Data Days CLE 2026 (Conference Day)

Your organization runs on data — it's how you know what's working and how you make the case to sustain and grow your programs. But most teams hit a wall after a spreadsheet or two: sources multiply, staying current becomes a chore, and trusting the numbers gets harder just as complexity increases.
The good news: you don't need a big budget or an IT department to fix this. Using free and open-source tools — DuckDB, dbt, and the spreadsheets you already trust — you can build a real data warehouse that runs on your own laptop.
Drawing on 13 years experience in the non profit sector, and first hand experience building data warehouses, this talk walks through what's achievable in 2026: centralizing scattered data, encoding your team's institutional knowledge into clean and tested data, and freeing up time to actually ask the questions you've never had time for. Live demos will show these ideas in action — mapping civic open data with DuckDB, Leaflet, and H3, running real SQL queries, and automating it all with GitHub Actions.
If you've ever wished your data could do more than sit in a spreadsheet, this session will show you exactly how to get started — no procurement request required.

This interactive workshop will guide participants through the process of identifying current shortfalls in policy within the current political landscape of the United States. Through a series of guided short systems science activities, participants will gain insights on emergent challenges facing governmental systems by understanding how mental models align with expectations of democracy. Participants will come away from this workshop understanding how group model building can be used to understand different epistemologies, which in turn influences how knowledge is obtained and applied to real world problems.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Health will share steps taken to increase organizational and community partner capacity to understand and advance the brain health of Cuyahoga County residents. Learn how the agency developed internal expertise, identified community needs and strengths, and increased access to local data on brain health through the development of various data products including a dashboard, fact sheets, and social media to support health equity and data-driven decision making.

The presentors will lead the sesion particpants through an empathy mapping process with the focus on a Data Day's paraticipant as the central user.  User will experience the technique of empathy mapping while developing a deeper understanding of the collective experience of being a data days attendee.  Presentors will share the results of the empathy mapping with Data Day oganizers.