Big thank you to all of those who made the Datafest possible!

We had a great time at the Datafest at Stanford this past weekend. The event produced valuable insights into what kind of things can be done in computational reporting. There were ten teams working on different projects and their members were incredibly enthusiastic. Team Awesome, Team Gophers, Team Z, Team KeyStoners, Team Donkey vs Elephant$, Team G8tor, Team Black Cobra, Team Most Excellent, Team Frienemies and Team Eagle… thank you all for being so wonderful!

We appreciate your willingness to forego the leisure and spend the weekend working hard. You generously contributed your skills and expertise. That helped us better understand the opportunities that lie in data. The value of your effort will definitely extend beyond this weekend. And some projects show the potential that can be easily realized with some additional work.

The Datafest proved a fun and valuable experience. My heartfelt thanks to all the participants for making it happen.

I would also like to thank the following:

Our sponsors for their contribution: O’Reilly Media, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, The Sunlight Foundation, Sony, Revolution Analytics and MongoDB. My special thanks to good people at Google: Kathryn Hurley, Sree Balakrishnan, Greg D’Alesandre and Jeff Dean. They provided generous support, despite the short notice. I especially appreciate Kathryn’s help during the event.

Our partners for their involvement: The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism, OpenSecrets, MapLight, Code the Change, Visual.ly, Institute of Design at Stanford and Institute for the Future.

Ann Grimes, Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism director, for helping us recruit volunteers for the Datafest and for her great introductory remarks.

Jim Bettinger, John S. Knight Fellowships’ director, for delivering the awards.

My colleagues and the staff at the Knight Fellowship for their presence and help at the Datafest: Jorge Imbaquingo, Consuelo Aguirre, Kit Miller, Claudia Nuñez, Tomoko A. Hosaka, Martyn Williams, Liz McClure, T. Christian Miller, Girma Fantaye, Robin Evans, Djordje Padejski, Michelle Holmes and Masood Farivar.

Former Knight Fellow, friend and media strategist Gabriel Sama.

Patricia Carbajales, Geospatial Manager, Branner Library, Stanford, for her help before, during and after the Datafest.

Our volunteers: Sharanya Shankar, Eric Johnson and Georgia Wells.

Paulina Froemel, our hard working and talented web designer.

I’m particularly indebted to Dan Sinker, of the Knight-Mozilla Open News, Ethan Phelps-Goodman, senior software developer from The Sunlight Foundation and Pam Maples, innovation director at the Knight Fellowships. Their involvement and support from early on made the Datafest possible.

I am also especially grateful to Tim O’Reilly, Bernd Girod, director of The Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford, and Kelly Yilmaz, at Stanford’s Engineering School, who helped generously at critical moments of organizing the event.

I also greatly benefited from the expertise and wisdom of Andrew Ng, Stanford´s Artificial Intelligence Lab director; Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics; Adam Bonica, assistant professor of Political Science at Stanford and Sam King, director of Code the Change.

Many thanks to John Mollenkopf, CUNY’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science, for spending the weekend helping Datafest’s participants, and to Jeff Ubois, of the MacArthur Foundation, for traveling from Chicago to the event.

Our judges deserve a special note. They were the ones who had to make the difficult choices:

Monica Rogati, Senior Data Scientist at LinkedIn
Anita Lillie, Data Visualization Designer at LinkedIn
Ethan Phelps-Goodman, Senior Software Developer at The Sunlight Foundation
Gauthier Vasseur, Vice President, Business Intelligence and Performance Management at TriNet
T. Christian Miller, Senior Investigative Reporter, ProPublica. 2012 Stanford Knight Fellow
Martyn Williams, Senior Correspondent at IDG News Services. 2012 Stanford Knight Fellow

Congratulations to the winners: Team Frienemies, Team Most Excellent, Team Gophers and Team Keystoners and to the teams that did not win a prize. You all did an amazing job. You were all winners at the Datafest.

Thank you all for a wonderful weekend!