Data: Agent of Change
Feb. 13-17, 2023, marks the annual celebration of Love Data Week, an international celebration of data that's aimed at raising awareness and building a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and research data services. This year’s theme is “Data: Agent of Change,” focusing on inspiring significant change through data, whether large or small, ranging from policy change, structural change, to social change.
WaTech’s state Open Data Program is hosting two events listed below. For more information about Love Data Week and events being hosted internationally, go to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) website.
Dataset Matchmaking for Researchers
Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023
Noon-12:30 p.m.
Presented by Kathleen Sullivan and Cathi Greenwood
Can government data be the perfect partner for your research data? Washington State’s open data program manager and open data librarian will share where to find eligible datasets, how to tell if the datasets are compatible, and options for short or lasting relationships.
Kathleen Sullivan is the open data librarian for the Washington State Library, in the Office of the Secretary of State. She brings longstanding library collection development practices to state government open data: tying data to community needs, retiring data that is no longer useful, and improving documentation to make data easier to find and use. Her professional background includes government and business journalism, grantwriting and communication.
Cathi Greenwood is Washington state’s Open Data Program Manager. Cathi is passionate about making data available to and usable by the people who own it--the people Washington state serves. She wants to make it as clear and easy as possible for agencies to publish quality data responsibly and reliably. She wants the people the state serves to know what data of value to them exists, what it does and doesn’t mean, and how to use it. Outside of work, Cathi volunteers with a local alternative dispute resolution center providing mediation services, and she sews and plays board games.
Human Coding – Change Management in Data
Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023
Noon – 1 p.m.
Presented by Tammi Leclerc
Let’s face it change management is needed in data. Sure we have change requests for us to capture the what, but what about the human part of that request? Data informs leaders, leaders change approaches, changed approaches result in more/different data, and the cycle continues and that is if your leadership or stakeholders stay consistent. Ever have a data project you data modeled and maybe drop into Tableau or PowerBI only to find out they want something totally different? Wouldn’t it be nice if people came with rules, kind of like SQL or R? Change Management can help with that. Join us for a Love Data and Change Management approach to understanding change management in the space of data.
Tammi Leclerc grew up in Washington and trekked to Texas for a few years, finding herself an amazing husband and a couple of kids. Along her journey, while in New Jersey she picked up a leadership role in pharmaceuticals which quickly had her in the middle of all sorts of data. As the Senior Manager of Marketing Communications, she was playing with data systems and data tools to be data informed. The Pacific Northwest was calling and Tammi was only too happy to slide back over! Tammi continued to lead in the space of award winning performance, because the people and the data were aligned to make that magic happen. Eventually, Tammi had to decide, continue in Pharma or move to state service. She jumped on the State Service light rail and has not looked back since. Tammi has worked in and around data in state service for over six years, leading data teams and strategic data initiatives. Today, she is at WaTech, supporting Organizational Change Management and pulling on threads of data to support agency-wide change management.
