Makeover Monday 2019

2018 is not quite finished and the real ‘end point’ to the year will come in this week’s recap. It is, however, time to announce where Makeover Monday is heading in 2019, what’s changing, what’s new and what you can expect from us and the project.

Why are we changing things?

As Makeover Monday continues to grow in size and global reach, we always look for ways to optimize our processes, reduce complexity and to use the right tools that help us do more. Our mission is to help improve the way we visualize and analyze data – one chart at a time. To achieve this we want to focus on coaching, feedback and support and in turn reduce the administrative effort required to run the project.

At the beginning of 2018 we introduced a number of changes and over the course of the year realized that not all of them worked out the way we intended. So we’re looking to tweak things a little bit more.

What we want to ensure is that every change we make makes us better able to coach and guide the community. The focus for us in 2019 will be to:

• Continue providing feedback as much as possible;
• Create content to teach key concepts and best practices;
• Open our platform to #dataviz experts and outstanding community members to share their knowledge and skills with our global community;
• Help to connect participants through our online channels as well as Live events where possible, and
• To bring Makeover Monday to the Enterprise through our workshop offering.

The next few paragraphs will give you some details on what we’re changing to make #MakeoverMonday an even better project so you can get more content, more lessons, more connections, more practice and more fun out of it.

What will change:

• Viz Review will return to Twitter. If you want feedback on your viz in the webinar, then add the hashtag #MMVizReview when you first post your viz for review. Please note that the hashtag shouldn’t be used for general feedback requests but be dedicated for those people who are using the webinar to get our feedback.
• Discussions are already largely happening on Twitter, because data.world features simply don’t allow for threaded conversations. Twitter also gives people a chance to have their work seen in the wider community. We will stop the discussions on data.world (you can still post if you like but we won’t monitor them) and simply use data.world as a data repository for hosting our datasets.

These blog posts are very time consuming to write, taking 2-3 hours each week by the time the challenges are identified, lessons are written, examples are created and favorites are picked.

We also noticed by analyzing our website data that the blog posts get very little traffic and based on the mistakes made immediately in the following week, we have concluded that writing these recaps is not the best use of our time.

What will change:

• We will create content related to different technical lessons and have this content available and indexed on our website. This will take some time and will happen in the coming days and weeks.
• The weekly blog post will continue to highlight outstanding visualizations and feature these favorites which are also part of our gallery.
• We will not write lessons learned anymore. Our book covers most of the best practices and tips and the upcoming online content will give you a summary of best practices relating to many topics, including colors, aggregations, layout, storytelling and others.

What will change:

• We will update the community page with a dashboard that shows participation across the project.
• We will track participation (see next section).

The information you provide will be a massive help for us when it comes to the weekly favorite selection as well, because it will save us A LOT of time researching hyperlinks to people’s Twitter profile, interactive vizzes, etc. Thank you for that :-).

What will change:

• When you submit a viz, you will do so via a short google form, asking for a link to your viz, your name and Twitter handle. This data will be used to drive our Makeover Monday dashboard (stay tuned for this – we need your data first 🙂 ).
• You do NOT need to post anything on data.world.
• You will be able to see your submission and everyone else’s in our dashboard. We’re excited to see the numbers grow every week – and not just the number of vizzes but also the number of authors.

For 2019, we are also planning a number of webinars with experts from across the community. Having guest speakers present their own topics will bring further variety, diversity and will just mix things up a little bit.

We started in December with two Fanalytics webinars and the first two parts of our ‘Stats for Dataviz’ series with Anna Foard. We will continue with more statistics in January and have an exciting line up for the first few weeks and months of the new year.

What will change:

• 2019 will bring further content via webinars, with a focus on shorter and more frequent sessions related to topics around data in general, but also data visualization, data analysis, careers in the industry, events, etc.
• We encourage you to always provide feedback on the webinars you watch. Whether it’s as little as a star rating or a short comment, we’d love to hear from you, how you found it and what else you’d fnd useful.
• We will invite more guest speakers on our channel.

And here is the tl;dr for you

Where will you find the Makeover Monday data in 2019?: On data.world

How will you submit your viz?

1. Go to www.makeovermonday.co.uk/submit
2. Fill in the google form
3. Hit ‘submit’
4. Tweet about it, using #MakeoverMonday, a link to your viz and an image
5. Optional: include #MMVizReview in your tweet if your want feedback during the Viz Review webinar

Where can you find the week’s favorites?: On our blog

How can you learn more?: Tune into our webinars

We look forward to a fantastic, dataviz-filled 2019 with all of you!

Eva & Andy