 So we are going to hear from Juan Pablo Ruiz-Nigolini about the opening up the data and the processes of the public tourism statistics in Argentina. Yeah, Juan Pablo, you can just take it from here. Okay. Thank you. I didn't realize that when they emailed me, it says that I was going to speak in English. If there are no, if some of you is only English speaking, I can try to do my best and do it in English, but the slides are in Spanish. It's okay. Okay. I'll try to do my best. Okay. My name is Juan Pablo Ruiz-Nigolini, everyone called me Tucumano. That's my handle on Twitter. I am from Tucumán province at the north. I am in charge of the National Tourism Statistics Office, and I am trying to tell you very, very fast what things we've done, like, for two years or a little more. I don't know how this works, like this, okay, the computer. Okay. When we arrived, basically our office was in charge of two main things, like getting basic statistics of the tourism sector, working with the National Institute of Statistics and with the United Nations Office recommendations, following up some public records of the economy and the sector, the tourism sector in the economic activity, and doing some impact evaluation of the tourism policies. The office was also working with the sub-national units, the provinces and municipalities that are very important because of the territoriality of tourism, and this was the image that we had when we arrived to the office, like, in the middle of the pandemic that was very special for tourism. When the Minister Lamens called us to work in the office, this was the picture we had. A lot of work. I think when we look at the national government offices that work with data and statistics, like a big team, like 15 people, but mostly all of them were working on their own computers with Excel files and like old school of data, in a sense. This is like the image of the office when we arrived. Every people, each one was working in this particular use case of tourism and then collecting data and some wrangling, and then they have like final reports on PDF. Our proposal and what we are doing right now is like this modernization, in a sense. We add this, I'm sorry for the Spanish if you don't understand, the data team. We start like a data team that consists mostly on generating, scripting, and pipelines to automatize things. And the second important thing we think we've done was creating this whole communication stuff. When I showed this image is people grab the data, wrangle that, unpublish some PDFs, and nobody had access to outside the office for the data unless they asked for it. The team was always okay to share it, but it was like very passive way. This new workflow implied like connecting those teams that were working separately and opening the whole process to the public. Not only the data, but also the process behind the data generating and a whole bunch of dashboards and stuff that I'll show you. There's where SINTA, the Sistema de Información Turística de Argentina, the Argentinian Twist Information System was born. And SINTA mostly consists on the old stuff, these PDFs and press reports about the data that we work. We maintain that like a small, how do you say, a new phase, but it's mostly the same thing. Then little stuff, this is the first time we publish the official numbers of tourism in Argentina like in the participation of the economy. This is basically the United Nations recommendation and this year we finished that and like the old phase of the tourism office activity. But we start opening more and more spaces to share the same data for different publics and thinking about which are the publics that are consuming that data. We create this library to publish research documents and methodology and some of the stuff we work daily at office. When we open this blog, it's a more informal place to share the daily work. We are working on a new project with this dashboard to check the hotel's national registry for the first time and there we explain for a wide audience what are we doing, not only a technical documentation but for the general public. We build a lot of dashboards and trying to open the access for this data for a wide public, not only reading the PDFs and our interpretation of the tourism but to allow the public to interact with that data and create their own data sets and download them without having a technical skill or being a programmer or so. They don't need to interact with an API but they can interactively work with those dashboards and download data. We have a lot of things like the airplanes market, the hotels, some stuff to share the investment news or investment opportunities or a little app to create touristic maps without knowing anything about GIS or programming and so. Then we have that lower level of sharing that we are using the second API system and we are sharing a lot of data. When we arrive to the office, this portal also exists, I was speaking with the guys recently and we had only three data sets that someone put there when they opened because of the directive of the ministry but the IT guys had the portal and they have three little exels there and when we arrive to the office we say that's ours, we are going to keep that and we start opening all this stuff that was living on the staff machines, we were curating them, cleaning it, wrangling it and then we started sharing this information. Then we make another little websites to put order on that chaos that we found when we arrived there. I'll skip these little bots and this kind of stuff to share for why don't audience all the production. This was very important for us, we found this isolated workflow with the people in each machine then we make this putting all together and sharing the information not only between the workers at the office but also outside the office and the other major thing we've done is working with the national units. As I said it's very, there's a lot of variation down side in the provinces and municipalities how they work, how they deal with data so we build some pieces of software and some stuff to help put on a common ground how we speak and what we speak about tourism in Argentina. We also work on some education like the project where we transfer some knowledge how we do things with the provinces and this was like the classes for data science to excel users. It's like the small offices of tourism in each province are doing some work analogous as we are doing but they have less tools than we have so we try to share some knowledge and some transfer some knowledge for the provinces and municipalities. And we are developing software to put all this data that each province is generating in a common, I am very nervous with my English, in a common like... What's behind all of this? We run version control, we run a lot of version control. Remember people was working with excels on their own machines and they barely share between them all those files. Now these same people is working with Git and making version control and software development. We are making this literate program. We run all these PDFs that we still publish. They are run with scripting and the same people that was working on excels is doing these things. We are documenting all these processes and we are opening repos with all the code of these processes and we are working on sharing the knowledge we are learning while doing and we share it all the time. Our main mission is to share it for every people interest in this literate we can achieve now but publishing all that we can. And then we are doing all these for the daily work and we are learning how to develop our own software and sharing it so other offices we are aware that there are some other offices at the national government that are dealing with problems similar to the one we found when we arrived. So we decide to open all the software we can develop so other offices can have like an example and adapt to their own needs. This is very hard. I didn't speak English for a long time. Okay and we have some, we are all non-programmers at the office. I am a political scientist, the guys that came with me at first, the sociologists and economists that work with that. And we didn't know anything about tourism and we lean on the specialists that were at the office when we arrived and they are a great team that love to learn these things at the same time we were learning about tourism so it was like a very good thing to do and we are standing on shoulder of giants. We are air programmers, social scientist air programmers and we are doing all this stuff all what we are publishing, the dashboards, the SICAN interaction, the little software we are developing. It's everything around that. I would be love to answer any question of what you may didn't understand of this awful speech. And I think that's all. Thanks very much. Do we have, oh that's very loud, sorry. Do we have questions in the room? Oh, we'll start here. In Spanish. I'll do my best. I'll try sorry to lose it, translate the question. Please the Spanish speakers in the room complete my translation. So basically what she's asking is how did you manage what was the motivation for people that use Excel to move to exactly more reproducible ways to work and what was the second part of the question, that was it. Okay, sorry for the loose translation. What's the secret? I think that there's no secret, it was like being there and give the opportunity to have the space to develop their new skills for them. And the selling point was only that this, it was saying we have to move on, we have to do new things, we have to minimize the dependency on people because each people had only one role at the office and were very specialist. So my speech was we have to lower that dependency, we have to work more collaborative and we have these tools that we are used to, we are used to me and two guys that come with me when we are at the office and say we are going in that direction and we love that you come in the same direction and we'll do our best to put our effort so you can learn this. Mainly I think there is a secret, you can learn this in office hours. So there were some office hours during the week that we have, this was the illustration, it's on Thursdays, this was Thursday mornings from 9am to 1pm we have four full hours working something with R. So you're going to have this for free, that was the selling point. I think it was like a marketing selling, people is not going to change the whole way they work because of this, but this was like the message. We are on to put our personal effort and leave the office obligations for a while so you can grab this and go the same path we are thinking of. Yes. I think you need for the video. You're right. Do you think you got to a point where this awesome thing you did is going to keep going even if the administration can't change this? Do you think you got to that point? And if you don't or if you do, what's the key to get to that point? Thank you. I think it's a very important question for me because I think this is the main goal I have today the administration probably going to change in a while. And I think there are a few things that ensure that these things, most of these things are going to hold on time mainly because we are raising the bar because we are documenting things. We say we do all this stuff that didn't exist two years ago and this is how you can do it. There is some public demanding that. There is someone that is consuming this and it has no cost. You know how you can do it. And there's anything that is problematic in what we are doing politically. So I think it's cost less to maintain it and the team, and that's why I think that is important. The team know how to maintain this and we are working on that that each people can know of every process. Perhaps they are not experts in every process but they know about every process and they can go to the documentation and they can learn from the others. So I hope that it will maintain and we are working with that as a goal. We want to raise the bar so they can clean this when we finish. We have one question there and we will need to move forward. So you implemented a lot of tools and technologies. Was there any point where you realized maybe you added one too many tools and it was too complicated of a stack and was it hard to sort of simplify after you crossed that line? It's a great question. Yes, but they are not here. Those things are not here. Yes, many times I thought about that and perhaps for some of the people in the team it was too much and we had to stop and think again. It was not always straightforward. We had to stop and make some changes and decisions about the role of each participant in the process. But I think it's something that is dynamic when we were pointing very, very far and then we stopped and we go backwards. But when I see the results, how people at the office is working with this I think we are in a good path. Maybe we had to make some adjustments, but I think it was scary. But it flows. I don't know why. Maybe it's a little miracle. It's a lot of stuff. There are people that only work with Excel working with Git. It was like 15. Okay, this repo is Dr. Jacob and Mr. Hyde. This is on production repo. This is the office repo. Here we are 15 with two mes, so 16. Here we are five. On production only five people have a privilege. So they can break things here and we work like that.