Decol Futures: Join a Professional Group?

Author

Dana Reijerkerk
August 21, 2024

A newsletter to learn about practical ways to decolonize your research and data work-lives with byte-sized drabbles about the daily life of a data professional.

Professional groups are like favorite animals: A way to break the ice

Beavis And Butthead Comedy GIF by Paramount+

Gif by paramountplus on Giphy

Picking a professional organization to join is like picking your favorite animal.

Your opinion might change over time, it’s going to differ from the next person, upkeep on having one as a pet is costly, and it’s a fun ice breaker to talk about with other people.

My favorite animal is the platypus.

Professional data organizations include groups like:

  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

  • International Game Developers Association (IGDA)

  • Society of American Archivists (SAA)

  • Code4Lib

  • Research Data Alliance (RDA)

Joining an organization can help you. And depending on your job, you might be required or voluntold (volunteered + told) to join one.

Let’s talk about it!

Why join a group?

Professional organizations offer social interaction, street credibility, and upskilling.

  • There are volunteer opportunities where you serve on a working group. If you join a group, the purpose is to have some tangible output. Write a blog post, a report, white paper, research study, etc.

  • Most have an annual conference where you fly out somewhere, meet others in your field, and learn the latest research/news/professional knowledge by sitting and listening to others talk.

  • You can meet people in your field not dependent on your current place of work! In today’s job market and economy, it’s typical to switch jobs every couple of years and depending on your data field that means moving cross-country and starting all over with making friends and professional connections.

  • Street credibility is your expertise. Expertise is a math equation of what you know, who you know, where you’ve worked, and what upskilling you do. Name dropping professional organizations, belonging to them, attending their events shows expertise. Showing expertise is important to getting gigs, jobs, and making colleagues out of strangers.

Conferences can be pricey! Expect to easily pay upwards of $1,000 total to attend. Registration costs can usually be waived or lowered if you poke around the organization’s website.

Look for things titled scholarships, early-bird registration, or fellowships. You’ll probably have to write up a “why I deserve this” statement - talk about your professional background and name a few sessions from the conference program with an explanation of how attending the specific session relates to your background and helps you do your current/desired job in the field.

p.s. if you present at a conference, registration is typically waived.

Don’t want/need to join a group?

Consider the “cost.” “Cost” is bandwidth, time, interest, and finally money. At the end of the day, what matters is your portfolio projects and your expertise. You can stay up-to-date on your professional knowledge by reading research or blogs related to data. Some places to start:

  • Nielsen Normal Group “Articles” - this is a user experience-based blog with tons of Wikipedia-like articles and videos on topics like metadata, taxonomies, UX, intranets, and web usability. UX design is important to communicating data.

  • CODATA Data Science Journal - free to read! and talks about a broad array of data topics, like new software or legal data issues, policies and practices for open data, and I saw some of their latest articles are on Darwin Core (a science metadata schema) and data from LGBTIQ+ populations in European Social Science Data Archives.

  • Proceedings of the IEEE - This is more technical and relevant to electronics, electrical engineering, and computer science. You can find interesting news on data like, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. It’s a paid journal, but like most it has an open access article per issue and you can check out their archives. 

  • Cataloging and Classification Quarterly - everything Internet, database, collections, and digital assets that you do involves cataloging and classifying data. Reading CCQ is good for staying up to date on metadata schemas and seeing how others implement data standards.

Educational Opportunities

A short list of things to explore!

[Conferences] Attend a Video Game Developer Conference for Upskilling Your Writing, Coding, and Data Logic

Video game development is a nexus of data skills, like UX design, level design, programming, and animation. Knowing how to communicate data is vital to our work and video games do this really well. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has an event page that lists international conference venues!

[International Plenary] Attend a Research Data Alliance Plenary and hear about global data topics from librarians, computer scientists, domain scientists, and data scientists

RDA is great for volunteering and upskilling. They have plenaries twice a year and one is totally virtual, the other hybrid. These are working events where you create a tangible output related to sharing data across borders and domains.

[Thinking Fuel] Read up on Taxonomies from a User Experience Perspective

Taxonomies are often taught from a data-focused perspective like classifications or digital asset management. What about the UX? UX Design is the least thought of data aspect in practice - just look at any database you use…

Let’s Create!

I’m open to collaborations, freelance gigs, and conversations about the ideas I shared. Feel free to get in touch and comment on the newsletter.

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