Diversity @ Data Council

#DataForEveryone - Data Doesn’t Discriminate

 We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, neurotype, religion, elder status, family structure, culture, subculture, political opinion, identity, and self-identification. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, data-nerds (because we are all data-nerds deep down), musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with colleagues, people who want to make great data visualizations, and people who just need a break from data visualizations. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained fanboys/girls. We welcome data beginners who aren't sure what any of those terms refer to. We welcome you no matter if the Internet was a household word by the time you started secondary school or whether you were already retired by the time the Cloud was invented. (And we’re talking both rain clouds and data clouds here).

We welcome you. You may wear a baby sling, hijab, a kippah, leather, piercings, a pentacle, a political badge, a rainbow, a rosary, tattoos, or something you can only dream of. You may carry a guitar or knitting needles or a sketchbook. (No weapons though, keep it PG). Conservative, liberal, libertarian or socialist, we believe it's possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to come together and learn from each other during our events. We believe in the broad spectrum of individual and collective experience and in the inherent dignity of all people. We think that amazing things happen when people from different worlds and world-views approach each other to create a fiery conversation about the many forms data can take.

We get excited about creativity, from pro to amateur, from novels to haiku, from the developer who's been doing this for decades to the person who just dove into a cheap Udemy class last week. We support maximum freedom of creative expression within the few restrictions we need to keep the service viable for other users. We will never put a limit on your creativity at our events just because it makes someone uncomfortable even if that someone is us.

We think accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We believe neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug. We believe in being inclusive, welcoming and supportive of anyone who comes to us with good faith and the desire to build data products, platforms, algorithms, companies, scripts, hacks, MapReduce jobs or Jupyter Notebooks..

We have enough experience to know that we won't get any of this perfect on the first try. But we have enough hope, energy, and idealism to want to learn things we don't know now. We may not be able to satisfy everyone at our events, but we can indeed work to avoid offending anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we'll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us. We promise to make it simple for you to share your thoughts with us, so you don’t have to fill out needless forms, navigate phone trees or get lost in corporate hierarchies, instead just email me here: pete@datacouncil.ai and we'll do our best to make it right. We expect to learn from you.

We think our community experience is an essential part of who we are at our core. We know what goes wrong when companies say one thing and do another, or when they refuse to say anything at all. We believe that keeping our operations transparent is just as important as serving lunch on time at our events.

Come and let's make great data happen.