 OK, good morning, everybody. It is fantastic to see so many faces here in this room, so many people interested in the world of open data. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about one of my journeys with open data and a project that I was lucky enough to work on that I'm happy to say had an impact that I'm very pleased with. So just to quickly introduce myself, as was mentioned, I'm Eric. I work at Tableau. As a product consultant, I help people see and understand their data, which means that I work with usually closed data sets, usually very big data sets. But in my free time outside of work, I also try to volunteer as much as I can. And today what I want to talk about is one of the projects that I worked with DataKind and a charity on to visualize poverty and a region of the United Kingdom. All right, so let's go forward. So this whole story started with an organization called DataKind. I don't know how many of you here are familiar with them, but they are a really great organization. Basically what they do is they team up data scientists and charities that have data. And they get them to meet to spend a weekend together. Usually it's sort of hackathon type events where the charities will come with questions, and then the data scientists will try to answer those questions, or at least to explain to them to answer these questions, this is the additional data you would need. And their mission is to harness the power of data science in the service of humanity, which I think is a fantastic mission. So at one of their events that I attended, I met this man, this is Robin. And he was representing a charity, which was the Northeast Child Poverty Commission. And what they aim to do is to help leave the issues of child poverty in this region of the United Kingdom. And he came to us with a list of questions and also some data that he had been using. And also one of the things that he wanted to accomplish was to bring his message to a wider audience. He said, I know what the problem is, but how can I explain this to other people? How can I convince others to lend me their attention so that we can do something about this issue? So during this data dive, basically this hackathon, we spent a weekend working. And this is the team. You can see Robin on the left explaining to us what the issues that his charity faces were. And then us on the right, sort of just hacking away all weekend. There were many people involved. So the world of data scientists is a fantastic world. Many people can do many things. I focus on the visualization side. I don't necessarily consider myself a data scientist, but I was still allowed to participate in this event. So some people built up models to try to predict the things that might happen in the future. I, however, focused mainly on turning the data that Robin had into visualizations that he could then bring to a wider audience. So to do that, one of the data sets that I ended up using that Robin actually liked, and I have to say is a fantastic data set, is something that's available from the HMRC on gov.uk, which I have to say that, as somebody who obviously isn't from this country, is an absolutely fantastic source. When I moved to the United Kingdom, I was really impressed by the amount of open data that's available to people here. And so one of the sources I ended up using to help Robin was this data set. However, as those of you that have worked with open data, and I'm sure everybody here has, data is not always in the format that you want it to be. It's not always as clean as you need it to be. In this case, the HMRC had created Excel reports, which are great for reading. They're not necessarily fantastic for creating visualizations or crunching data from. So the first thing that we had to do when we found the data that we needed to use was to clean it up. So if you see there's a lot of empty columns, there's a lot of empty rows, there's merged cells. I mean, probably many of us here in the room work with this kind of data. And those of you that do know that probably 80% of doing anything with data involves just cleaning it up, so you can actually do something interesting with it. So I spent a lot of time to get the data into a format that looks like this. I could start to see what were the poverty rates for different age groups by year. Then I had to tackle this thing called an LSOA. Does anybody know what an LSOA is? OK, all right. It's a very educated crowd. That's fantastic. I had no clue what an LSOA was. So Robin tried to explain this to me. And it turned out that my geographic knowledge was pretty bad in general. So he tried to explain this region of the United Kingdom to me, the Kingdom of Northumbria, as he called it. And it became clear to me that LSOAs are these very, very granular geographic regions that the government uses. Most people don't really know what LSOA they live in. Does anybody know what LSOA they live in? OK, less hands went up. So to make any sense of this data, what you have to do is map it so that you can see, I live in this part of the world, and I know that I live on this street, and here's the LSOA. So to do that, I went ahead and grabbed a data set of all the LSOAs in the United Kingdom. So to do this project, since I'm a Tableau expert, I use Tableau. But the great news is that there's many, many different tools out there. So as data people, we're really spoiled for choice when it comes to the data sets we want to use and also the tools that we want to use. But anyway, I found a Tableau data set that I was able to use. And at the end of this weekend, we were able to present to Robin a very basic outline of the kind of visualization that he wanted to create so that he could go off to politicians and people in his area to explain the problems that children were facing. And so on the right, you can see the basic demo that we did at the end of the hackathon. But those of you that have been to hackathons know that the end of the hackathon is really just the end of the beginning, because you barely scratch the surface. So I kept on working with Robin over the months since the hackathon. And we sort of iterated on ideas that we thought might be a good way of portraying this data. So here's the first iteration, a lot of green, a lot of red, maybe too much. Then we sort of settled on being able to look at the different regions at a less granular level and then zoom in on the LSOAs. So you can get a trend of how a certain district is doing. And then you can see within that district how are the LSOAs doing. So even a district with very low poverty might have regions or patches where there is very high poverty. And then we sort of just kept on going with that theme. And so we finally found this one or decided on this one. A visualization never really is finished, so you're always changing things. But this is actually what's live on their website right now. And what was really interesting for me was that Robin told me afterwards, he said, I didn't really learn anything from this visualization. I knew the data. It's not telling me anything new. But it's amazing. I can show this to people, and they see it for themselves. And it's almost as if they can touch the data. And it becomes so more meaningful to them. Robin was fine reading the data out of an Excel, but not everybody is. And so I think one of the things that I'd like you to take away from this talk is that open data is out there, but not everybody can consume it in its native format. So visualizations are a fantastic way of giving meaning to data for a wider crowd. And this has been quite successful on their website. Basically, once the visualization was built, we went ahead and published it on a platform called Tableau Public, which allows it to be embedded on any website. And it's actually up and interactive. I'll give you the link in a second so you can look at it yourselves. It's not mobile ready, so it's probably better if you have a device with a big screen. So one of the platforms that I use for this is Tableau Public. It's a completely free tool. As I mentioned before, there are many, many tools out there. This just happens to be the one that I used. Free platform, free tool. In fact, one of my coworkers, Sophie, is in the room, hi Sophie. If anybody's interested in learning more about this, we'll be around. Also, since there are probably a couple of charities or NGOs here, at least it was the case of Robin, we've recently launched a program to work with charities. So if you're interested in visualizing your data, get in touch. Finally, if you want to see the interactive visualization, it's at the poverty map link. If you want to learn more about Tableau Public, public.tableau.com. And I am on the internet, as many of you. So if you want to learn more about me, I'm at Erichanel or Erichanel.com. So really, I wanted to hopefully inspire you to say that visualizing data is something that everybody's capable of doing now. And there's so much data out there for the taking. So I think as people in this moment in time we're very lucky. That's pretty much it. I'm happy to take any questions if you have them. Thank you, Eric. Eric, a round of applause. One at the back. Hi, quick question for Public Tableau. Do you plan, how can we publish information on Public Tableau? Do you give a domain and then you can, how does that work? Could you elaborate on that, please? Could you say your name and where you're from as well? I'm Kirk from Sound Mouse. All right, so, hi Kirk. Basically, Tableau Public is a piece of software that you download to build the visualizations. So to build something like what we have here and then once you've built it you then publish it up to this platform called Tableau Public. Once it's been published to the platform you can then embed it in any other web page. So it's really a two step process. First you build it on your machine then you publish it to the platform. Does that answer the question? Partly does. What I wanted to know is whether you created a domain. So say you wanted to do multiple publishes along a theme, whether you created in effect a domain that was in Tableau as opposed to just a URI or whatever that would link to that particular visualization. So you publish to sort of a list of you create a user account then there'll be a list of your visualizations and each visualization will have a unique link that you can link to. But then if you also want to embed it that's possible as well. Okay, thank you. You can think of it kind of as YouTube for data visualization. That's what our marketing people say at least. Time for one more quick question, I think. Mary Burton from the Bournemouth Foundation. We're a sustainable development charity based in Herefordshire. And I want to do exactly that for a series of 36 indicators for our county. Do you think that's mad or achievable? Sorry, I missed the middle bit. We want to do, we want to create a website or in the process of creating a website to look at approximately 36 indicators for our county on sustainable development. So environment, society and economy. Do you think we're mad or do you think that's achievable? No, I mean, as long as you can calculate the indicators as long as you have data to calculate them, no. Tableau Public is something that many people are using at the moment, Sophie could probably name a few but I know the mayor of London uses it. So Boris is a fan. I can give you more examples afterwards but I don't think that that sounds too unreasonable. All right, and with that I'll say thank you all. And I thank you very much.