Keynote: Simon Willson - Datasette and Dogsheep: Liberating your personal data
Channel: csvconf
Date: 2021-05-20

Datasette is an open source web application for exploring, analyzing and publishing data. I originally designed it to support data journalists working in newsrooms, but quickly realized that it has applications way beyond journalism. I decided to start digging into my own personal data - the data that sites and services collect about and for me, which thanks to regulations like Europe's GDPR is increasingly available for me to export myself. This led to Dogsheep, a collection of tools for importing personal data from Twitter, GitHub, 23AndMe, Foursquare, Google, HealthKit and more. Being able to export your data isn't much good if you can't easily do interesting things with it. I'll show how the combination of Datasette and Dogsheep can help liberate your personal data, and discuss the lessons I've learned about personal data and open source along the way.