PCMA CONVENING LEADERS 2014 PREVIEW

with their peers. But today it can be difficult for event organizers to determine which processes are still effective, which are dated and should be retired, and which need improvement. At Convening Leaders 2014, Masters Series speaker Hilary Mason — who recently became the first data scientist in residence at Accel Partners, a venture and growth equity firm, after serving as chief scientist at the URL-shortening service Bitly since 2009 — will encourage meeting professionals to think differently when it comes to data, and discuss ways to mine and analyze information to advance their conferences and careers. As co-founder of DataGotham, an annual conference in New York City for data professionals, Mason understands firsthand what it’s like to interpret attendee responses and construct a better meeting based on the results. Additionally, she is an active member of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, helping the mayor discover ways to foster growth in the local technology community. She’s spoken to groups about everything from email hacking to the history of machine learning. At Convening Leaders, Mason will help

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attendees “make better decisions with data,” taking a look at the amount of data that’s available today and the ways in which people are now able to source and construe this intelligence. “I’m a data optimist,” Mason recently told Convene, “in that I think there’s a huge amount of potential for all businesses that we still have yet to explore with data.”

ince the early-19th century, professionals from nearly every field have held meetings to educate, exchange ideas, and network

Are there basic ways in which all professionals should be thinking about data? It’s hard to answer that question without context. Over the last five years, a huge amount of data has become available. It’s suddenly cheaper to keep data than it is to throw it away. It’s a very simple technical change that’s gotten us into a situation I don’t think anyone expected, where businesses and professionals now have access to a huge amount of data, but don’t necessarily yet have the tools or processes or organization to really make use of it optimally. So the way professionals today in 2013 should be thinking about data is, when you’re trying to make a decision where you think the data might be able to guide or inform the deci- sion you make, make sure you have access to and understand the data that’s available to you.

You are the co-organizer of DataGotham, an annual conference in New York City for data professionals. Where did the idea for the event come from? How has it evolved? I’ve run an informal, semi-private group of data practitioners in New York for about four years, where we meet up for beers every couple of months. I started doing that because when I started at Bitly, I was the only data person at my company and I was sort of lonely, so I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if other people in the same situ- ation could get together and talk with people who do the same sort of thing? Over the years, [atten- dance has] grown; it’s now over 300 people. We wanted to create an event with two goals, and the first goal is to help people who care about data in New York connect with each other, and lots of relationships and jobs have come out of that. The second goal was to make a point to the rest of the world that if you want to do or see this kind of interesting work with data, it’s here in New York.

What kinds of data do you collect about DataGotham attendees, and how do you use it? It’s funny you ask that question, because we’ve really just been getting the basics. We find out if attendees are local or not local, what company they work for, what they’re hoping to get out of [the event], and whether they’re hiring. We have a very large group of students attending and then a large group of companies who are looking to hire those students, so we want to make sure we connect them.

78 PCMA CONVENE OCTOBER 2013 PCMA.ORG