CSV Conf 2014 - for Data Makers Everywhere

MAY 5, 2014

Announcing CSV,Conf - the conference for data makers everywhere which takes place on 15 July 2014 in Berlin.

This one day conference will focus on practical, real-world stories, examples and techniques of how to scrape, wrangle, analyze, and visualize data. Whether your data is big or small, tabular or spatial, graphs or rows this event is for you.

Key Info

CSV,Conf is run in conjunction with the week long Open Knowledge Festival.

What Is It About?

Building Community

We want to bring together data makers/doers/hackers from backgrounds like science, journalism, open government and the wider software industry to share tools and stories.

For those who love data

CSV Conf is a non-profit community conference run by some folks who really love data and sharing knowledge. If you are as passionate about data and the application it has to society then you should join us!

Big and small

This isn’t a conference just about spreadsheets. We are curating content about advancing the art of data collaboration, from putting your CSV on GitHub to producing meaningful insight by running large scale distributed processing.

Colophon: Why CSV?

This conference isn’t just about CSV data. But we chose to call it CSV Conf because we think CSV embodies certain important qualities that set the tone for the event:

  • Simplicity: CSV is incredibly simple - perhaps the simplest structured data format there is
  • Openness: the CSV ‘standard’ is well-known and open - free for anyone to use
  • Easy to use: CSV is widely supported - practically every spreadsheet program, relational database and programming language in existence can handle CSV in some form or other
  • Hackable: CSV is text-based and therefore amenable to manipulation and access from a wide range of standard tools (including revision control systems such as git, mercurial and subversion)
  • Big or small: CSV files can range from under a kilobyte to gigabytes and its line-oriented structure mean it can be incrementally processed – you do not need to read an entire file to extract a single row.

More informally:

CSV is the data Kalashnikov: not pretty, but many [data] wars have been fought with it and even kids can use it. @pudo (Friedrich Lindenberg)

CSV is the ultimate simple, standard data format - streamable, text-based, no need for proprietary tools etc @rufuspollock (Rufus Pollock)

[The above is adapted from the “Why CSV” section of the Tabular Data Package specification]