Around February last year, I was browsing Twitter when I found an amazing initiative backed by several people I look up to in the field, I signed up on the spot. That's how I entered the Data Visualization Society (DVS), a community intended to gather practitioners of the field, or just people with an interest in data, to discuss topics, learn new techniques and help each other grow.
I was not alone in those first couple of days. Hundreds of people eager to start a community around the topic joined and they kept joining. It's been almost a year and the DVS keeps growing and growing.
Since being founded, the DVS has received new members every day!
Daily members signups / Feb 20, 2019 - Feb 18, 2020
Source: Data Viz Society
Since then I’ve seen the Slack Channels get bigger and the initiaves more ambitious. And for good reason, most of the members of the DVS signed up on the first couple of months and since then the DVS has received at least 300 new members every month, with the exception of February 2020.
A year after launch, still moving forward!
Monthly members signups / Feb 20, 2019 - Feb 18, 2020
Source: Data Viz Society
A year after it’s inauguration, the DVS had 11,573 registred members on February 20th 2020 🥳 🥳
Thats a lot of people!
I started to wonder, how big is that number? Could that be a small town? What about a stadium? Also, while 11,573 members is a lot, is there room to grow? Is there an audience?
Let's find out...
This is the Data Visualization Society it had 11,573 members on Feb 18,2020. It's first anniversary
Let's see how it compares to other things
This is the estimated capacity of the Radio City Music Hall in NY. It seems the DVS can fill a relatively large venue with no issues
The DVS could even be a small country. Nauru, an island state in Micronesia has a very similar population.
So, we could start our own island state but, what's the limit? In order to see how much the DVS could grow I decided to look into Tableau Costumer Numbers, which, even though, it's a narrow representation of the people working today with data visualization, can give us a rough idea of how much more people the DVS can reach
With that in mind, let's compare! These is the number of costumer accounts using Tableau in 2017
Source: Data Viz Society, World Bank, Tableau Media Alert, Nat Geo
It seems the DVS still has a lot of room to grow and, as the article published earlier this year by the Nightingale stated, “2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream”. So I wouldn’t be surprised if 2021 brings more and more people to the field and the DVS.
Let's move on to the next topic then!
The DVS aims to be a worldwide initiative, let’s see how well is that goal represented. I obtained country data of each member using the provided lat and long and joined that to the World Bank data with information about income groups and world regions.
Source: Data Viz Society, World Bank.
Thank you for scrolling this far, I've really enjoyed the DVS and I hope it keeps growing. I want to see the different initiatives and possibilities a space like this can offer.
