The Curate-ocracy of Data: What we learned from Napster

Data today is much the same as music in the early 2000’s. We either have precious little and so management isn’t a problem, or we’re drowning in an overwhelming library of analyses and don’t know how to manage it. In the midst of all this, we all but forget that data is just another kind of content, and we’ve been grappling with how to manage increasingly large libraries since the explosion of P2P networks.

In this talk we’ll explore the implications of data as another form of content, and look to the future, so we can take what we’ve learned in other fields and avoid the pitfalls that lie directly ahead of us. Specifically how...  

• At first we valued ownership, and so our libraries were manageable by default.

  • Many of us are here

• Then we valued access. We had unmitigated access to everything, and were drowning in choice.

  • Many of us are here. We have “democratized” data, but the result is the duplication of unmaintained dashboards and the multiplication of tech debt which ultimately obscures our initial intention.

• Now we value curation, relying on clever filtering to anticipate our wants and make sense of the chaos

  • Few of us are here, where we still have access to everything, but relevant content is the most accessible and the most maintained.

What this means from a practical standpoint is that we’ll go into the nuts and bolts of how to develop the right set of data insights that answers most of our questions, as well as how to maintain that over time - so that you spend less time joining SQL tables, and more time doing what your clients pay you to do.