Today I woke up and saw an email in my inbox: “Dear Participant, As we are just one week away from the Data Journalism Unconference”…. And I was like “WOOOHO”, because I had totally forgotten about this conference in New York. And the email is right, it’s in a week. So the first couple of hours after waking up I was super excited that I will be in New York next Tuesday, and that I might facilitate a session there. And the day only got better.
After the Scrum meeting, I started working with the awesome Zyma on her project. I helped out with my R skills. I’ve never done that before (because I had no skills in R), and it felt awesome. It felt like I had a job, a responsibility, a mission and I contributed to her project (and could also show her how awesome R is). She even described me as “a R expert”, which of course I’m not (but I’m trying to get there).
And after I wrote some neat dyplr code in R, I sat down and prepared a presentation for tomorrow’s “Look at This”. Look at This is a weekly 30min meeting where everybody can present something. I decided to talk about “Tools - for Thinking, Organizing, Building”. Mostly I will focus on the “Tools for Thinking” part. But while I put the slides together in InDesign I remembered my 6 years of design education and was like: “Hm. Interesting. Zyma doesn’t know I can design, but she wants my help for something else. My design skills are not even important here!” And I felt like I have a secret super power. And it felt great because it made me aware, once again, that changing careers and learning entirely new skills is definitely possible. (Especially in a team where the skill set, in this case R, is not that highly developed.)
So I had looooots of fun with preparing the slides (because that’s just something I love very, very much). Also, I had great lunch. And tonight I’ll have (hopefully) great dinner with a friend who I know from Weimar. Yeah. Good days, these days.
Input? 2
Output? 8
Learnings?
Dplyr group_by’s “peel” thelmselves up. Which is weird and can be helpful.
Questions?
Stiiiiiilll tinkering about my blogpost. Which I like, but - yeah, still not sure how to organise it. Maybe I should ask one of the OpenNews people.
How can I “make people talk” at events? How can I get their experiences and knowledge out of people, not only from the ones that are self-confident? How can I create an atmosphere which makes them very welcome to speak? Eg one trick is to let everybody introduce themselves: Once they spoke, they are more likely to speak up later. I guess another trick is to ask everybody to first write down their thoughts on post-its, and then talk about them. Or, more forced, to just ask everybody one by one about their thoughts.