#DataBS conf was a lot of fun!

Seven hours of talking and listening to folks talk about working with data in all sorts of ways, from technical to interpersonal. Since data folk have a bit of a tendency to lean introverted, you'd think that it'd be an exhausting ordeal but by the looks of it, everyone who attended had a good time. There were smiles, laughter, a very lively chat full of banter, commiseration, advice and encouragement. In my book that is a resounding success, and I believe that for many other people it was also a success.

Over the next few evenings I'll be slicing up the video, preparing to archive them onto YouTube, you can subscribe to the channel now if you want a notification when the videos go live all at once.

With that, the roughly three month journey from Bluesky shitpost to actual live event comes to a close. We officially had 209 people? emails? somethings? register for the event, and 14 registered speakers. A solid number for an event whose primary "marketing" strategy was "uh, make some posts about it?".

After the high of a successful event everyone always asks the obvious question of "will there be another one?" And for now the answer is, no for the foreseeable future. Maybe in a year or more's time and I get annoyed that there's been no fun data event to gather around, I'll make another fateful shitpost and start the cycle again. But for now I'd love to see if someone else wants to make their own event and take it in a direction that they want. I'd be more than happy to help anyone make a fun data-related event. If they want to take the same theme and run with it, I'd cheer them on and will happily use the extra overflow budget we collected to fund that event.

As I said in today's opening remarks, making space for other people to get together and shine is a very important job. So, I'm being 100% serious here, if in the coming months anyone of you gets an idea for some kind of data event and needs support to make it happen, talk to me about it.

That said, it would be really fun if a bunch of data people got together to do some kind of livestream of us doing non-data things, like making food. Someone do that!