June 18-20th was the DD4D Conference, Data Designed for Decisions. InformationAesthetics was there, and has posted a review of the conference on their site.
The overarching question raised by most speakers was how to go from data and information to decisions and actions with a focus on both traditional and emerging deciders such as politicians and executives and also citizens and consumers. To address the challenge of making sense of large data quantities, several speakers discussed the potential of storytelling for communicating complex issues as well as the power of numbers in the form of social indicators and benchmarks. There were too many interesting talks/sessions to write about here, so below you will find our personal (of course highly subjective) best-of list.
