ETHOS’ Collaboration with New Student Organization GATEWAY
What if data could tell stories? And what if those stories have valuable meaning for your team and help you make better decisions? While many organizations are trying nowadays to deploy their data in order to have an objective account of their performance, generating useful information based on it, is a real challenge. At ETHOS we try to bridge this gap by creating maps and visualizations that encompass complex issues in a way that is easy to understand and easy to extract meaning out of.
For this we offer services that complete our teaching and research activities and we collaborate with other organizations in leveraging digital methods to improve their practices.
Our first established collaboration was initiated in March 2015 when GATEWAY, a new non-profit organization at the IT University of Copenhagen, were planning their weeklong launch.
For ETHOS, having our first official collaboration to be with GATEWAY was interesting as the organization share a vision similar to ours – the goal to link people and skills together across disciplines.
“Why GATEWAY? A gateway in telecommunications describes “a network node equipped for interfacing with another network that uses different communication protocols”. In that sense GATEWAY’s goal is to connect people at ITU that come from different cultures and have different academic backgrounds, but still share mutual interests.” – GATEWAY
When engaging in a collaboration with an organization, it is important for us to help answer questions that the organization can benefit from, but the questions that can be asked, or expected to be answered, also depends on the data available.
In the case of GATEWAY, we were fortunate to be part of the project during the early stages, meaning that we were able to influence which kind of data we should collect in order to create value.
During the initial meetings with GATEWAY we met up and discussed which kind of challenges they have as a newly started organization, and based on this we formulated some questions to be answered. It turned out that there was a gap between GATEWAY and their potential users in the sense that they needed to understand what kind of events their users were interested in. In short they needed demographic data to get insight into which segments of the student body they were working with and what wishes these students had.
The collaboration turned out to be very beneficial for both parties, and GATEWAY had this to say about the collaboration:
“We really liked the collaboration because instead of just collecting post-its with event ideas, we now have insightful maps of this data. These maps show what ITU students are interested in in correlation to what they study, which will be a great help for our organization when we decide which events to host.” – GATEWAY
Together, ETHOS assisted GATEWAY in the establishment of relevant questions, which led to generating data, which could be visualized, and help GATEWAY in their mission of helping people at ITU crossing silos and coming together.
To learn more about GATEWAY visit their website and give their Facebook page a like and if you are within ITU auspices, plan your next event in collaboration with them.
If you know an organization who could use our assistance, feel free to send an e-mail to ethos@itu.dk