Data Discussions

With the growth of innovative technologies, opportunities to connect with people and discuss interesting topics keep expanding. For those of us who find data discussions fascinating, here are some of the types of places I've been noticing where people are talking about data.

Swivel: Swivel groups form around shared data sets (or sets of sets). The It's Official! group is a pretty good example of what this means: The group, created last week by United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), "aims to improve communication between users and producers of official statistics. Producers are invited to show their wares, particularly any new or innovative data. Users, please let us know what you think about our products, and what sort of data you really need." Check it out and add your input to the discussion.

Many Eyes: Many Eyes has topic hubs that include discussions, visualizations, and data sets. An example of this is the topic hub around global warming: here's an opportunity to look at data, reshape it into graphs, and talk to others interested in the data and its presentation.

What other discussion groups do you participate in that include conversations around data, indicators, and statistics?

On a separate subject, take a look at the 16 data visualization tools (plus a few more in the comments section) in this article -- really interesting stuff. Let me know if you have others to add, or can figure out how to use one of these tools in a community indicator project.