Internal Data Science Conference

An internal data science conference is a great way to meet others across your organization and grow your community.

It can help keep your team current on new technology, increase collaboration, give people a view into the work being done in other parts of the organization, and celebrate that work.

Items to consider:

Who is this event for?

• What teams for your organization will be part of it?
• Which timezones are you accommodating?
• Beginners and advanced users?

What is the format of your event?

• One day, multiple days? Hybrid, in-person, or virtual only?
• Keynote? Workshops and talks? How do you want to split them up?
• Will they be company-led speakers or do you want Posit to present at any?

What is the key theme or main motivation of the conference?

For example: Bringing the community together so that we collaborate more effectively.

How will you market the event?

• Do you have an internal site for the conference? A logo?
• Do you have internal channels to share this on? Teams? Slack? Newsletters?
• Will this be shared at a leadership level?
• Can Posit help in connecting you with other teams we work with?

What is the follow-up?

This is a great opportunity to build relationships across the company. The follow-up actions are just as important as the event itself. Think about the ways you can keep people connected in between these conferences.

• Will you share recordings and slides?
• How will people stay connected after the event?

Conference ideas:

• Company-wide data science day
• Shiny Day
• Data science hackathon/competition

We’d love to help you in getting started!

Examples:

AstraZeneca:

AstraZeneca spoke about their internal R Conference, #AZRC2022, in a blog post and meetup. This was a fully virtual, half-day conference with Max Kuhn as a keynote speaker, more than 30 speakers, and close to 100 poster authors. They ran three parallel tracks: governance, machine learning, and reproducibility.

World Bank

The World Bank hosted a Shiny Day (actually 2-days!) to demonstrate how Shiny can be used in the context of bank projects. From their event overview site, this included a series of lightning talks, a keynote by Carson Sievert from Posit’s Shiny team, and interactive workshops.

The site linked above includes more detail, but the general agenda for this was:

Day 1:

• 9:30 - 11am: Beginners workshop - “How to build a Shiny app”
• 11:15 - 12:30: 7 different lightning talks (6-minutes each)
• 12:45 - 2:15: Intermediate workshop - “How to customize reactions”

Day 2:

• 9:30 - 11am: Advanced workshop - “How to customize appearance”
• 11:15 - 12:30: Posit Keynote
• 12:45 - 2:15: Advanced workshop - “Shiny in production: maintenance and speed”