Straight Flush

Well, dashboard week is officially over for DS9. It has been, by far, my favourite week of the DataSchool so far and I’m hoping to take a lot of good lessons forward. Before I share some reflections on the week though I’ve got to share some of the shit we did on the final day.

Talking Crap

The final dataset of the week came from the City of Vancouver. Specifically, the location of the public restrooms around the city. We were heavily time-limited today with only two hours to get to grips with the data and produce something meaningful in visualisation. Because of the time restrictions Andy made sure the dataset was clean before giving it to us. Great stuff. The slight downside was not really having an awful lot to go on. The fields were location, wheelchair accessibility, opening hours, washroom type, notes and a field giving what local authority is responsible for the facility.

I looked at accessibility for wheelchair users. I also added a little on the variation in opening hours for women. Yes. If you’re in a wheelchair or a woman or both you might just have to hold it in for a bit.

Here’s the link to my final viz. Let me know what you think – nudge me on Twitter @AdiBop_.

Dashboard Week Highlights

Like I said earlier, this has been my favourite week. It’s fast and furious but it’s also time-limited. Everything happens in a day so there’s simply no time to overthink or be indecisive. That’s a good type of pressure. Getting the chance to solve a new problem every single day is also a very good thing.

But the best thing for me was the way we worked together during the morning sessions. We were fast, efficient and collaborative. Where an idea failed (and a lot did), it generally failed fast and we moved on to the next one. There was enough room for individuals to pursue different approaches to solving the same problem. We supported each other in doing so – when we work hard to polish our own skills, everybody benefits.

Being successful during the early part of the day meant we had the entire afternoon session to design beautiful visualisations to tell our data stories. And there were a lot of beautiful things going on this week. Here are some of my favourites from the gang: