As y’all may recall, last year I was lucky enough to spens some time working with the fine folks at Locally Optimistic to produce and run some AMA content for them – they ended up being more similar to traditional interviews, but folks seemed to enjoy them!

You can find those all here!

These were well received, and generated a TON of insight for folks working in the data and analytics space – but I had a few things I wanted to try doing a little differently:

• They could be more discoverable: it was tough to know which guests talked about what, they were about an hour long so it was a big bite of content if there was only one thing the viewer was interested in – even with YouTube’s search function it’s likely folks were leaving before the parts they were interested in arrived.
• They needed a little more social support: I tweeted about each one, but probably different parts and points of the conversation could have warranted its own outreach.
• The live format, where we’d schedule them and invite members of the community to join, and then post afterward, was a bit tough to schedule, and we never really got the community engagement during the calls that we had hoped for.

So, I’m putting together some videos that hopefully are a step in the right direction – I’ll chat with similar folks, luminaries in the data and analytics space, and then publish the entire conversation, but also smaller chunks (ideally one per topic) which can be posted separately so that folks who are only interested in, say, data career ladders, can easily find and watch only that piece.

I still absolutely have a lot to learn – both about being a data professional as well as producing and sharing video content! – but, I’m giving it a try! I’m also hoping to use this energy to help carry me into blogging more, once more – but that’s a perennial hope, isn’t it?

With no further ado, here is the first full-length conversation, with my friends Stephen and Emilie – I think you’re going to like it!

• General