SAP TechEd d-code Viz-a-thon, What Happened in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas ?
On Tues 21/10 at SAP TechEd d-code Las Vegas there was an evening community session supporting Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Even after a long day at TechEd over 50 people came along to assist MSF gaining insight from their internal datasets using SAP Lumira.
Megan McGuire, eHealth Unit Coordinator at MSF, kicked off the evening sharing information about MSF and how they help people worldwide where the need is greatest, delivering emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care.
The attendees were split up into mixed ability groups each with a “Lumira Expert” from SAP to support them. The great thing about these group was the diversity of age, general technical experience and SAP Lumira expertise. The task set to each team was to draw insights from datasets provided by MSF to research into the factors that can affect to staff retention and other issues. Teams were given 1 ½ hours to dig into the datasets and build stories to share. After about 2 hours each team was given an opportunity to share their insights with the wider attendees, and interestingly the stories uncovered in the data provided were different in each team.
My team went to “Hit it out of the park” doing some advanced things but failed (yep myself and Greg Myers) only to be saved by Chris Kernaghan who just plugged away creating great interactive data visualisations. What’s great here is that Chris was a complete beginner using Lumira before the evening and picked it up so well in the 1 ½ hours we eventually came 2nd in the light hearted competition.
What impressed me most was how the attendees many of whom had ZERO experience of SAP Lumira before the evening started easily drawing out insights from the data using SAP Lumira to help the great cause Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières At the end of the evening Megan McGuire took away all the visualisation and storyboards in Lumia to take back and share with her colleagues to assist and inspire them
Credit where credit is due, thanks goes out to Marilyn Pratt for organising the evening, Sue Keohan for the tireless fundraising efforts, and all the SAP Lumira team for staying on to support the attendees.
Check out the blog by Marilyn Pratt titled I Care, I Gave, I Inspired and enter into a Mission on SCN
Thank you Andrew for your participation and your summary of the event. Special props to Nic Smith for sponsoring this and to Eamon Ida who really organized the event flow and made everything work so seamlessly.
An interview with some of the student participants and with Greg Myers and Eamon Ida can be found here:[embed width="548" height="308"]https://events.sap.com/teched/en/embed.aspx?sid=13629[/embed]
Hi Andrew, and thanks for the blog.
I'm no Lumira expert - and I don't even play one on TV - but I was really impressed with the variety of visualizations that the teams put together.
Hope Megan McGuire got some valuable insights to take back, the #datageeks keep playing with MSF data, and our University Alliance people can ignite even more students with the head start they got with Lumira.
I think Megan was impressed. Throughout the judging, she was snapping pics of all the visualizations.
Great work by the #datageeks #dataviz team. #dataviz is comming
Oh, and Megan McGuire's session (which was a prelude to the #dataviz #datageeks challenge) can be viewed here Doctors without Borders: Going Digital | SAP TechEd && d-code - Important stuff.
Hello!
Great Blog Andrew!! It was great to read about your experience during this challenge!! Our group as well wanted to "hit it out of the park" but with the time limit and lack of experience we had to settle for less than we had imagined. It was inspiring for all of us to come together and help out this great organization!!
Cheers,
Megan Laughlin