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Communities

Data science community

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• Last updated: over 1 year ago

Page contents:

• Who the community is for
• Get involved
• Community events
• Training courses
• Areas of special interest
• Community resources

The data science community exists to:

• bring together data scientists and improve data science capability across government
• develop and share data science best practice
• help digital and other analytical teams work effectively with data scientists
• discuss and challenge the way government uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve services

Who the community is for

You might be interested in this community if your work involves:

• making sure decisions are based on evidence
• presenting insights in an understandable way to both technical and non-technical audiences
• building credible statistical models from data and using best coding practices to generate reproducible work
• commissioning data science projects
• working with policy and operations to understand where data science can improve services for users
• exploring new data science technology, tools and algorithms
• deciding how to deploy data science at scale

Get involved

You can use the following online spaces to discuss data science related issues:

• the cross-government data science Slack - you’ll need a government email address to access this channel
• the UK Government Data Science GitHub - this is where to find repositories for code related to data science in government

Community events

The Government Data Science Partnership (GDSP) brings together public servants to share their knowledge about data science.

The partnership runs meetups every 2 to 3 months. They’re open to anyone in government with an interest in data science and often include speakers from across government, academia and industry.

The meetups are hosted in different places around the country.

There’s also an annual cross-government data science conference. The next one is planned for late 2019.

To sign up for either of these events, you can:

• sign up to attend via the mailing list
• join the #community_of_interest Slack channel

Training courses

The Data Science Accelerator is a programme to help analysts and aspiring data scientists from across the public sector develop their data science skills. Participants propose and work on a data science project for 3 months under the guidance of a mentor.

The GDS Academy also runs relevant courses including:

• the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course
• the Foundation Programme and the Service Owner Programme, both of which include introductory analytics training

You might also find some of the courses run by the Government Statistical Service or the Data Science Campus useful.

Areas of special interest

If you’re particularly interested in text analytics and natural language processing, you can join the #nlp channel in the cross-government data science Slack. You could also join the text analytics mailing list.

If you’re interested in reproducible analytical pipelines (RAP), which is a method for automating the production of statistical publications, you can:

• visit the RAP website
• see the Government Statistical Service’s page about RAP champions
• join the #rap-collaboration channel on the cross-government data science Slack

Community resources

Use these resources to learn more about data science in government:

• data scientist role requirements - explains the skills you’ll need to be a data scientist in government
• data in government blog - discusses the tools and techniques that GDS uses for data analysis and data science
• Data Ethics Framework - guide the design of appropriate data use in government and the wider public sector

• Last update: 26 June 2019

  Guidance first published