KIND network update
Week beginning Mon 16th September 2024
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our regular KIND network update. The big theme for coming week is the return of some of our social activities that have been taking a summer break. We’re starting to build up a set of community meetup topics for the Autumn on the Teams channel, and I’m delighted to say that SCODAS meetings will be back in their usual 1-2pm Tuesday slot.
We’ll also be pausing our one-off training sessions for the next couple of weeks to allow some space for preparatory work. If you’re a Tableau expert, please consider coming to a shakedown/feedback session for our new Tableau for beginners course which will be running 3-4ish on Thursday 22nd. It’s vital that we keep training resources aligned with the needs of the community, so your feedback is essential to our work.
Hope to see you at something soon - and save the 11th December for the KIND unconference
Brendan
Wins of The Week
In the spirit of #IAmRemarkable, we do a weekly wins of the week thread to celebrate the professional (and personal) achievements of the community. A random selection from last week:
- Producing a series of reports for the first time using script I’ve been developing in R Markdown. Something that use to take over day to do, copying and pasting from Excel to Word, and still be littered with errors, now just takes around 2 hours and is accurate after some simple checks.
- Helped out a lot of people (and remained patient with them)!
- stuck head over parapet to make a point and felt better for doing it
- I proved I am worthy of my promotion
Events
The Scottish Community of Data Analysts is a community of practice for those working with data in territorial NHS Boards. Next week, the meeting will be 13.00-14.00 Tue 17th September 2024. Lukasz Henszel - Infectious diseases notification exceedance detection (surveillance/ signals for potential outbreaks).
KIND Unconference 2024
Save the date - 11th December 2024 - an opportunity to share and celebrate your hard work. Fully online, free and open to all, and plans afoot on the Teams channel.
Book of the week
David Graeber. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
ISBN 9781612195186, Worldcat.
This is a fun and thought-provoking set of essays about bureacracy. It starts with a mystery: why, if people hate bureaucracy, is there so much of it?. A recurring theme in many KIND events that we spend lots of time managing forms and paperwork, rather than doing more important work. And so we might be reassured that it’s not just us, that ‘all of us end up finding increasing percentages of our day taken up in the filling out of forms.’ The most interesting parts of this book though are not about just moaning about the quantity of paperwork that we face, but instead point out exactly why all that paperwork might really be something to worry about. As the author notes, endless box ticking seems to prevent useful communication and other human interactions. Or, more cuttingly: ‘Bureaucratic procedures…make even the smartest people act like idiots’. That point then leads into a balancing act. As the title might suggest, some rules seem to constrain or prevent us doing useful things, while some rules seem to do the opposite (say, by insisting that we can’t discriminate based on appearance). So there’s a balancing act between different kinds of rules, that shows up as a long-running back and forth between different ways of ruling, that the author traces across times and places. That range of cases, and pleasure in talking about paperwork, is a substantial contributor to the great charm of the book..