotes, talks and workshops. You can see the full schedule of broadcasts here: http://datavis.ch/oBT4EO.

Strata doesn’t ring a bell in your head? It’s one of the biggest conferences focused on data and the business around it organized by O’Reilly.

Strata Conference covers the latest and best tools and technologies for this new discipline, along the entire data supply chain—from gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively. With hardcore technical sessions on parallel computing, machine learning, and interactive visualizations; case studies from finance, media, healthcare, and technology; and provocative reports from experts and innovators, Strata Conference showcases the people, tools, and technologies that make data work.

After last year’s successful 24-hour data visualization marathon, Visualizing teams up again with GE to bring the Visualizing Marathon 2011 to five cities around the world: Sydney, New York, São Paulo, London and Berlin.

Students from the academic partners of Visualizing.org will work in teams of 3 to 4 persons over the course of 24 hours to design a solution to a real world problem. A selection of open data sets will be provided by the organizers, but students are also free to use their own data sets as long as they are openly available. Results can be in any format and will be uploaded to Visualizing.org.

Here’s a little bit of inspiration from the Visualizing Marathon 2010 in New York:

If you’re a student of an academic partner you can register for the marathon in your city. If your school is not yet an academic partner, get in touch with Visualizing.org to make this happen.

Sydney: September 24 – September 25
New York: October 8 – October 9
São Paulo: October 22 – October 23
London: November 12 – November 13
Berlin: December 3 – December 4

My colleague Benjamin and I spent the last week at the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis and were blown away by the inspiring and creative atmosphere and the many, many talented and fun people we had the chance to meet. The festival absolutely lived up to its claim to «bring together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow».

Our impressions

First off, we were thrilled that so many women have been invited as speakers. For whatever reason, other conferences in this field are very men-biased, which is a big oversight in our opinion. Bonus points for the many women in the audience, too, a truly diverse community!

We really enjoyed the great mixture between presentations, sessions and workshops which despite the tight schedule felt balanced and well chosen.

It was eye-opening to see Casey Reas code on a C64 emulator and create an interesting pattern using only one line of code on such an old system. We also found his «Conditional Drawing» workshop inspiring, which was all pen and paper, no computers allowed.

It was also good to have artists like Marius Watz or Nervous System around to show that it doesn’t all have to be digital, that there’s real beauty in the physical. The singing MakerBot that was installed at the conference definitely added to that.

There were also several thought-provoking talks. Natalie Jeremijenko, has shown us that design is not enough if it doesn’t lead to action. Zachary Lieberman used his skills together with a group of fellow artists/researchers, to create the EyeWriter to help his friend who suffers from ALS to make graffiti again.

The best thing about this whole conference was, that it was ok to be nerdy! Robert Hodgin’s funny and inspiring talk made it clear, what great crowd we’re in, Golan Levin’s nerdy programming lessons added to that, and Heather Knight’s social robot «Data» was the crown of it all!

Coverage elsewhere

Eyeo 2011 has also been well covered elsewhere, here is a small selection:

• Jan Willem Tulp, who won his ticket to the Eyeo festival with his beautiful visualization «Ghost Counties», has written several guest posts on Infosthetics and Visualizing.org.
• Leaders in Software and Art have been hard at work taking detailed minutes of the talks – we still don’t know by what magic they were able to pull this off so quickly!
• Megan Erin Miller has started a community collection of all the projects that have been seen at Eyeo.
• Michael Wang created a beautiful visual overview of all the talks he’s been to.
• Maria Popova compiled a list of 7 Essential Books on Data Visualization and Computational Art that have been mentioned by the speakers.

Interaction!

Eyeo wasn’t an input-only conference, the organizers made sure that everyone got to talk to everyone at the awesome evening events. They even organized a bike ride through beautiful Minneapolis on the last day, where the whole crowd visited the Walker Art Center at the other end of the town and the conference came to a cozy ending with sun and beer.

To wrap this review up, we have to say that we would be totally thrilled if Eyeo 2012 would see the light of day. With foresight we chose the title of this review accordingly… With this community it can’t go wrong, because look, we’ve even been singing with the Piano-Man at Nye’s Polonaise Room!

On June 24th 2011, the opendata.ch 2011 Conference took place at the Swiss Federal Archives in Berne. Over 150 people from politics, journalism, science and technology gathered to hear about and discuss Switzerland’s future on the Open Government Data front. The day was filled with presentations by a diverse range of speakers, and a workshop session.

The Presentations

Prof. Nigel Shadbolt, Professor University of Southampton, Member Public Sector Transparency Board UK
In his opening keynote Prof. Shadbolt talked about how he and Tim Berners-Lee introduced Open Government Data to the UK and what it means for government and public. He presented evidence that Open Data improves transparency and accountability, and produces economic value, innovation and growth. Even the quality of government data was enhanced by the public’s fixing of over 18000 bus stop locations. Energy consumption of government buildings went down by 10 % after their usage data was made open.

He made a strong point about how freeing up government data fosters innovation, and that any restrictive license destroys the effort. To the question on how to convince skeptics he answered that we should get together people who are already doing stuff and show what you can do with Open Data.

“If you publish, the apps will come.”

Andreas Kellerhals, Director of the Swiss Federal Archives (SFA)
Mr. Kellerhals talked about the duties and challenges of archives. The SFA’s role is to document federal actions to keep them verifiable. At the same time it can’t keep everything (it’s simply unrealistic) and has the duty to decide which documents are important enough to keep. A big challenge is that there doesn’t exist a single point of orientation for the Archive, but they are working on a public solution to access all contents.

Barbara Schüpbach-Guggenbühl, State Secretary of the Canton Basel-Stadt
In her role as state secretary she probably has the most in-depth knowledge of the politic’s and administration’s inner workings (state secretaries are non-partisan and often stay in their job for a lifetime). When confronted with the demand of making data available in a machine-readable way, administration members are very often not even aware of this possibility, she reported. Less often than this, a fear of loss of interpretive sovereignty exists in administration. She explained how Switzerland’s political system differs from the USA and UK (we’re much less centralized), and that this means we have to take a slightly different approach. There is a big opportunity for the individual cantons to experiment with Open Data. However, it’s a challenge to keep them interoperable.

Jean-Philippe Amstein, Director of the Federal Office of Topography swisstopo
60 – 80 % of all political, economic and private decisions have a spatial aspect, geographic information is indispensable for a democracy. The socioeconomic return of CHF 1.– invested in geo-information is around CHF 4.– to 7.–. The problems of opening up the data is multi-faceted and complex, and consequences will be felt in many areas. Right now, the data holder can still sell data, so long-term financing is a big challenge.

Prof. Dr. Anton Gunzinger, Entrepeneur, Super Computing Systems AG, Professor at ETH Zurich
Dr. Gunzinger showed two inspirational big data projects his company is currently working on. They are making the Swiss Television’s whole video archive searchable down to a precision of 15 seconds. To put this in perspective, that’s in 125,000h (or 50 years, or 3.5 PB) of high-definition video material. Journalists will need to re-produce less material, and are able to verify, for example, statements of politicians (who are slightly uncomfortable with this idea, he joked). The other project was the measurement of trains’ wheel axle temperatures for safety reasons. This produces a lot of data and also valuable metadata about the trains, most of which is currently unused. He concluded with the thought that nothing should be kept around forever, that archives must be able to forget.

Hans-Peter Thür, Lawyer, Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner
Mr. Thür gave a comprehensive introduction to the Swiss freedom of information law (Öffentlichkeitsgesetz BGÖ). He outlined how official documents are defined, and what is covered by the BGÖ and what the exceptions are. E.g. by the current law, documents only have to be made accessible after someone’s request. He closed with examples where access to documents first was denied and eventually – after his intervention – opened by court order.

Martin Stoll, Journalist at SonntagsZeitung, Initiator Öffentlichkeitsgesetz.ch
As a surprise guest, Martin Stoll presented the miserable state of freedom of information in Switzerland from a journalist’s point of view. In a blistering talk he outlined how hard it is to request information. 31 % of all requests from 2006 – 2010 have been denied by the authorities. The Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Finance both lead with a denial quote of over 40 %. This is why he initiated Öffentlichkeitsgesetz.ch, a service which aims to assist journalists with their information requests.

Clemens Maria Schuster, Social Media Communications at World Vision Switzerland
Clemens Maria Schuster is the co-creator of DataMaps.eu, a web service to visualize geo-referenced data on maps. He talked about the inception and impact of the project, the technology, and how he created SVG templates on his train rides.

Christian Haeberli, Swiss Federal of Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Meteorological Data Coordination
Christian Haeberli talked about the complex processes involved in the gathering of meteorological data and the efforts it takes to make it internationally interoperable and consistent. There are still only five countries which make their data publicly available. It is clear that this has to change, as much can be gained for transparency, innovation, and international exchange. Therefore, access to Swiss meteorological data will be liberalized (i.e. available at no cost) by 2014.

Christophe Koller, BADAC
Christophe Koller presented BADAC, a web service which monitors the administrations of Swiss cantons and cities and makes the data available. It is a tool to compare and explain the different entities of Swiss federalism.

Armin Grossenbacher, Swiss Federal Statistical Office
Armin Grossenbacher reminded us that a lot of statistical data is already publicly available! So, embracing Open Data is a natural progression for statistical offices. Statistical services need to be improved by offering a global licensing model and making data referencable, machine-readable, and findable across multiple data silos. Metadata is important. Additionally, the Statistical Office also offers a service to help people understand the data. Data should not be left alone, it’s also in the provider’s duty to monitor its use and improve statistical literacy. There is great potential in Open (Government) Data, but there’s still a long way ahead of us.

Ronnie Brunner, Netcetera, Head of Solutions
Ronnie Brunner talked about a private company’s woes to get access to public transport data. Electronic data is very hard to get, and when you get it, the data quality is often quite poor. The legal foundation for access is there, but in practice there is still a lot of improvement needed in terms of completeness, documentation, availability, and cooperation with third parties.

Peter Fischer, Delegate for Federal IT Strategy
Peter Fischer recapped many points of the previous speakers. He raised the question if every use of Open Data should be tolerated, which he illustrated with the example of an insurance company using the data to calculate premiums. He also thoroughly praised the lunch buffet he had seen before coming to the presentation.

Workshop Session

After the lunch break, the attendees were split up to participate in five workshops to discuss Open Government Data from different perspectives. Additionally, we had the duty to discuss the proposed OGD Manifesto. Each workshop leader summarized what was talked about:

Politics Workshop: Going to Open Government Data definitely needs a mindset shift. The spirit was positive, although a few questions remain: How will it be financed? What has to be provided by government and what needs to be implemented by the private sector? It was felt that the benefits of OGD had to be researched more thoroughly.

Technology Workshop: In the thechnology workshop, I had the opportunity to present some benefits of Open Data for visualization designers. Prof. Abraham Bernstein followed with a excellent introduction to Linked Data. In the following discussion, the participants talked less about concrete technological solutions but agreed that the time is ripe to do stuff. Zurich with its eZuerich initiative emerged as a good place to start.

Law Workshop: The first thing noted was a matter of terminology; shouldn’t it be rather “information” than “data”? More pressing issues were the regulation of access to, and the usage of Open Government Data.

Journalism Workshop: Journalists saw the use of Open Data in “using data to make a point”. Building on this, they posed the question if data (selection) follows questions or do questions follow data (analysis).

Business Workshop: The business workshop’s outcome was more sobering. They couldn’t really identify the socioeconomic value, many concerns were still present, the benefits not really clear. But they saw potential for competition, especially for small, innovative companies.

Science Workshop: For the participants with a scientific background, the need for open access seemed to be clear. They highlighted that science could also benefit greatly from crowd sourcing. However, the issue of financing was still in the room. For libraries, for example, a complete opening just wouldn’t be feasible.

Closing Keynote

Rufus Pollock, University of Cambridge, Director Open Knowledge Foundation
The official part of the day ended with a truly inspiring presentation by Rufus Pollock. He talked about the importance of being truly open, that it means access for anyone and acts as a foundation of interoperability. Certain data is already public, but this doesn’t mean it’s open. He pointed out information technology as a possible solution for the growing information complexity. To take advantage of it, we have to make data open, because when it’s locked away in silos, it doesn’t scale. We have to engage people to use it and build an open platform.

“Make it a cool club people want to belong to.”

In closing, he reminded us us that we’re still at an early stage and patience is important, by quoting Michael Faraday: “Of what use is a baby?”

Conclusion

It was a great to see that Open (Government) Data ball was set rolling in Switzerland. I was surprised and pleased by the mostly positive vibe of the whole conference. It was clear that many people coming from different disciplines are unhappy with the current state of affairs, and that we must take action now. Some skeptics remain of course, and critical points like financing will have to be addressed.

I am thrilled about the perspectives and potential of Open Government Data. The first step has been taken, and we invite everyone to join us in this quest to make Switzerland more open. If you have data to provide, or are a data visualization maker, leave a comment or get in touch!

Many thanks to the hosts, organizers, coordinators and sponsors of this splendid event (and for having me as presenter in the technology workshop). Get to know more about them on the initiative’s website, read the press release, and the manifesto (in German). Join the mailing list. Slides of the presentations are available too.

Update: Videos of the presentations are now online.

Power and potential of data visualization with an european perspective was the core topic of Visualizing Europe, a one-day conference organized by Visualizing.org, Information Aesthetics and the OpenKnowledge Foundation. With a speaker list that didn’t leave no wishes open, an intimate and focused audience and stellar organization the event was a overall success.

The Sessions

Introduction

Adam Bly of Seed Media Group introduces the audience to the conference and gives a brief introduction to Visualizing.org, a place to publish, share and discuss visualizations. Visualizing.org strives to give professionals like teachers or journalists access to high quality visualizations under a creative commons license. Following Adam, Greg Farret of GE, partner of both Visualizing.org as well as this very conference explains the interest and engagement of GE in the field of data visualization.

“One of the thoughest challenges we face today is communication. Getting the message across.”

Session 1: The Power and Potential of Data Visualization

Santiago Ortiz, Bestiario, (Spain)
Santiago starts by presenting an interactive species tree visualization and then moves over to introduce the audience to a tool they’ve been working on called Impure. It’s a free, web-based visualization tool that lets non-programmers create, share and publish data visualizations. To explain the concepts and workflow with Impure, Santiago creates a simple Twitter visualization on-the-fly.

Moritz Stefaner, Well-formed Data, (Germany)
Moritz shows us two of his most recent client works — Notabilia for Wikipedia and the Better Life Index for the OECD. He provides us with an insight into his workflow:

“All my work starts with data and I cannot get started without it. I quickly prototype different visualization methods to see what’s viable and useful.”

Moritz discusses a new trend he sees in visualization, the idea of remixing existing works. As data sources, and oftentimes also source code is open, fellow designers and developers can step in and re-imagine and re-create. The second thought he shares with us is the concept he calls “full circle”: Getting data back from the usage of visualizations to inform design decision in future refinements.

Enrico Bertini, Fell in Love with Data, (Germany)
Enrico states the importance of of bridging the gap between practitioners and academia as he feels that some people dismiss what scientists have studied over the past 25 years. Enrico shows some scientific work and asks/proves that the contained data relies on visualization to be understood by the researcher. He moves on to explain that, although only a small subset of the population needs indispensable visualizations, a) these are still millions of people and b) they are working on solutions to problems that benefit the whole world like making our cities saver or curing our diseases.

“Data visualization is not useful, it’s indispensable.”

David McCandless, Information is Beautiful, (United Kingdom)
David disagrees with Moritz when he states that he is not looking for 1000 stories but only a meaningful one told well. He uses the metaphor of photography as he uses visualization as a new type of camera to give a specific look at a situation. He sees the task of storytelling as “relaxing and let the data unfold in people’s minds”. David also calls for more play in visualization to find new ways of doing things.

Q&A

Question by Paul Kahn to Moritz Stefaner:
What gives you the idea, you’ve created something the people will understand? Is in the development process any testing by end users to validate useability?

Moritz admits that he choses to come up with a solution without giving too much attention to the target audience. He focuses on the underlying data and to convey it in a readable and understandable manner, but doesn’t include any user testing in his approach.

Session 2: A Vision for Europe

Gregor Aisch, Driven by Data (Germany)
Gregor’s talk is focused around the topic of open visualization as the sum of a) open source code, b) open for different data sets and c) open to the community. Open visualization translates to fair share of knowledge as producing complex visualizations is cost intensive, thus might not be feasible for everyone. It also benefits the sustainability of visualizations as projects can be forked and advanced by everybody. He mentions some shortcoming in this regard of different popular projects. For ManyEyes the development has slowed down and the community seems rather inactive. Gapminder is perceived as being too closed and Wordle lacks of further improvements. In a quirky encounter, a representative of the agency that produced a visualization, critiqued by Gregor as being too close, stepped up and mentioned that the source code of the Flex based project is openly available.

“We can’t imagine how people will use our visualizations, thus we should make them as open as possible.”

Assaf Biderman, MIT (USA)
With challenges us to think of a city as a ubiquitous computer up in the air as we all carry around tiny terminals called Smartphones. How do we compute it? Who should program it and with what technology?

“A form of self-conveniance comes into place as we, as developers and designers, can analyze and interact with city structures of all kind.”

To underline how this can be done, Assaf shows a few projects from the Senseable City Lab of the MIT like the Copenhagen Wheel, Trash Tracking and Live Singapore.

Salvatore Iaconesi, Art Is Open Source (Italy)
The first project, Salvatore talks about is Squatting Supermarket, an augmented reality shopping experience. It combines goods with their impact on the environment that is of personal interest to the user. Along the lines of: “tell me what your favorite beach is, and I’ll tell you how this shampoo is polluting this beach”. He shows some more projects by his organization FakePress that develops and creates new publishing models and editorial projects presented by new scenarios in technology, productivity and contemporary culture. At this intersection, FakePress creates a range of interesting and innovative solutions.

Peter Miller, ITO (United Kingdom)
Peter gives the audience an overview over the possibilities of the OpenStreetMap project as a visualization tool for geographic information. Examples include public transportation, flight patterns, electricity grids or street conditions. After just a few years, the user generated data on OpenStreetMap is just as good as data published by the UK government.

Q&A

Question by me, Benjamin Wiederkehr to Assaf Biderman:
How can anybody, who’s not from the MIT but wants to have self-covernence in the way he interacts with his environment, be able to get access to detailed data that is not yet publicly available?

Having a University behind you efforts certainly helps a lot. But it hasn’t been always easy for the MIT to convince their partners to share their data. He suggests to clearly show them your intentions and the desired outcome of your project. Talk to them about the benefits and value of your work for them.

Session 3: Where Do We Go From Here?

In the closing round with panelists from the European Commission and the OECD, Adam Bly asks them to share their key take aways from todays conference and how these could influence their day to day work in the near and distant future.

Jean-Claude Burgelman, European Commission (Belgium)
Jean-Claude mentions that using these tools for illustration of complex information as well as to generate new knowledge by combining parts that were not possible to combine before. We need to view it in a global perspective and convince stakeholders to open up architectures.

Franco Accordino, European Commission (Belgium)
Franco even sees this time as a turning point in history as we as users can access so much information and work with it. In the public sector, this area has to obey to certain regulations and it’s crucial that these regulations are set with expertise knowledge and reason.

Toby Green, OECD (France)
Elements of trust, as we have them in academia, are very important to establish in visualization as well. Making data and its visualizations citable and linkable will be mandatory.

The Conclusion

The group of speakers, the intimacy and focus of the audience and the networking opportunities made this an excellent event. One recommendation that I discussed with the organizers was the limited amount of time reserved for the third session. I believe that influencers like Franco Accordino, Jean-Claude Burgelman and Toby Green are of crucial importance for moving our field forward. It would have been great to hearing more about the needed regulations and existing limitations for visualization in politics and economics. And once more, kudos to the folks of Visualizing.org for stellar organization and treatment.

If you want to reread the twitter backchannel, I have curated a list with the most telling tweets here.

Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures aims to tackle the big questions around infrastructures — the big systems that support global processes such as the production and transportation of energy and water or the provision of global communication and mobility.

About Visualizar

Medialab-Prado’s Visualizar program is a research and education platform devoted to exploring the culture of Big Data and its impact today in science, society and the arts. Since its first edition in 2007 the program has gathered more than one hundred participants from all over the world who have developed projects explaining stories about phenomena like pollution levels and traffic flows within big cities, the use of social networks in political campaigns or the financing of cultural institutions.

Each Visualizar edition includes an intensive project development workshop, a conference, educational activities open to the public and the exhibition of the developed projects. The program has featured specialists in the culture of data like Ben Fry, Aaron Koblin, Stamen, Fernanda Viegas, Adam Greenfield, Bestiario, Adrian Holovaty, Sunlight Foundation, Mark Hansen or Manuel Lima among others.

The Program

The next edition of Visualizar in 2011 will deal with an essential topic: infrastructures — the big systems that support global processes such as:

1. Energy infrastructures. power grids, gas and oil distribution networks,  renewable energy production networks…
2. Transport infrastructures. Aerial and sea routes, road and rail networks, urban mobility networks…
3. Information infrastructures. Radio and TV broadcasting, data networks, communications satellites, underwater cables, wireless urban networks, terrestrial and mobile telephony.
4. Supply chain infrastracture. Processes and systems of the agro-alimentary production, goods and products distribution networks…
5. Removal Chain.  Waste collection systems, treatment plants, recycling processes…
6. Economy and financial infrastructures. Banks, trade zones, processes and agents of the financial markets…
7. Legal infrastructures. International agreements, regulation bodies, territory regulation plans…

A theoretical seminar where selected papers will be presented takes place on June 14 and 15. The seminar is directed by José Luis de Vicente and features lectures by Dietmar Offenhuber of the SENSEable Cty Lab / MIT, designer and artist and MIT alumnus Amber Frid-Jimenez or Andrew Vande Moere of Information Aesthetics. After the seminar program the participants collaborate on their projects throughout to July 1 and present their results at the closing event.

Accepted Paper: A Visual topology of the food net flow

Accepted Paper: A Visual Atlas of Innovation in Spain

If you’re interested in participating in the workshop and seminar you can apply here until June 12. If you’re lucky / early enough, Medialab-Prado will even cover for your stay during the dates of the workshop. This event is an excellent opportunity to collaborate with the brightest minds on projects that truly can have an impact. If you have a few days to spare, I recommend doing so!

Visualizing.org teams up with Information Aesthetics and the Open Knowledge Foundation to bring us an event focused on data visualization in Europe. The one-day event on June 14th explores the potential of data visualization in three panel discussions with experts from various fields. As the conference is invite-only, the audience will probably be rather narrow and focused, thus interesting discussions seem to be guaranteed. Hopefully, the organizers will make the content available to the public at some point.

The Location

The Dominican Hôtel
Rue Léopold 9
1000 Brussels
Belgium

The Program

Let us know if you’re coming to Brussels and want to hang out. We’re looking forward to meet some of our readers in person.