# Tableau Conference-ish | Opening Keynote Livestream Watchalong 2020

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2020-10-07
- **Format:** Video · 2551 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Industry trends, Community
- **Tools:** Tableau
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-conference-ish-opening-keynote-livestream-watchalong-2020
- **Watch:** https://youtu.be/PqQ_vkbK0E4

Ravi and I ran a live watchalong of the Tableau Conference 2020 opening keynote, since this year's event went fully virtual. We chatted over the stream, shared our plans for brain dates and sessions, and reacted to Adam Selipski's keynote covering COVID, racial justice data and the Salesforce integration.

## Key takeaways

- Brain dates work better when you pick people by topic rather than fanboying, and come ready to offer something so it's a two-way exchange rather than one-sided knowledge transfer.
- When facilitating a group brain date, use the open 'horseshoe' approach to draw quieter participants in rather than steamrolling the conversation.
- Tableau's COVID-19 Data Hub combined and cleaned public data sources, spawning over 30,000 community visualisations and informing decisions at organisations like UNICEF, Deloitte and Lockheed Martin.
- Tableau committed $12 million to a racial justice data initiative with PolicyLink and the Urban Institute, building a hub to help disaggregate and contextualise equity data.
- McKinsey estimated five years of digital adoption happened in eight weeks during early COVID, reinforcing that every digital transformation is also a data transformation.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Pre-show setup and OBS tinkering
- 6:59 Conference plans and brain dates
- 10:20 Advice for brain date newbies
- 14:59 Keynote begins with Adam Selipski
- 19:52 New York City COVID data story
- 26:09 The COVID-19 Data Hub
- 28:19 Racial justice data initiative
- 36:08 Economic impact and adaptability
- 42:37 Salesforce integration and PwC
- 50:01 Break and field reporters

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/tableau-conference-ish-opening-keynote-livestream-watchalong-2020

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena