Data Science Hangout featuring all of us!

Happy Thursday, everybody! Welcome to the Data Science Hangout. Hope everyone's having a great week.

So the Data Science Hangout is our open space to chat about data science leadership, questions you're facing, and getting to hear about what's going on in the world of data across different industries. So it happens every Thursday at the same time, same place, so if you're ever watching these on YouTube, you can always add the calendar, there's a calendar link in the details below because we'd love to have you join us live too.

But together, we're all dedicated to making this a welcoming environment for everyone. We love hearing from everybody, no matter your level of experience or area of work. It is totally okay to just listen in if you want, but there's also three ways you can jump in and ask questions or provide your own perspective on certain topics. So you can jump in by raising your hand on Zoom, you can put questions in the Zoom chat, and feel free to just put a little star next to it if you want me to read it out as well. And then we also have a Slido link where you can ask questions anonymously, and I'm sure Hannah will share that in the chat here in just a second.

So Eric said this would be a fun off-the-cuff session, we're doing things a little bit different today. So our featured leader for today was unfortunately sick, so we'll be rescheduling his session to the 18th. So for today, we are all the featured leaders, so we can all ask each other questions to the audience, so still ask questions the same way. But I was talking with a few of you an hour ago on LinkedIn, and both Libby and Mike said I should put myself in the hot seat here first, so I am happy to get started here.

Rachel's introduction

But I'm Rachel Dempsey, I lead our pro community at Posit, where I'm always looking for new ways to bring customers together and our community together, to be able to listen to feedback and learn from each other.

To give you a little bit about my background here, so I've been at Posit for five and a half years, which I can't believe how fast that time has gone by. Of course, when I joined, it was RStudio. But I actually started off in sales, so I was working with our new professional customers, and in those conversations with customers, people were always asking me, like, what are other people doing with your tools, or what are people doing in my industry?

And we had some stories and customer stories on the site, but I didn't really have a great way to connect people. And I was just thinking about, like, all these amazing news cases and stories I was hearing from other customer calls, but I couldn't say, like, hey, I just got off the call with so-and-so, this is what they're doing.

So I started planning these enterprise community meetups a few years ago, because I was also running a Boston news hour group, and that actually helped me transition into the role that I'm in now, so leading our professional community.

And so that's just a little bit of background on my role, but outside of work, a few things that I like to do. So I like to play guitar. Not like professional or anything, but it's nice to be able to, like, get my mind off of work or outside, away from a screen. I like to run, snowboard, be active, do things outside. And it's been really fun getting to learn from you all, like, things that you do outside of your data world, too.

But yeah, that's me. I'll kick things off here as our featured leader, but as I said, we're all the featured leaders today, so any questions that you have, still put them in the chat or on Slido. I can absolutely kick things off with starting talking about community. I love talking about community.

What did you think you'd be doing in high school?

Libby, I'm going to have you ask this question here live. I'm curious. I'm always curious about what people thought they would be doing when they were in high school versus what they're doing right now, because mine is so wildly different, because I feel like nobody in high school is like, I want to be an analyst or I want to be a data scientist. And community leader inside of a software, open source software company is like something you probably couldn't have imagined, right?

Um, I actually just very, I'm very indecisive, I like never knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wasn't one of those people who are like, yes, I want to be a doctor and I 100% know that.

But it's, it's funny, I was thinking about this the other day, because I went to Bentley University of Business School, and my major was information design and corporate communication. I was thinking like, that's actually what I'm doing right now, which at the time, I didn't even know like, what those roles would be, when that was my major, and was thinking it was more like public relations.

But something that I had shared at the RStudio conference last year is that I, I feel like a lot of, oh, Bill just sent, just put that in the chat, but a lot of what I know about community building has nothing to do with school or work. I shared in my conference talk that a lot of it actually came from watching my mom who's run a bar for 38 years, her and her friend own a bar in Groton, Connecticut.

And so like, watching the way that my mom always interacted with customers, like new and regular customers, and how she'd always like walk up to every table and check on people and introduce herself, little things like that, like, always stuck in my mind. And I felt like they always came, like, it just felt like common sense or things that came natural to me. But then I realized in preparing for that conference talk, like, that really applies to community building.

But then I realized in preparing for that conference talk, like, that really applies to community building.

Getting traction for data science tools in large organizations

So, first of all, Rachel, thank you for sharing that. And I really think that some of those fields that relate to customer service, the skills are so transferable and, you know, you're applying it in different ways. You know, you see that restaurants, but you can apply it in everyday business settings. And I, I think that's very powerful. Myself, personally, I've had roles in food service, and I feel like I carry that wherever I go.

But a question or a topic I want to open to the community, if possible. So, I'm not sure here on this call, if anyone has, within a large enterprise, been part of the initiation of using our solutions or our tools, essentially, that, that I find myself in my, in my current role, you know, in big organizations, it's a little bit harder to get that traction or get that momentum or get that trust. And I'm curious if, if anyone on the call has thoughts or ideas to share about, about that topic, or what have they done, or how have they, how have they implemented using our more, more openly or more commonly in, in these larger organizations?

I mean, it's a very important issue and some I wrestled with my early career. I touched a little bit on this, I think, in the hangout from last year, but I think for me, what drove it to leadership, the value of what open source could bring is, I hate to say, I kind of took matters into my own hands in one way by spinning up the infrastructure myself with a little help from IT to get the, you know, the RStudio server and Shiny server spun up. And I just show them a couple simple prototypes, nothing that fancy by today's standards, but then it just organically grew.

So I was kind of like in sports, some of my favorite people I follow in the sports world, they'll lead by example. They're not going to shout at teammates about, oh, you did bad, or this is what we need to do. They just go and do it. And then they kind of bring people along the way. So I took a calculated risk at the time I was sewing on it and realized how risky it was until after the fact, but it ended up working. So I think leading by example and trying to get some examples to leadership of like, this is what is possible, but in order to make this happen, you need some support to push it further. But just getting those examples in the right eyes of people that are ready to embrace doing something new, not always following on the status quo way of doing things. I think that's my general advice.

Yeah, so I'm going to match Eric. I was the IT guy that would help somebody like Eric stand up the infrastructure and kind of present the need to the leadership team, right? I handled a big project for a small, very small life science organization many years ago where it was a computational chemist. I was like, hey, here's the tools we need. Here's the space we need to kind of pitch to the organization. And present day, they've got a data center and multiple Novaceks, right? And many different data analysts running their pipeline that they built on R. And so I think it absolutely takes a tribe.

ChatGPT in the workplace

So, first of all, Rachel, thank you for sharing that. So hi, everyone. I'm just wondering, so far, what is the company's response to chatGPT? Any company has any concrete plan to use it to create value for the business? Right now, we are having some weekly meetings on chatGPT. We discuss how to use it for our business. We are a financial service company. So for us, transparency is very important. The model needs to be interpretable and explainable. So we cannot use it directly, obviously. We cannot give any of our customer data to the server of open chatGPT to rate it, and they cannot respond. So we are planning to build our in-house, a similar in-house model. Here, I'm just wondering, any company here have any concrete plan on chatGPT? How do we use it for the business?

I can share that in our internal company, our first meet over the year was one of my colleagues showing how they were using chatGPT as their virtual code assistant to build a Shiny app quite quickly. And everybody was blown away. It actually wasn't too bad. Much better than the last time I tried something like this, a co-pilot, about a year and a half ago.

We're seeing potential as that virtual pair programmer that you can bounce ideas off of, maybe for a language you're not as familiar with. Like for me, I'm still on this JavaScript learning journey, even though I've been using Shiny since the very beginning. I've been able to be a consumer of Shiny without having to know too much about the nuts and bolts behind it. But now I've kind of taken that extra transition to having to extend it a bit more. So that's how we're starting with it. But in my industry of life sciences, we have to be, I hate to say it, pretty cautious about how we're using this. But we are very much intrigued by what it can do from an efficiency standpoint, for sure.

So everybody asks me, because I'm the one data scientist in our family of companies, what's the dealio with chatGPT? And overall, I try to say it's a tool, right? With a pencil, you can draw, you can write prose, you could dab somebody. So I keep telling them it's just like any other tool, depends on how it's wielded. But so far, the biggest non-supporters of it has been the communications department. Anybody in journalism is very threatened by it. But I keep trying to tell them it's great for brainstorming. Don't think of it as like polished copyright, you know?

So it's funny. I think you're going to end up being, each one of you, you're going to end up having a lot of people come to you and trying to be seen as an expert, right? A domain expert in it. Always, my advice to you especially, try to be objective, right? Even though you have your own opinions about it, it's important for us to be good stewards of knowledge. So I do my best to tell people, like, envision a lot, be cautious, but also, like, feel free to dream because it's not going away. So that's kind of been my message to anybody who's asked in my company, which has been a lot in the last couple weeks, that's for sure. So that's my two cents.

My message is always talk to legal. I know there are a lot of concerns about not only, obviously, sending your data to their servers, but even if you have like a local instance of a model running, there's always concern about bias in the model. And there's always concern about some of the copyright stuff. So if you're producing code and then using it, you know, where did that code come from? That's all obfuscated behind the model. So I definitely, I'm so excited about the tech. I know people in my company are, but gosh, everyone has to be so careful. We learned from Samsung who's shared a bunch of sensitive information with a model, and now it's all out in public domain. So be careful.

So I work for Teach for America as a data scientist. So we have 10,000 applications coming every year, and we do a first pass with our NLP models. But we've had this huge challenge now, because we are the target audience for the early adopters of GPT, which is like college age students who are writing essays. And because we're basically have trained college age students to write the exact same essay that GPT wants to write, we're now dealing with this huge repercussion of all of our historical training datasets for NLP parsing are trained prior to GPT. And now we have this huge influx. So it's really become a challenge, you know, not on, we also use GPT internally, but it's more on like the receiving end of seeing the products of GPT has been a huge challenge.

Selling ideas to leadership

Hey, Rachel, how would you like to be? I asked you in the chat was basically you were, I know that you, you know, have come from a marketing background. And so, you know, oftentimes I've, I've said that data scientists are geeks, you know, and so if we're selling to people that selling to other geeks and we're trying to hook them in with how clever the solution is or how, you know, how, you know, what, how it's going to help us do geeky stuff better. Well, knowing about marketing, what skills would you recommend data scientists to look into for selling upwards to managers and people who aren't the geeks?

So something I think that is really important is like actually taking the time to make something look pretty. And there's a lot of tools out there that you can use to do that. One that I always use for like meetup groups is Canva because there's like a bunch of different like design templates. But I always find if you put like a little bit of effort into what something looks like, people take it more seriously.

And so I was thinking about that with like showing an idea for an app to your leadership team, like trying to like actually use the colors that match your brand or putting your logo in it so that people immediately see it as something like, oh, this is how we would use this at our company. Even if it's completely made up data, I think having the brand guidelines there, like it just changes the way people view it.

But I, I mean, I still struggle with this too, like pushing ideas forward. I literally just got off a call about something a little bit, probably an hour ago. And one mistake I made was like not thinking of the sales process with my own idea. Like if I get really excited about something, I want to go like make it happen immediately. And sometimes that's good, but sometimes you need to make sure that you are actually like bringing everybody on board to see your vision and your goal for the project. Especially in leadership so that they can help push it forward. Because I've learned like you're not always going to be in the room when somebody is discussing your ideas. So it's important like they understand it too.

I mean, a piece of advice I can share here just from like community building and also getting everybody on board. Like community building and also getting our, getting our team on board to come to events as well as just having one-on-one conversations with people to learn about some of the problems that they're facing every day in their work. And then trying to incorporate that into whatever you are proposing. So that you can like build them up as your own champions to help you like pushing this forward.

I will say that getting to know people on a more personal level is really helpful. Like if you can have conversations with leadership that are not about work and get to know them and what matters to them generally in life. And even what matters to them in a business sense, everybody has a different thing that they're championing and that they're really interested in moving forward. And so finding out what is individually motivating these people that you're trying to talk to can be really helpful because then you can speak to that and you're not just blowing your own, own horn a bunch, right? Like you can blow their horn. I think that that's really helpful and important.

And I, I've been trying to take some of the advice that you all share here too, and all the different future leaders. And I remember like, I think Emmy Zimbardo was sharing about like repeating the things that you really care about and not, not just thinking because you said something or propose something as an idea one time that it's going to be accepted. Like you have to keep talking about it.

And then I've also been trying to put my ideas in the lens of our like company OKRs or objectives and key results so that when they're talking about those at a leadership level that they think about my project because it was put into those exact words or those terms.

Yeah, just a little, I guess in addition to that piece of advice, I would say that when speaking with leaders, sometimes saying less is more. We tend to overshare the technical aspects and we're very, and sometimes we feel the need to talk into those details to make our point, but they're not as interested in the technical pieces, just, you know, speak to them, you know, at a normal human level and they trust you as an expert. You just have to come from their angle as much as possible but I feel like that's something I've learned more recently when I'm explaining a model or I'm explaining a solution I feel like I want to go into some of the technical details where it's like that's not, they're not too worried about that piece, they're just worried about the, how does this impact them or how is this going to impact the organization.

Yeah, sure. So, I was just saying, at my old company, I did end up pitching data for good center of excellence and it took a few pitch decks that I made on campus, by the way. But no, I think the biggest feedback I got from that is just echoing what Anna said here. Don't try and be technical with non-technical people like that's truly not what they care about and I think putting yourself in the shoes of whoever you're pitching to is so important and focusing not on the outcomes like for yourself or like I want to do this idea because xyz is my passion, like they don't really care that that's your passion so much but they want to know how it's going to help them actually, not how it's going to help you in your career in your future. But so yeah, I ended up doing a couple of pitch decks, definitely a lot of meetings and then I think something that's really helpful for higher ups to see is almost like a 30, 60, 90 day plan on like what the outcomes may be of your idea.

Community resources and podcasts

I see there was a question in the chat if there's like a slack or discord or some group for everybody to connect after the fact with the hangouts or where to find the hangout recordings. Right now we don't have a great like solution for like the ongoing conversations. I would love to have that in the future. Right now we just have a LinkedIn group which I'll share here. I know that's not the best format for having conversation sometimes but it's what we have right now. But we can definitely explore other options there too.

A Slido question that was asked is for the whole audience, do you have any favorite data science podcasts or YouTube channels?

I see a lot being shared. Data humans, Libby's podcast, absolutely. I'll be myself in AI too. I find it pretty interesting. They just recently had a couple from, one was an airline. I think it was, I want to say it was Delta and then another from Lego group. So as a Lego nerd, that was also really cool to see data science and AI and Lego and things like that.

I mean, we can't talk about data humans with Libby on this call without Libby giving us the elevator pitch of what data humans is about.

Data humans doesn't have a ton of episodes. It's something I'm doing on the side. It's like every month or six weeks whenever I can get it in and convince somebody to come on the podcast. But I started it because I realized that there was a lack of vulnerability and realness when a lot of people, especially people on LinkedIn are talking about data science. It's like all wins, all I'm doing this big, huge modeling thing. And when you meet them, sometimes you realize they aren't actually doing that for work. They're doing that on the side for fun.

Not everybody is a full-time R package developer. It kind of has the potential to make us all feel like everybody else is doing something so much cooler than we are. They must be doing something so much cooler than what I'm doing, because what I'm doing is like a bunch of Excel still. And my company doesn't want to have a code-first approach to analytics and all this stuff.

And really, we're all pretty similar. On the whole, there's still a ton of data people using Excel and using SAS and using things that are not crazy, huge machine learning models. So I just wanted a place to talk to everyday data people, like not CEOs, right? Because there's a ton of podcasts that are CEOs or super senior data scientists at Spotify or whatever it is. And that's fantastic. Learning from those people is great. But what I'm interested in is the everyday people like me and people who are just doing normal stuff. What are they doing? We don't get a peek behind that vulnerable curtain very often.

And really, we're all pretty similar. On the whole, there's still a ton of data people using Excel and using SAS and using things that are not crazy, huge machine learning models. So I just wanted a place to talk to everyday data people, like not CEOs, right?

And then, of course, Eric is also on this call. Eric was the first podcast I ever listened to. When I first started learning R, I felt really alone. I'm like, there's no way that anybody else is this excited about a programming language as I am. I'm sitting there in my first R programming class. Everybody's really bored. I'm super excited. I have a copy of the grammar of graphics. I am absolutely just highly invested in this thing. And I found Eric's podcast. And I was like, there are other people out there like me.

That's why I started the whole thing is I wanted to connect with people. And I cannot think of a better thing I could have done, even though I was really running with no knowledge of how to do any of this whatsoever. But no, really, it's about connecting with people. But I'm really passionate about sharing what other people are doing that I'm learning from every day. And so that's why the R Weekly Project, once I got involved with that, I realized, well, yeah, we have the website. Every week, we have a new issue. But let's have another avenue to deliver this great content out there. And that's why I started the R Weekly Highlights.

And it's been a joy to work with. I cannot do it alone. I say this every week. So Mike Thomas, my co-host here, is one of the biggest motivators for me to keep going because it's a weekly show. We have a day job with kids. It is a lot to fit in. But R is my hobby. I'm still open sources. My jam. I love talking about it. So just throw it out there, see if it resonates. And sure enough, it has. But yeah, I love hearing the stories and being able to put the spotlight on others in the community that are doing awesome things. So it's a true pleasure to do.

Community appreciation and spreading ideas

This feels like such a heartwarming community call right now. And I just wanted to take an opportunity to say thank you to everybody here who has also helped make this space what it is. And I absolutely love getting to hang out with you all every Thursday. And if I think back to it, I think we're going on about two years in a month or so. Which is amazing.

But if I think back to two years ago, and I thought we didn't have a featured leader, and we were just going to join and all chat, I would be freaking out. And I just love that we're all able to have this open conversation here. So I just want to say thank you to all of you here, too.

Rory, I see you had some thoughts on something we were talking about a little bit earlier on the topic of spreading ideas. Do you want to jump in here?

Yeah, just a little background. So I work as a behavior scientist. And my big interest is in organizational network analysis and a lot of relationship dynamics. In organizations, and I think one of the things that doesn't often get talked about is how the relationships that you have are really important with influencing people and getting buy-in.

And one of my sort of favorite resources or people to follow is this guy named Mike Arena, who used to be at AWS leading their talent organization. And he has recently done a lot of research on remote work, on hybrid work, on relationships and innovation. And he's generally found for a lot of that research that it's best to spend a lot of time incubating your ideas. If you come up with an idea, you're passionate about it, kind of like you were talking about, Rachel, it's great to kind of socialize that with a few people, especially if they're kind of at your level. And maybe they can help you improve that idea. And once you really build that out, then it becomes a good opportunity to scale. And you have a network of support around you that can help you build that up.

And I've seen that play out a lot. I don't know if anyone else has had a similar experience in their organization where they felt like once they had a good coalition, they were able to get somebody's buy-in. But I feel like we don't always talk about the relationships we have either at work or in our personal lives and how much of a difference that makes in influencing people to do one thing or another. So just want to call that out in case that was helpful to people as they're trying to pitch new ideas.

Yeah, I'll just reinforce we did the same thing when we started our internal user group. It was started as just in our user group. And it was basically the same five of us that were interested in just presenting back and forth to each other each month with very little variety in the presenters. But eventually, we started to expand it, started to include other open source languages. And now we've literally got hundreds of users across the of the company, pitching new ideas, sharing things that they've done. And just really cool to have kind of every stage too, right? We've got folks who are brand new and have heard of R or Python or something and want to learn. We've also got people who are super advanced and teaching very complex topics. So that kind of snowball effect has worked really well.

Data storytelling

You know, I think the discussion going back, I think Mr. Smith was the one who kicked it off, really, of how do you get decision makers to buy into your ideas? Some of the stuff I'm seeing, I do analyst relations for Posit, so talking with some of the market research firms like Gartner and Forrester, there's a lot of research there that talks about the use of, you know, the correct use of the right tool to get your point across.

And I wondered if any of you had been taking, you know, data storytelling courses at any point. Some of you have replied here to help you figure out, you know, what's the right tool to get across? How do you present data to be able to persuade people? And then another point that came up, I thought was also interesting, was the idea of, you know, there's this proactive storytelling versus using a self-service method of getting your ideas out there. So both of those topics, I think are, I find very, very useful. And I know that Rachel's found some other customers that, you know, one customer talked about using an interactive web app versus sending out a 200-page PDF report and how that really changed their interactions with decision makers. So just curious to hear more about other people's experiences in that respect.

Just really quickly, I find that we end up going down one of two paths often, depending on the client and the environment and the skill sets of the people. Sometimes it is, in fact, a matter of storytelling and getting it down into maybe even a five minute set of slides. But just as often, the exercise is a matter of empowering other analysts or other operational people whose day job is doing whatever, and we want to make their life better. And so we're going to push data through some kind of a layer to an endpoint so they can use it in the system they're comfortable with. And so it's more of a, you know, using the endpoint that they're comfortable with, and maybe less storytelling, more developing empathy for the person you're trying to help do what they do better.

Yeah, so one, I'm in a master's program right now, and I'm literally in the middle of a class that's focused completely around communicating data, which I found admirable. They actually spend the time, it's not even, you're not touching data at all in this class. They want you to make sure that you identify your target audience, that you use the right tone and language, that you make your point easy to follow, things like that, that we kind of take for granted and are super nuanced, just like presentation giving. They force you to really reexamine your habits, use concise language. And so I think that goes in line with what the comments made about communicating data. It's not just an effective visualization or an effective tool to kind of get the point across, but really making sure your words back up your point, right?

And then secondly, I went to a water data conference out here in Southern California. It's called the California Data Conference, but it's all around water, so it's a little misleading, but there was an excellent speaker and her name eludes me right now, but she gave me an entire presentation that was just gorgeous. And it was about highlighting signals so that when you're talking to somebody in management, right, that you're not just giving them a bunch of data fluff, that you're really getting their attention to the part of the visual that, you know, the outliers or the signal and whatnot. And she also referenced a couple of books that I thought were incredible. One was, sorry, it's called Signal. I believe it's out of print now, but there is a newer version of it, so maybe you can hunt it down.

But yes, I think totally, it's about saying it well, saying it short and concise, saying in the language they understand and then giving them the visual to back it up, totally. Because usually if you put it in their hands and they get some real visceral feel around what the possibility is, it helps. But half the time you can't get in the door with them, and that's where probably the other half of us who are still in that frustrated kind of vicious cycle of not being able to get management to help really build infrastructure or tools or teams to support your work are falling into.

So some of it is time, right? Because there are usually 1,000 other things on their plate that will take more precedent than we need our infrastructure updated. Like unless your building is on fire, they're never going to see that as something that really needs attention. At least that's what my organization has been like. They're like, our computers still run. We're still crunching data. Our analysts still do these reports. We're good. We don't need a single source of truth or anything like that, which is crazy.

And then the other part is even if you get in the door, it's, well, what is the ROI on this? And sometimes it's hard to do. Like I don't have people's salaries. I can go to HR or to our accounting and try to get some of those projections, but it also seems off-putting to them that this analyst scientist in the corner of the company is asking for these things, right? So it can be tricky to try to give the value add right up front where they go, aha, I get it. Instead, you have to kind of say like something's broken and I need to fix it. And then you have to prove that it's actually broken enough that it needs fixing. So I kind of hope that makes sense. But those are kind of the two cases I've run into, both in the same organization.

That course sounds great, too. You're reminding me I just bought this everyday business storytelling book and I forgot to actually read it when it arrived. But one of the lessons learned I saw in it was like in your PowerPoints, like your headers, like instead of putting like Q3 results or like something that really doesn't mean anything at all at the top of your PowerPoint, like actually putting the value there and what you're trying to show.

Yeah, if you've ever read the Storytelling with Data book, it's a super great way to think about how to distill a graph. Yeah, it's like how do you distill the graph down to its essence? And the workshop I took with them was really interesting because they really focused hard on every graph should just have one big idea. And if you're not telling one single individual isolated story with that graphic, it's going to confuse people. And so you should just keep working on refining that until it's just that one story and then make it super obvious what you're actually trying to say with a title that says, you know, sales decreased, whatever, you know, last quarter. That's the whole story.

So just being super clear and making sure that each slide, each exhibit is just one specific thing you want to get across because people are so bad at juggling what they've learned so far in your presentation and what they're looking at now. And then thinking about, you know, what they're going to have for lunch. And so making it as simple as possible to get that message across.

That makes me think about the conversation about like presenting to our executives as well, like having one thing in mind when you are meeting with them. I have a tendency because you don't get somebody's time all the like as often as you want, you want to tell them everything in that like 30 minute meeting instead of focusing on one.

Yeah, this is just kind of following on from what Adam's just said, though, that yes, absolutely. I would love if that was the way that we presented data and graphs. But there's also the tension that says, well, if anyone takes this graph out of context and, you know, copy pastes it and it winds up in front of the CEO and none of the context is there because I'm not presenting it, then I must cram every single hedging statement onto this graph. And so the actual useful stuff becomes like the letterbox in the middle with all of that extra fluff.

I so wish that we could have it so that your graph isn't just a static thing, but it has hover overs or whatever else you need to convey that additional contextual information. But I think the danger is that people try and have a graph that meets the needs of 15 different parties.

Well, actually, do you always put your contact information on graphs and slides you put out? Does anybody do that?

I worked for an organization that did always have like every dashboard and thing had a thing, like you, somebody to contact within the organization that made it or who owns the data behind it. I started doing that on like random Google Docs that I share across the company, like making sure that my name is at the top of it. So if anybody has questions, they know who originally made this and to reach out to me.

I had a leader a couple of years ago ask if we could put QR codes next to the plots that we put in a slide as a way for people to get in touch with more information. And sure enough, there's an R package that doesn't make QR codes. So there you go.

Public speaking tips

I see somebody had asked a question anonymously that was, no matter how much I practice, I always panic when I have a presentation. Does anybody have tips you would like to share regarding public speaking?

Yeah, I have a quick one. Do a podcast. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It actually did help me though, honestly. So it would be unnatural not to feel nervous, right? Everyone feels nervous. Even the people that don't look as though they're nervous are nervous. It's just they're managing those nerves. And the other thing I tend to think of is, you know, you talk to people as though you're just having a conversation with friends. You know, don't use language that is more complex than you would normally use or, you know, I know some people work well with, they kind of put on a persona or put on a hat in order to present. But honestly, I tend to like just picking out one or two people in the audience and just talk to them like I was having a conversation.

Yeah, Mike, those were really great points. I feel like I can talk about this. I just finished a one hour workshop at a conference. So I think the biggest tip, and yeah, you hit the nail on the head, like it's, of course, you're going to be nervous. 30 minutes before my hands were sweating. I was like, oh, gosh, like, am I going to completely blank?

But no, I think once you so something I do is like, I count myself down because really, it only takes like one second of courage because once you're once you're up there, you can't really go back. So it's like in my head, I kind of like three, two, one, go. And then, you know, you go. And I think during the start of my, I guess, public speaking engagements or career, I did kind of put on a persona and stuff. But now that I've done it more and more, like, it's your best bet to just be yourself and talk to the audience.

And I think it's so important to remember. I feel like public speaking, it's so easy to just focus on yourself and how, you know, maybe perceived by the audience this and that. But like most of the time, the audience is just there to learn. So in whatever way you can provide value without like just being so in your head about what you look like, what you sound like, what content you're even presenting. Yeah, I think it's so important just to remember why the audience is there and they're there to learn.

And then the one last thing that I could say about public speaking that's really helped me is if you are doing a public speaking engagement, do something that on a topic that you feel very comfortable talking about, that you could talk on this topic for hours and hours and hours. Because I've done presentations where I didn't really feel super confident about the topic. Like once I did a workshop on data visualizations, and though I had spent the whole year not making a data visualization at all, I was just doing data analysis pipelines in R. Right. So that public speaking engagement, I remember I was so nervous because I didn't feel so confident on the topic I was presenting. So yeah, just make sure you know your topic really well. And then I think from there, it can flow really natural.

What you were saying, Kaylin, was just making me think about sometimes it has been helpful for me is to reach out to a few people who I know are going to be there ahead of time and just asking them maybe questions about what they would like to learn or, I don't know, just reaching out to them in general to talk to them. Because then I at least know part of what I'm providing or sharing is providing value to somebody in the audience. And it makes me a lot less nervous. I guess also helps with any sort of imposter syndrome, too, to know that this is going to be valuable for at least these people. So chances are it will be valuable for their other peers there, too.

Yeah, no, for sure. And even yesterday, I was talking, so I presented today and then the conference was yesterday and today. And I was talking to people who registered for my workshop. And that made me feel so much better. And even seeing them today in the audience, those were the ones that I was looking at and talking to, you know what I mean?

I was just talking with one of my co-workers who's going to a PyData conference about this, too, and was just saying, like, if we do have, like, a list of who is attending and if you can, like, reach out to somebody on LinkedIn ahead of time or just introduce yourself, it makes you feel so much more comfortable when you're there that you at least know somebody.

I really liked Anasa's tip about dressing comfortably, like, dress in something that you're comfortable wearing and that you're not going to be constantly thinking about what you're wearing. That's super important. Absolutely. Yeah, I've noticed that, like, if I have a presentation to do, I'll pick an outfit that makes me very comfortable. I'll even get a haircut or I'll do something like just those are little things that will definitely make you, yeah, make you feel better. Yeah, minimize all the other stuff. The peripheral stuff that could make you nervous, that's not you speaking, because you don't need that in your life. You're already nervous enough.

I see a few people talking about Toastmasters. Has anybody been part of Toastmasters? A lot of places will let you drop in if you want to go to a group and say, like, hey, I'm interested, but I'm not sure if I want to do this. A lot of them are really happy to have you spectate and kind of clap for people when they finish and stuff like that. So I recommend anybody go check it out. But it's usually not data focused. There's a good topic each time, each session. It's not data, but helpful.

I've done super technical data talks to them, and it's kind of helpful because talking to an audience has no idea what your domain knowledge is can make you like, oh, OK, I have to, like, make sure this jargon is to a minimum. I have to explain this like I'm explaining it to a really smart junior high student instead of my peers. So it can be really helpful.

They also have, like, a meeting is an hour, and they will have three scheduled big presentations, like, 15, 20 minutes. But they also have little drills. And even as a first timer, you can go and try one of the little drills where you get up for 30 seconds, and they ask you something, and you just have to speak off the cuff. And it kind of works out some of those jitters. Even if you're introverted, even if you're scared, it's worth doing, because if it doesn't scare you, it won't change you, right? Totally worth doing, though. I wish to go to one Toastmaster meeting in their life, I'd say.

We had for the Posit conference, all the accepted speakers get speaker training through articulation. So I got to go through that last year. And it was really helpful to think about, like, starting off your talk with a story, like, framing things as a story to bring the audience in. And I've been starting to try and do that with presentations that I give internally as well. Like, who is the customer that this is impacting? And why am I presenting this to?

Avoiding bias in presentations

This is just more open-ended for anybody's experience when it comes to giving presentations or, I mean, I know it has more to do with the audience that you're in front of. But trying to avoid the sales pitch type of presentation versus keeping things much more unbiased and just presenting, kind of giving an unbiased approach to what you're presenting instead of trying to push an agenda, essentially. Because I've gone both ways where if I'm trying to essentially persuade decision makers on, you know, my idea or pitch my idea, then it obviously becomes straight into a sales pitch kind of scenario. But I've also, like, tried to just do presentations on giving the information in sort of a very unbiased, disseminating the information to the public audience type scenario. And I always run the gambit of, like, how to not include your own personal bias when presenting and try to keep things very open, if that makes sense. Just wanted to kind of get everybody's opinion.

I, again, we're kind of tool people and maybe even statisticians here. What we bring in terms of our backgrounds and skills matters. And so, more often than not, the opening slide is going to say who we are and process we maybe use to arrive at this piece of information. And that's a pitch, you know. Now, bias maybe implies that we've imprinted something unnatural or a distortion on this. And I don't, you know, mean to misconstrue what you said there. But I don't undersell the skills we bring as people to the conversations with, you know, our organizations, you know, whether it's a government institution or charity or a business. We bring something that's valuable and hugely valuable, in fact. So, we shouldn't be ashamed to, you know, to imprint that on the work we've done and the results that we've arrived at. At least that's kind of where I'm coming from.

Thank you all so much for joining today and kind of winging it with us. This has been really fun. I appreciate everybody jumping in here and being the featured leader, too.