If you are interested in Big Data you might want to keep your calendar open in late April for some interesting meetups. Every day starting with Monday April 23 will have at least one meeting going on in cities around the world on various Big Data topics including data science, data visualization and specific software development tool-related user groups around data-related businesses. There are activities scheduled in New York and San Francisco as well as Sydney Australia and London. And they have a cool logo, too.
The London events look the most organized so far, in keeping with that it is Europe’s largest community of professionals exploring commercial big data opportunities, at least according to the site organizers. There will be the “first ever” Data Science Hackathon that will cover 24 hours starting on Saturday morning April 28. Unlike other marathon coding sessions, it promises to have better food than the standard Jolt-plus-pizza that you find at others. (Ironic that the Brits actually are advertising their food!) Another London event will be a Hadoop Day on Wednesday April 25. And if you are in London you will have a chance to spend some time with our favorite Big Data geek Hilary Mason from Bit.ly.
She told me: “It’s great to see people come together around the data theme! Most data scientists are the only person in their organization who thinks about data from that perspective, and so Big Data week will be a great opportunity for them to meet their peers and learn new things.” She makes a very good point: sometimes it is nice to network with peers in person, and these events would be a great way to do that and break out of your IRC chat shell and into some quality f2f time. If you can stand doing so.
The BigDataWeek website is somewhat spare and sketchy at this point but it looks like the various events could be a lot of fun and certainly something to check out if you are near one of the venues and interested in learning more about the topics.