Reflections on Open Data Camp 2025
Last weekend three of us traveled to Edinburgh for Open Data Camp 10. If you include the pre-meet on Friday evening, it's a three day affair with a group of really kind data enthusiasts.
How an unconference works
As an unconference, Saturday morning sees introductions and session pitching. Each person has the opportunity to propose a session that they'd like to attend which is then placed on the session grid and, if space becomes tight, may be grouped with other similar sessions.
I proposed a session to discuss the role of waste in enabling innovation, learning and organisational agility. It was motivated by some discussion that we'd had in a session the previous year at ODCamp2024 in Manchester. Data runs across almost every part of an organisation, but it’s not always planned for. Enterprise data programmes often face a trade-off between:
Reducing duplication by creating central services and shared systems
Respecting differences in data that exist because teams have adapted it over time to fit real processes and user needs
Those variations might look like “waste”, but they often enable teams to deliver value effectively.
Session Highlights
Here's some notes about the sessions I enjoyed the most. I won't mention any names because the conference was conducted under Chatham House Rules.
Politics, Policy and Opportunities
There was a session "pledges, policies, politics" that was aimed at discovering things we could ask the government to engage on ahead of the Labour Party Conference this week. Discussion of the hot political topic of the day, Digital ID cards, was notably absent in that session but there was a very constructive session about those later on Sunday. Some of the usual suspects came up, such as opening up the address database and freeing the Postcode Addressing File, and there was a brief discussion of how the tasks now might be different after over a decade of good digital government policy and its widespread adoption in the UK.
But mainly the discussion centred around new ideas. Awareness was high amongst members of the group of how AI was a technology that embedded market values (especially US/American Market values) rather than social values. A need as well as an opportunity was identified for the Labour Government to reframe the conversation around emphasising and prioritising social values in AI adoption, rather than simply toeing the line of continuous technology adoption for its own sake.
There was also a discussion of the need for education under the banner of "defense against the dark arts": dark patterns on the web, how social media companies sell the behaviour of billions to the highest bidder and how critical thinking and analysis skills can keep up in the current climate of media manipulation and deep fakes. A UK government that is seen to have realistic policies and a strong lead on these issues would be a force for good in our country.
Mandala Art and Reflection
Someone ran an absolutely awesome session around Mandala Art. The premise was to use the process of producing art to self reflect about one's own thoughts about data as well as learn from the other participants. It was a remarkably deep session in lots of ways, covering ideas of vision, control of that vision, how that's compatible with contributions from others and learning from an organic and open process. I learnt far more about the other participants than I was expecting in a way that was simultaneously intangible and extremely practical. Unlike other group exercises that are billed as being explicitly about team building, we quickly learned enough about each other to work fluidly together towards rather abstract goals. It also helped enable conversations after the session throughout the rest of the day and long into the evening.
Sunday Sessions
On Sunday pitching for the day's sessions happened in the morning as per Saturday. It was a slightly shorter day but there was no less enthusiasm or variety in the pitches.
Open Data and Assurance
I attended what could have been a rather dry session on the role of "assurance" in Open Data but everyone who attended was self aware enough that it turned out to be good fun. The challenge posed was around how to assure the publishers of open data to ensure trustworthiness and reliability whilst not erecting barriers that chill publishing or deter publishers. There was also some talk about how to assure data consumers so that more sensitive datasets might be shared more widely than they are now. This touched on data trusts and how to get commercial competitors to collaborate around common goals such as net zero carbon reduction and supply chain security.
Flights of Fancy
By far the most stimulating session of the weekend, "Flights of fancy", was nothing to do with data at all. It was pitched along the lines of "what if murmurations of starlings and other group behaviour have the same underlying mechanisms" and, now I come to reflect on it, is really hard to summarise in a blog post. Suffice to say, the conversation flowed quickly and covered a lot of varied topics. It was probably the poster child for the value of an unconference: show up, contribute, ask good questions, you'll get more out than you put it and you'll probably have good experiences that you weren't expecting.
Sponsors and Campmakers
Register Dynamics are proud to have been silver sponsors of the event, but the real thanks has to go to all the campmakers who worked tirelessly for months before and during the event to make it a success that was welcoming, friendly and an all round fantastically enjoyable experience.
Our Spreadsheet Survey
As sponsors, we had a small stand and took the opportunity to run a survey about spreadsheets that connects with our recent work on how users use spreadsheet uploads for bulk transactions and our work on the Data Upload Design Kit patterns and components. You can read more about the data we collected from GOV.UK which helped inspire our survey here: Spreadsheets are for humans or machines. Not both!
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