Strategic Data Project Convening 2019

What do you do when your organization’s data is sequestered in a third-party vendor’s system? This question is the heart of our panel of the nation’s leading organizations that are working to improve data interoperability, integration, and privacy from the organizations that are leading the way in this space. From developing data interoperability standards to grassroots organizing of LEAs and SEAs, you’ll learn how Project Unicorn, the Ed-Fi Alliance, and IMS Global Learning Consortium leverage their strength in numbers to move the market to an ecosystem of interoperability. You’ll also get to hear what the world’s largest cloud computing provider (Amazon Web Services) is doing to address interoperability and integration issues and can learn about the implications of FERPA and COPPA on data interoperability, integration, and privacy analysis from the Future of Privacy Forum. Our panel illustrates the existing strength in numbers that these organization’s wield and provides you with an opportunity to learn new strategies for managing vendors, gaining access to your data, and helping your vendors move out of the age of carrier pigeons and papyrus and into a world where data flows effortlessly through APIs. Most importantly, we want you to leave our session equipped with new strategies that you can use to get data flowing back into your organization from the third party tools you use.

SDP Fellows have transformed their agencies’ abilities to leverage data for high-quality insights and actionable next steps. From curriculum and instruction to teacher preparation and college-career readiness, fellows have helped shape policy by providing tools that drive key decision making. But given that the number of fellows in an agency is limited, much of this work must be prioritized based on capacity. In other words, a small group of fellows within an agency can uncover deep, custom insights for a small number of stakeholders, but not for all of them simultaneously. Yet transforming an organization’s data culture requires participants to be actively engaged at multiple points. So how does one transfer the ability of a few analysts uncovering key insights to a broader swathe of the organization, which may not have an advanced level of technical skill, in service of a culture that relies on data and insights?

Toolkits allow us to harness the power of a few and transfer it more broadly without training every person on staff to be an analyst. Similar to a Blue Apron dinner kit, this session will walk participants through an in-depth step-by-step approach to scaling micro solutions to large-scale toolkits capable of servicing a large number of stakeholders without direct supervision from the product designers. The session will cover the 6 stages to designing a tool kit and help participants determine where and where not to leverage products for potential toolkit scalability.

Please bring your laptop to this participatory session.