World Visualization Day

This is an attempt to refine some first ideas, and to flesh them out a bit more. I also want to add some numners so that we have some measurable goals to go by. Of course all this is just preliminary and up for discussion. Please add your thoughts below.

 

Planned Activities

The main thing of course is to get activities off the ground. A reasonable goal for the first year seems to be to have activities in at least five cities in the US, two in Canada, and five in Europe. Reaching those numbers would be a great first step, and anything above would be amazing.

Activities will be documented with photos and possibly videos. We will need the documentation to show the world that there is interest, and to garner more support for this activity.

In addition to our own documentation, we want to get media involved, of course. The goal would be to have at least some coverage in a local newspaper for each city, and hopefully one or two tv reports.

 

I hope to get an official endorsement or even support from the vgtc, the visualization and graphics technical committee, which is the organization that sponsors the Vis/InfoVis/VAST conference. Your attendance of the BOF meeting at the Vis conference will be an important part of making the case for supporting this effort to the committee.

In addition, there is of course more financial and other support we need. I hope to get some support from the makers of popular visualization software, as well as perhaps some large companies with an interest in visualization. Obviously, I don't want to throw around names here, but if you have contacts or ideas who to talk to, do let me know!

 

Timeline

Finally, how do we go from an idea and a few people who think it's worthwhile to visualization ruling the world? The obvious first step is to discuss matters in more depth at Vis. A realistic time frame for the actual day is probably not before May, probably later. We need to prepare materials, find volunteers, find suitable venues, alert the media, etc. All that takes time, and we also have other things to do. But by starting with realistic first goals, I think we can get this endeavor off the ground and not only sustain it over the years, but slowly and steadily expand it.