Real World Data Science - London Data Week is almost here. What’s it all about?

Transcript

This transcript has been produced using speech-to-text transcription software. It has been only lightly edited to correct mistranscriptions and remove some repetitions.

Brian Tarran
Hello, and welcome to Real World Data Science. I’m Brian Tarran. And today I’m joined by the organisers of the upcoming London Data Week, Sam Nutt and Jennifer Ding. Sam, Jennifer, how are you? Nice to see you here. Thank you for joining us. I wanted to start, maybe you can introduce yourselves to our viewers, tell them a little bit about your background. Sam, I don’t know if you want to go first.

Sam Nutt
So I’m Sam Nutt. I’m the researcher and data ethicist at the London Office of Technology and Innovation, or LOTI. We’re about four years old. We’re an innovation unit that sits across 26 of the boroughs of London, and the Mayor of London, the GLA and we work sort of through collaborative processes to sort of foster innovation within local government, in the public sector in London. And I lead partly on our work on data ethics, as the title suggests, but also I lead our work on innovative public participation, which I guess leads nicely into maybe talking a little bit later about London Data Week. But yeah, that’s kind of my background and where I’m coming from. My interest in data, I guess, more originally came from the governance side, and how we use it properly and best in public sector context.

Brian Tarran
Excellent. Thanks, Sam. Jennifer?

Jennifer Ding
Hi, I’m Jennifer. I’m from the Alan Turing Institute, and I– the Turing, I should say is the UK’s national institute for data science and AI. And I sit on a team called Tools, Practices and Systems, or TPS, which we sometimes colloquially call the Turing’s open science team. So we focus on open, reproducible, and ethical data science practices. And at the Turing, I co-lead a team of research application managers, and our focus is making sure that the research that happens at Turing is more usable, and also actually used by more people outside of academia. In a previous life, I was a data scientist at various US tech startups, working on applied machine learning, mostly for local and national government partners. And in New York, where I was for many years, I participated in something called New York Open Data Week, which was a great introduction to the open data world, and also the civic technology world and how vibrant and exciting those communities are.

Brian Tarran
Excellent. Okay, so that– so you’ve had the exposure to data weeks before? Tell us how did London Data Week as an idea first germinate?

Sam Nutt
Yeah, well, I mean, maybe I can go because it was it was something LOTI, last year, we had a sort of anniversary event, we sort of tried to bring together our community, across local government, and also partners. And so we invited [the] Alan Turing [Institute], we’ve done some work with them. And Jen came, and it was just something Jen raised to me, with me last July, you know, the idea of maybe doing something a little bit, like, inspired by some of the bits we’ve seen, for example, in New York, but also thinking, you know, what’s, what’s the London version of that? What’s the opportunity we have, given, you know, our different context to New York, and we don’t just mean in terms of, you know, you’ve got a different, like, legal context for how you use data and regulation stuff, but the cultural bits, you know, what is the physical space? How does that make London different? The people who live here, you know, what are the opportunities of London. And I think, you know, partly also inspired at the time by, you know, at least from my perspective, a real want to include, you know, ordinary people, Londoners, the public at large – all of those terms can be broken down – but effectively, to increase participation in how we think about data and how we, you know, think also about the future of the city, in a, you know, a future that we know is going to be defined by how we use data. So it kind of, it was a perfect thing where I was very inspired by, you know, I was thinking about those things, and then Jen came along. I don’t know, maybe Jen, you can talk about why you came along with that idea in the first place.

Jennifer Ding
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Sam and I sometimes talk about how funny that chance encounter was really. I think the LOTI event was a really great example of how London’s flavour of data innovation is actually quite unique. Just gathered there with all the local councils and various other data organisations that LOTI works with. It was such a cool display of how much the public sector is involved in defining data innovation in London, and also how much academic and private tech in London is also committed to creating data and tech outputs that are for the public good. And coming from the US, I think it was very inspiring to see that organisations like LOTI, organisations like the Turing Institute, like the Ada Lovelace Institute, the Open Data Institute – there is such a great network of data for public good institutions here that are committed to, you know, centering Londoners in the conversation. And I think something that Sam and I really got to talking about was, you know, was this an opportunity also to clearly articulate what this new thing, this unique thing, is that exists in London, that if you’re here, and you work in the space, you know it, but it hasn’t really been formally articulated in the way that I think many of us know that Silicon Valley is associated with a certain kind of innovation – and may be Europe as well with regulation – but what’s happening in London is really special. And we hope that with all our great partners and our London Data Week team, we can begin to start to articulate what makes data innovation in London so special.

Brian Tarran
Please do, Jen.

Brian Tarran
And before we get carried away, we should probably pin down exactly when London Data Week is taking place. It’s beginning of July, is that correct?

Jennifer Ding
That’s right, first week of July 3rd to 9th July.

Brian Tarran
And so from what you’ve said, my understanding, broadly, maybe the aims of the week are to kind of bring together people who are working in data, who are using data and people who are affected by data, or for whom data helps sort of shape their lives, to kind of have maybe, I don’t know, a broader understanding, a kind of commonality of purpose, whatever it might be, is that is that how you would summarise it or…

Sam Nutt
Very nicely summarised, are you available for comms help?

Brian Tarran
I am. Very expensive, though, I’m afraid.

Sam Nutt
Okay. It’s all pro bono stuff. No, I think, yeah, I think that’s really well put. It’s, yeah, it’s articulating that– coming together to start to actually build that imagination, that vision for what London is, and articulate it more, in more clear terms. But it’s also, you know, actually trying to do some things in line with that as well. Some of the activities and events we have, you know, we’re running, it’s kind of in this distributed format. So different organisations across London, who are sort of value aligned across the sector, who might have their own communities, their own publics, can run things – different types of events, you know, engaging people in different ways. And then, you know, all together, we think, sort of the sum of the parts of doing these things across a week, in this distributed format, testing different engagement methods, you know, not only sort of builds a community of organisations around these, like common values, but also lets us, you know, actually reach out to the public, you know, the public with all the different people in London, from different backgrounds, there are so many different communities, you know, as much as possible, to connect to different communities and make them part of the conversation about how we use data and AI and in ways that they kind of historically haven’t been. Not just for data and AI, for lots of other things. But, you know, we know that these technologies are going to be so important for the future. And it’s, you know, designing events and activities that can try and ensure that they’re sort of have a, you know, a seat at the table, thinking about what that future is.

Brian Tarran
Yeah. And you mentioned there a range of events. Jen, can you give us a flavour of some of the events coming up, the highlights, things that you might personally be most looking forward to?

Jennifer Ding
Yeah, happy to Brian. And maybe something to add to is something Sam and I were really hoping to go for is to not have, you know, maybe the typical talk or panel style format for all of our events that might be really common in a conference, but rather have different kinds of events that can focus on different kinds of activities. So having public conversations and debates, having exhibits and experiences, having resident or citizen science opportunities where people can actually be a part of creating data, and also learning opportunities if people want to upskill or learn about a concept. So to shout out some of the events I’m really excited for, maybe to start with the more wacky ones first. The Turing is hosting a “Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas” which will be a comedy show at the Camden Club where they will dig into topics like technology and data, but over a pint and through humour. So apparently, this is an 18+ show. So that might give you a little bit of a flavour of what’s to come. Another event we’re really excited about is an event called All the Docks, where a team of cyclists attempt this challenge in one day to hit every single Santander bike dock. They’ve done it before, and this year for London Data Week, they’re doing a round to hit, I think, the now over 800 docks that now exist in London. And this time, for London Data Week, what they’re also doing is making it a data collection exercise. So as they cross the streets of London, they’ll collect data on the road conditions, the cycling infrastructure, which can be then an open dataset that people can use after the event as well. So those are two that jumped to mind. I don’t know, Sam, if there’s anything you want to highlight, or Brian because I know there’s a really exciting on that the RSS is…

Brian Tarran
Yeah, I’ll put a quick plug in for the, so the Royal Statistical Society are organising an event associated with our Statisticians for Society initiative, which offers pro bono support to charities under a million turnover in the UK. So I can, I’ll post a link in the show notes so that people can find out more about that and sign up if they meet the criteria and are interested in taking part. But Sam, sorry, I, I hijacked there. But go ahead.

Sam Nutt
No, Brian, I was going to only mention your event. But no, a couple of others, I think just to show the like breadth of the types of activities. So you know, for example, it’s also it’s about partnering with organisations who are thinking and you know, already doing things like this, so the Science Gallery, for example, there’s– they’ve got an exhibition called “AI: Who’s looking after me?”, which is, you know, looks at some of the playful ways that AI is already involved in people’s lives and brings sort of people on a critical journey. That’s more of that sort of art exhibition type thing. In local government, where, in LOTI, we’re helping some boroughs with developing basically, a toolkit, a resource to help officers in boroughs in some of the data teams, who maybe haven’t had that history of engaging with residents, as seen as more sort of technical back office staff, actually, you know, give them the confidence to go out and have a conversation with residents about some of their practice and see how they can improve it. So there’s been a lot of interest there, in particular, around having conversations about how we do data linkage better, which, you know, in some ways, feels– it’s quite a straightforward data topic. But actually, the huge thing is that these teams in boroughs have never thought, we need to speak with residents at the design stage of data projects, you know, the public, what might a digitally excluded, relatively low sort of data literacy person be able to tell us about our data work that’s helpful to me as, you know, a data scientist, that was sort of some of the historical thinking, but actually, we’re sort of bringing boroughs on the journey of thinking, actually realising, you know, the value of doing that. So that’s sort of, I guess, the range of types of things as well.

Brian Tarran
Fantastic. So where, if people do want to sign up for any of these events, is there a good way for them to do that? Is it go to the LOTI website– not LOTI website, the London Data Week website, I’m guessing?

Jennifer Ding
There is a good amount of info on both the Turing and the LOTI website, but the best place we’d suggest is londondataweek.org. There you’ll find a list of events. And if you click on an event, there’s more information. And also, if you click “Find out more”, you can access a link for more information on how you express interest or sign up.

Brian Tarran
Excellent. And if people– when we’re speaking, we are almost exactly a month away from London Data Week. If someone’s listening to this and they think, Oh, I’ve got a great idea for an event I want to organise, is it too late for them to squeeze onto the programme now? Should they get in touch somehow if, if inspiration strikes?

Sam Nutt
We’ll never say never. Probably there is a very late point in which we would say never. I think realistically, you know, the way it’s being run, it’s being run often with the time of volunteers and this sort of thing. And it is sort of the first year of us running it. So a lot of it’s coming through, through Jen and I. So if you are interested in running something, please do reach out to us. You know, we’ve got very good, Jen and I, at finding creative ways to slot people into programs and this sort of thing. But equally I think at this point, it’s really more about you know, bringing together people and organisations who are interested and actually, you know, I think we’ve got a really good exciting, fun set of events and activities across London that would be great to be part of even if you yourself haven’t been able to organise something, and then maybe it’s something for next year, for London Data Week 2024. Fingers crossed, we might be able to do something there.

Brian Tarran
So the stress of day jobs and organising a week-long event, or week-long collection of activities, hasn’t put you off doing it again? No.

Jennifer Ding
So far, so good, Brian.

Sam Nutt
Yeah, we’ll “no comment” some of that.

Jennifer Ding
We’re definitely really excited though. And if anyone does have an idea or wants to start a conversation, there’s a contact form on our website, drop us an email. We also have a Twitter if you want to send us a message through that. So at the very least, we love, we’d love to chat.

Brian Tarran
Great, well, we’ll put all those contact details, social media accounts, etc., into the show notes so people can find you. But thank you very much for joining us today. I know this must be a very busy time for you. But Sam Nutt, Jennifer Ding, thank you for joining us and talking about the upcoming London Data Week. I’m looking forward to it.

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This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International licence. Images are not covered by this licence. Thumbnail image by ARTHUR YAO on Unsplash.

How to cite: Tarran, Brian. 2023. “London Data Week is almost here. What’s it all about?” Real World Data Science, June 8, 2023. URL