Catch all of the talks from MDS Fest 2.0 HERE

The story of MDS Fest

The core value of MDS Fest is to amplify voices in the data community and encourage data practitioners (ranging from first-time speakers to seasoned vets) to come together and share their stories.

Now in its second year, MDS Fest 2.0 will return from April 8 - 12, 2024 with an impressive roster of speakers sourced from the data community for five days of talks and workshops. You can relive all of last year’s talks here.

This year, attendees will be able to register for talks relating to five tracks that were sourced from the community: data-driven organizations, scale and complexity, data quality, data discovery and literacy, and career growth and skills development.

What to expect from MDS Fest 2.0

This year, MDS Fest will again be hosting over 50 speakers who will be sharing their ideas through talks, and peer exchange sessions. Check out the full speaker lineup on our website here.

Talks and peer exchange sessions are focused on one of five different tracks:

1. Data-driven organizations

Leveraging data to optimize your product, marketing, finance, and operations is table stakes in today's world. Data teams help enable highly targeted marketing, personalization aligned to customer preferences, identification of product-market fit, and a reduction in the risk of investing in unsuccessful products. Hear how real data teams are strategizing and levelling up their practices, and have the chance to ask your questions as well.

2. Scale and complexity

The modern data stack has matured, and we’re now facing the issues that come from a surge in data volume and complexity: spaghetti DAGs, increasing number of dependencies, resourcing infrastructure maintenance, and rapidly growing costs of running infrastructure that often outpaces the value being delivered. Speakers will showcase how they’ve deployed scalable solutions that resulted in cost and operational efficiencies to maintain positive ROI.

3. Data quality

Untrustworthy data wastes your data team's limited resources and creates risk for the business. Most data quality solutions focus on alerting data teams to quality issues after something has gone wrong, but proactively identifying issues before they even happen can help data teams move more quickly and drive more trust with stakeholders. Speakers will showcase how they’ve optimized data quality for their business-critical pipelines.

4. Data discovery and literacy

"Self-serve analytics" and "data democratization" get a lot of attention across discussions of the modern data stack, but to be successful, these require data access and literacy across the organization. Speakers will showcase how they have improved data literacy and adoption of data products across their organization.

5. Career growth and skill development

With an ever-changing toolbox and skillset to learn, data professionals must remain at the top of their game to ride this wave, and advancing in your career as a data practitioner can feel as clear as mud. Speakers will share skills, advice, strategies, or best practices to position for success in a data career path.

Peer exchange sessions

Interested in a more interactive setting? This year, we’re introducing peer exchange sessions to encourage engagement and interaction between attendees and speakers. Peer exchanges are an opportunity to come together as a group and deep-dive into an important topic in data. These sessions offer the opportunity for deeper engagement using breakout rooms, and finish off by coming back together as a group to share insights and learnings from discussions.

How to access MDS Fest

MDS Fest 2.0 is taking place virtually from April 8 - 12, so you can access the live sessions anywhere in the world.

Register for tickets at mdsfest.com, and take a look at the schedule on our website to start building your personal festival experience.

With 50+ speakers bringing their expertise, there’s a session for everyone at MDS Fest, so we suggest taking some time to review each session’s offerings.

Our goal is to make the expertise of our speakers as accessible as possible, which is why access to MDS Fest is free. Share the conference with a friend, colleague or peer who is interested in the data space or joining the data community. This is an invaluable opportunity to connect with the community, data professionals, and like-minded professionals in the space.

See more about our other tracks and speakers in articles on our blog:

• Elevate your data career: the ultimate guide to career growth and skill development
• Celebrating the Voices of Women in Data: A Spotlight on MDS Fest 2024
• The expert playbook to building a data-driven organization