Recently at the December virtual KCTUG meetup, I presented on how to get involved with the Tableau community. You can watch the video above; this is the accompanying blog post with a little more detail, some examples and clickable links to take you where you need to go to learn more.
You can click through this accordion sections below to explore and dig deeper in several open and frequent challenges and initiatives to take your skills to the next level
What can be said about MakeoverMonday that hasn’t been said already… A project that started in 2016 by Tableau Zen Master Hall of Famer, Andy Kriebel and Tableau Technical Evangelist, Andy Cotgreave focuses on righting the wrongs of bad dataviz on the internet. The project has been running ever since; now led by Zen Master Eva Murray and Charlie Hutcheson. The premise is simple. Each week, they present an ineffective chart found on the internet AND the underlying data. Your job is to take the data and make the chart better or tell a different story. This easily, the most popular project in the community with nearly 10k entries in 2020 alone.
Click here to see the backlog and here to see how the process works so that you can get involved right now!
Workout Wednesday is a weekly challenge to re-create a data-driven visualization. The challenges are designed to kick-start personal development in Tableau and Power BI.
Each Wednesday a challenges are released and participants are asked to replicate the challenge that is posed as closely as possible.
When you think you have it, leave a comment with a link to your visualization, share on Tableau Public, or post on Twitter for others to enjoy.
Sports Viz Sunday kicked off in January 2018 when three sports enthusiasts, brought together by the Tableau community, agreed to work together to share, create & promote visualizations from the world of sport. Participate in one of the monthly challenges. They try to make these relevant to a sporting occasion being hosted that particular month. Download the dataset, create a viz & share it with the community for feedback!
#ProjectHealthViz grew out of a need Lindsay Betzendahl saw in the Tableau Community. Healthcare is a huge topic around the world as costs of healthcare rise and various illness continue to see increased prevalence rates. Everyone is impacted by health. Health is part of being a living being. Therefore, she’s believe we all can be impacted by healthcare data and thus it can be interesting data to visualize.
Additionally, it’s important for her to create a community of Tableau users in the healthcare field. She’s appreciated in the past other community members who have shared their work-related dashboards. This project is also an effort to create a resource for Tableau users in healthcare to seek out each other and share visualizations.
One of the newest community projects, Real World Fake Data. With it’s DNA clearly drawn from MakeoverMonday, RWFD hopes to scratch an itch for business-ready dashboards to act as examples to the datafam community.
The datasets will cover a myriad of industries and departments, 12 in all. The first dataset will be posted on the 15th of November and will continue on the 15th and the end of the month… just like a paycheck.
The goal of the project it to build upon the amazing portfolio of Tableau Public vizzes, but with specific industries in mind to provide inspiration to those seeking a spark for their internal business developments.
Focusing on the elements and concepts of the popular book of the same name, author Cole Knaflic created a community of challenges, exercises and discussion for users to grow their skills of data visualization
Iron Quest is a monthly community-led data visualization project which follows a similar format to the Tableau Iron Viz feeder competitions. Participants have a calendar month to source a suitable data set and then design, build and submit a data visualization. Every submission should use a data set that somehow touches upon the chosen theme for that month and every viz should aim to showcase best practices & skill in design, storytelling & analysis.
- A nonprofit launches a data visualization project and provides details (e.g., datasets, needs, goals). Viz for Social Good volunteers receive an email notification about the new project.
- Volunteers join virtual or in-person hackathon to design visualizations for the nonprofit and use the hashtag #VizforSocialGood on Twitter to submit their visualizations.
- The organization receive 10 to 80 visualizations from the volunteers and can pick one or more visualizations to feature on its communication channels (e.g., website, social media, publication, newsletter).
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) were created and adopted by all UN Member States in 2015 as part of a 15-year plan to end poverty, protect the planet, and improve the lives and prospects of all persons. Although there has been incredible progress over the last 5 years, the speed and scale is not enough to meet those goals by 2030.
The SDGVizProject will be leveraging data from the World Health Organization to build data visualizations focusing on one of the 17 goals. We will also be sharing this data with the community, so you can join us on our SDG journey.
#Viz2educate focuses on creating a high-quality bank of educational resources for teachers worldwide. Teachers will have free access to dig into subject-related visualizations. The challenge will be to create visualizations on a specific topic which is part of the global education syllabus. & focus on a different subject which will be announced on the website at the start of the month. We will be sharing our creations with the #datafam and the wider teaching community.
The Data Visualization Society fosters a community where every member benefits from resources that support growth, refinement, and expansion of data visualization knowledge regardless of expertise level.
But don’t forget about the DATA!!!!
In conjunction with the Alteryx Community, the Alteryx Academy puts on weekly challenges help users to grow their skills in the Alteryx product while also preparing users to certification exams. If you are looking to learn a new tool, this is the challenge for you
PreppinData is a weekly challenge to help you learn to prepare data and use Tableau Prep
A weekly data project aimed at the R ecosystem. As this project was borne out of the R4DS Online Learning Community and the R for Data Science textbook, an emphasis was placed on understanding how to summarize and arrange data to make meaningful charts with ggplot2, tidyr, dplyr, and other tools in the tidyverse ecosystem. However, any code-based methodology is welcome – just please remember to share the code used to generate the results.
This list will certainly grow
This is a living, breathing document. As new projects start, I will be sure to add to this.
If you know of any that you want to added to this list. Please leave a comment below and I’ll get it added!