Who are they? What do they want to achieve? Is there a need for such a platform? What does it mean to be "data-driven"? Is it even feasible for Curaçao?


Curacao Data Driven DataWiki

Who we are

We are a group of data ninjas (analytics professionals) that during office hours help our clients or employers introduce or optimize the process of extracting insights out of raw data. Yes, we're getting paid to do cool stuff. And after office hours we all contribute through different non-profit organisations to help build a better community. As we all are passionate about data and helping the community, it was easy for each of us to accept the invitation from Ronald Lieuw-Sjong to explore the possibility to create a platform that promotes the adoption of a culture that acts on data. After all, we have already seen the benefits that this brings to our clients and employers, so why not contribute with our grain of sand to introduce this at a larger scale.

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We are Curaçao Data Driven, a non-profit platform for creating awareness and sharing knowledge to create a culture that uses data to make better decisions.

What we want to achieve

We believe that a key aspect to improve society and business is for people to adopt the culture of fact-based decision making. And we think that we can achieve this by first of all creating a safe platform, where practitioners and other interested parties can come together to learn, share their experiences and by way of collaborating, help others adopt this culture. After careful consideration and much thought, we came up with the following key components that will help us achieve our goal:

We've classified our target audience as follows; Government, Students, Businesses and the Tech Community. We believe in achieving goals together, not alone. Therefore we formed strong partnerships with Central Bureau of Statistics Curaçao, Bureau Telecommunicatie en Post, Curaçao Tech Meetups, the Dutch Caribbean PASS community and will jointly continue our journey.

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Awareness session held on February 26th, 2019 at Curaçao Innovation and Technology Institute (CITI)

Forty professionals attended the event which included presentations from founding member Heinrich Angela and the guest speaker Dennis E. A. Arrindell from Social Insurance Bank (SVB).

The topics of Angela’s presentation were Vision to be Data Driven, What is Curaçao Data Driven and What’s next for CDD.

Arrindell mentioned that the SVB have a great amount of data related to health, which is gathered on the SVB platform.

In August of 2019 we had our informal get together where we did a survey amongst those present to understand better what their needs are so we can cater to that.

Another successful event with great responses was held in November of 2019 with presentations by founding member Durvin de Lannoy and guest speakers Neil Stabler from Maduro & Curiel's Bank N.V. (MCB) who talked about Data Governance. Another guest speaker was Miles Mercera from Curaçao Hospitality & Tourism Association (CHATA) who talked about how CHATA uses data to keep the industry informed.

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Awareness session held on November 21st, 2019 at ACOYA Curaçao

We've also organized training to learn the basics of dealing with data and turning this into insights. In the future we plan to give product training also to further empower the people so they can achieve more during this journey of becoming data driven.

But in addition to the above, we think that a Data Wiki will help our target audience to have access to publicly available structured data via a central storage, so they can enhance their current data sets. The Data Wiki is a free an open knowledge base that can be read and edited by our members.

The need for such a platform

"Data driven" is on everyone's lips these days. A lot of organisations are considering to invest in this area, but do not have an endless budget to pay the experts to guide them through this journey. This doesn't mean that they do not need to start at all. Our platform will share the knowledge and experience during our different sessions, for each participant to go back with takeaways that can be used to identify steps they can take their selves. You also prevent allot of headaches if pitfalls and bottlenecks experienced by a few are shared with others. We also want to protect our members of aggressive vendors that will haunt and harass you to buy whatever they're selling.