Swivel goes to Washington

Last week was a very exciting week for Swivel. On Wednesday I showed Swivel at a panel "The Story Behind the Numbers: New Tools for Presenting Data," part of a publishing conference in Washington DC organized by The World Bank. I'm grateful to Eric Swanson of The World Bank for giving me the opportunity to present there. But that was just the beginning. In the short two days in DC, I met with several teams at The World Bank (thanks again to Eric Swanson), the IMF, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and a small non-profit KEIonline.org. I had statisticians, economists, and computer systems people in these meetings, and while many of them had questions and concerns about topics such as data accuracy and caveats of data interpretation, overall they were open to the idea of putting data out for public debate and making it useful in the way Swivel is trying to do. Well, maybe "open to the idea" is a slight understatement: I got a hearty round of applause from a room of 40 people or so at the World Bank at the end of my presentation. One of the teams affiliated with The World Bank, AiDA, is already uploading data into Swivel as an Official Source. There will be more to come. Meeting these groups, showing Swivel, and listening to their comments and questions gave me a huge boost of enthusiasm that I tried to covey to the team back home, and at the same time highlighted all the many things we need to improve and problems we need to solve at Swivel. So, back to making Swivel better.