State data conference: in the struggle of opposites - search for unity
On 16 January, the annual conference of the State Data Agency (Statistics Lithuania) "Dialectics of State Data: Struggle of Opposites and Search for Unity" took place. The purpose of this year's conference is to share expectations and possible challenges of the state data lake with representatives from various data managing state authorities and institutions with the aim to demonstrate that specialists of the State Data Agency treat data responsibly.
Opening the event, Dr Jūratė Petrauskienė, Director General of the State Data Agency, started with archival material and a comparison of how the work of statisticians looked like in 1977. Today, the Agency, with major changes and more responsibilities than ever before, carries out significant development activities. "Our building is the same, but we have succeeded in coming a long way - being light years away over the past 50 years. And even our functions are no longer similar: we are becoming an analytical hub where all authorities can receive their own and other institutions' most detailed data for safe analysis with the most powerful analytical tools", the Director General shared her thoughts.
At the experimental conference, a dispute format was chosen to discuss data management, to which the participants were successively introduced by Associate Professor Vilius Bartninkas, PhD at Vilnius University, who briefly presented the theory of dialectics as a way to search for the truth between opposing positions. During the dispute, two teams of the Agency challenged each other - after being divided into two groups by lot, our specialists had to answer whether and why the opening of state data is more reminiscent of utopian visions of the future or, conversely, raises fears of turning into a dystopia.
Dispute was attended by Gita Literskė, Deputy Director General of the State Data Agency, Vadimas Ivanovas, Head of the State Data Governance Information System Division, Chief Programmer Jonas Bačelis, Programmer Eligijus Kaupas, Information Manager Gytis Straševičius, Computer Systems Consultant Vainius Indilas, Jana Vanagė, Advisor of the Methodology and Data Science Group, and Aidas Stoškus, Head of the Data Protection Division.
Participants of the teams were randomly distributed to demonstrate that every specialist in the Agency can see both the advantages and benefits of opening and centralizing data, as well as potential threats. In the dispute, a common position was agreed upon - decisions required for high-quality state management should be based on the best available and relevant data. Although data centralization poses certain risks, they are known and under control. Participants of the event were also asked which opinion they personally support - even 60 per cent agreed that the current direction of data management is more like a utopia. However, according to the rules of the event, the dystopia position won, as the number of its supporters, during the event, increased by 11 per cent.
A short video of the event can be seen here.
