Hello, internet. Long time no speak.

In a previous career, I used to enjoy writing & maintaining a blog. Often I wrote about gaming, science, and my opinions – I was even mildly well known in certain circles and I’m proud of what I did. Recently, I’ve been missing having a quiet hobby and started thinking about how much my old blog brought to my life. It helped me to be intellectually well-rounded and fulfilled. But I can’t go back to it now because I’ve changed a lot as a person and it might be inappropriate for me to maintain as a Civil Servant.

But I want to learn new stuff! I want to share those ideas! I want to help make my profession – analysis in Government – the best it can be for my own benefit and for everyone else’s. On top of that, I want to show off just how much stuff rattles around in my head – I’m one of those sad people who just loves the doing of analysis and wants to share that with the world.

I got to thinking – can I articulate the cool ideas in my head in a way that’s fun while maintaining a professional distance from my personal opinion? Well, I think so, and here I am – launching a website that’s all about learning and communicating tools, concepts & ideas which are useful for analysts in Government.

I think it’s important to lay out the guiding principles early on.

Sharing – I want everything I make to be easy to reuse in Government without limitation. All the substantive content I create will be open for reuse (see: Copyright) and I’ll limit myself to using mostly tools that are free or open source.

Analysis – while Data Science is exciting and new, the Analysis Function is the umbrella for analytics in Government and it covers everything from statistics to geography, so I won’t limit myself just to the trendy topics.

Learning – I want to try new things, and I want to do it visibly so that other people can learn from it. Sometimes, that will mean failing in public. So be it.

Propriety – being a Civil Servant doesn’t make it easy to be visible on the internet. On this page, we stick to subjects about analytics and the ways analysts in Government can be better. We don’t talk about unpublished information on individuals, Government policies, or private interactions between Civil Servants and their colleagues. We don’t comment on current or recent events. We don’t talk about current jobs and avoid doing anything that’s directly inspired by existing projects.

I’m really excited to start getting things going! Watch out for a few early posts in the coming week or two outlining what I’ve learned from setting up this website, and outlining the direction of my first major project.