#DataResolutions – More than a hashtag

This gem of a blog post appeared on Tableau Public and within my twitter feed earlier this week asking what my #DataResolutions are.  Here was my lofty response:

 


Sound like a ton of goals and setting myself up for failure?  Think again.  At the heart of most of my work with data visualization are 2 concepts: growth and community.  I’ve had the amazing opportunity to co-lead and grow the Phoenix Tableau user group over the past 5+ months.  And one thing I’ve learned along the way: to be a good leader you have to show up.  Regardless of skill level, technical background, formal education, we’re all bound together by our passion for data visualization and data analytics.

To ensure that I communicate my passion, I feel that it’s critical to demonstrate it.  It grows me as a person and stretches me outside of my comfort zone to an extreme.  And it opens up opportunities and doors for me to grow in ways I didn’t know existed.  A great example of this is enrolling in Alberto Cairo and Healther Krause’s MOOC Data Exploration and Storytelling: Finding Stories in Data with Exploratory Analysis and Visualization.  I see drama and story telling as a development area for me personally.  Quite often I think I get very wrapped up in the development of data stories that the final product is a single component being used as my own visual aid.  I’d like the learn how to communicate the entire process within a visualization and guide a reader through.  I also want to be surrounded by 4k peers who have their own passion and opinions.

Moving on to collaborations.  There are 2 collaborations I mentioned above, one surrounding data+women and the other is data mashup.  My intention behind developing out these is to once again grow out of my comfort zone.  Data Mashup is also a great way for me to enforce accountability to Makeover Monday and to develop out my visualization interpretation skills.  The data+women project is still in an incubation phase, but my goal there is to spread some social good.  In our very cerebral world, sometimes it takes a jolt from someone new to be used as fuel for validation and action.  I’m hoping to create some of this magic and get some of the goodness of it from others.

More to come, but one thing is for sure: I can’t fail if I don’t write down what I want to achieve.  The same is true for achievement, unless it’s written down, how can I measure?

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