Making places: The Accessibility and Data Dossier

It matters in life to feel like you’re part of something. And communities come and go, they rise and fall and move and change over time. But we have this incredible power to just create community whenever we can.

But we can’t just find spaces and hope something happens. A “place” is a space with meaning. We bring that meaning. It’s up to us to turn spaces into places.

2.5 Places: Thinking of a new kind of community

Third places have been declining in recent years, perhaps because of social media, or perhaps also for many other socio-cultural reasons. First and second places are for home and work. But third places give us a sense of belonging and community. They are often the real lifeblood of neighborhoods, towns, communities, hobbies, passion projects, grassroots political action, and mutual aid. We need third places, especially because they have, for thousands of years, helped humanity feel a sense of belonging. The epidemic of loneliness that has exploded in recent years has also been made even worse thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We need something else.

Smart people are thinking about urban planning that focuses on third places, designing digital third places, and retro-fitting traditional third places (churches, libraries, plazas) into new kinds of third places. I don’t think I’m really qualified to speak to the problems and challenges of building third places.

So I’m going to propose the idea of a “Second and a Half” place: a professionally-centered community that focuses on building a sense of belonging, where we can come together just because of our shared niche of expertise. Second and a half places shouldn’t focus on work in any top-down sense, but just focus on facilitating a place for like-minded people to come together. What we need are these places to come together. A second and a half place doesn’t require that anything gets done, it just helps us connect, talk, and share what we’re passionate about without any sort of external pressures. It’s a free space for ideas.

But to pull off a second and a half place, it takes intentionality. We can easily turn these spaces into work or another job or worse, some kind of forum or help-desk for other people to come and interact with “the experts.” Balancing inclusion and identity can be difficult. These spaces and places are fragile.

Experiments with community discussion spaces

I do work at the intersection of data visualization and accessibility and there really aren’t too many other people out there who also specialize in this kind of work. I’m pretty sensitive to feeling like I don’t have a place to belong, so over the years I’ve tried to keep track of the other people who I can learn from, connect to, chat with, and so on.

And thanks to a lot of magic (largely Amy Cesal and Melanie Mazanec making connections on Twitter, if memory serves) back in 2020 or so, we first came together as a group and called ourselves the DatavizA11y group.

We started meeting virtually with a strong intention to keep our group small enough for open, forward-thinking discussion. Discussion in this way was the whole point, because we wanted to feel free enough to really conjure up ideas and visions. And yes, projects happened. Chartability really came to life because of that group. Many of the members offered key feedback (during our meetings and out of them) in those early days. But we didn’t come together intending to force anything to happen. It was about letting ideas incubate.

Other collabs happened on the side between various folks, but what I think most fondly on from that time was just the fact that so many outstanding people came together in the same space on a somewhat regular basis. It really was neat.

We did have to “screen” new folks every now and then, which was just brutally hard. We wanted to make sure that folks in the group had some existing expertise first. Open discussions and topical groups, like you might find in the #topic-accessibility channel of the Data Visualization Society slack are awesome for building community - but these aren’t the same as second and a half places. And second and a half places shouldn’t operate the same way that these open spaces do, either. Most of the discussion in that slack is similar to a help desk, kicked off by a problem or challenge someone is facing and people going back and forth to help each other out. Obviously, a problem area like accessibility and visualization needs a community space like that. But we wanted our DatavizA11y group to work differently. We wanted something just a little more intentional, future-focused, and tight-knit.

The birth of my “Accessibility + Data Dossier” (A.D.D.)

Thanks to the DatavizA11y group, we put together the first-ever list of who’s who and what are they up to in our relatively popular Visualization and Accessibility Resources document. I put this together and have updated it (about once per year, although it is overdue at the time of writing this). Folks have also helped to keep this up to date over the years.

But on the side, I’ve kept documents and lists of folks and their projects. This might seem weird or absurd to do, but as a person who is neurodivergent (and terrible at remembering people and names), it’s important to me to be intentional and keep track. I have a pretty devastating, chronic rejection sensitive dysphoria. And part of that is why I work so hard to make sure other people know that they are known, have their work recognized, and feel like they belong.

(fun fact) In my personal docs, I recently named this list the “Accessibility and Data Dossier” since the acronym ADD is funny for the similarity to ADHD as well as the fact that “add” is a solid verb related to math/data stuff.

After the DatavizA11y group, I have now tried to assemble (or participate in) groups like these, specific to data, visualization, and accessibility. I reckon that I will make a tradition out of this too, since it has been happening more often lately.

Now I qualify our second and a half places more as moments or periods of time where stars seem to have aligned (or really, that we aligned the stars ourselves). Here’s a short list, with the most recent being yesterday (3.13.2025) at CSUN in Anaheim.

(2020) Original ADD: DatavizAlly group

(2023) CHI Data + Accessibility Anarcho-lunch, Hamburg, Germany

I don’t have a solid list of people who actually attended this (largely because it was so impromptu and certainly against the rules). But we ordered some pizzas, had to steal some cutlery, and ate lunch inside the conference venue at a little nook overlooking the main foyer.

I remember Jonathan Zong (who, to put it lightly, is the person I look up to the most in terms of research at our intersection), John Thompson, Leona Holloway, Matthew Butler, Ibrahim Al Hazwani, Keke Wu, Laura South, Katrin Angerbauer, Ria Khan, Lilian de Greef, Dominik Moritz, and about 25 people being at that lunch (or CHI itself, if not at the lunch).

(2023) IEEE VIS and Melbourne, Australia

Unfortunately, I had some short-term memory loss during this time (for about a year or so). I know we did things here in Melbourne, but I don’t remember many of the details at all. I know Keke, Sandra, Arran, Leona, Lucas, Pramod, Dominik, and Kim were all there. I can’t remember if we did a bigger get-together or not? I spoke about Data Navigator here and gave a “Lemonstration” (which I still sorely regret not getting a video recording of!).

I had a great lunch with:

And a second (although not accessibility-focused) with:

And a whole bunch of lovely meals and activities (stand up, penguins, etc) with:

Meeting Larene for the first time was really awesome. We’d spent plenty of time chatting and discussing things over the years (and even gave a talk together at outlier with Sarah). But Australia is a whole world away! I feel like getting the chance for our paths to cross was pretty magical. I’m deeply thankful to have been able to meet Larene, who is the most-isolated member of the DatavizA11y group! Thanks to the original formation of our group, I now consider Larene a wonderful, wonderful friend. She was a more-than-generous host, showed Lucas and me a great time, and finally helped give Lucas someone music-savvy to talk to (thanks to Damian!).

(Unrelated, but we also had a magical meal made in a chef’s condo overlooking the bay, thanks to Lucas’s impressive network of friends. This included meeting Fanni Melles and our eventual podcast episode together. Lucas and I also ate some really good meals and had some of the best coffee in the world here. Melbourne was an outstanding trip.)

(2024) IEEE VIS’s AccessViz Workshop

I was an assistant organizer for the first-ever Workshop on Accessible Visualization at IEEE VIS in 2024. We were remote (thanks, hurricanes!) but had a great time. The spirit of an academic workshop is very similar to the spirit of a second and a half place, so I thought I’d mention this here too. The one (major) limitation of an academic workshop is that it primarily only attracts academics. But that being said, the spirit of this absolutely fits the bill.

The organizer list (plus keynote speaker):

I gave the second “keynote” which was a short state-of-the-art talk. It was a blast. You can check out our whole workshop on youtube, too.

(2024) ASSETS Lunch, St. John’s, Newfoundland

I threw together an impromptu lunch at ASSETS in 2024, which was also the subject of my blog post on belonging in academia.

In attendance (my memory isn’t too great - I may have forgotten some!):

I can’t seem to remember whether Ather Sharif made it to the lunch or not, but either way - I managed to chat with him!

(2025) CSUN, Accessibility + Data Lunch of Legends, Anaheim, CA

Our latest get-together was a lunch at CSUN and I couldn’t believe how many people made it out.

Around the start of the week (this week) at CSUN, I called all around to restaurants within a close walking distance, “do you have any reservations open for lunch this Thursday? How many seats can I get?”

This was the single-biggest gathering we have ever had! In fact, it was such a large assembly that we couldn’t invite everyone (our reservation only had 14 slots). 14 was the biggest number I could get and I regret not being able to do more. Perhaps with a group of our size, ordering pizzas and finding an open-but-hidden area (like we did at CHI) would have made things more inclusive.

So first I wanted to give a huge shout out to the folks who were at CSUN but couldn’t make it to our A.D.D. lunch (due to the invitation waitlist or not being able to attend) but absolutely belong at our table:

Cynthia Bennett, Google
Léonie Watson, Tetralogical
Hannah Williams, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Tim Kluthe, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Elle Waters, Workday
MJ Jawili, Adobe
Sam Boot, BBC
Simon Varey, Fizz Studio
Josh Fennell, Fizz Studio
Nasif Zaman, The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
Kate Glazko, University of Washington
Nikki Kuhn, Sca11ywag

Attendees at our lunch:

(me)
Doug Schepers, Fizz Studio
Andreas Stefik, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Øystein Moseng, Highsoft
Marita Vindedal, Highsoft
Brianna Wimer, University of Notre Dame
Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington
Venkatesh Potluri, University of Michigan
Sile o’Modhrain, University of Michigan
Chancey Fleet, New York Public Library
Marco Salsiccia, Intuit
Taliesin Smith, CU Boulder
Volker Sorge, Helix Opportunity and University of Birmingham
Ted Gies, Elsevier
(bonus guest!) Brandon Biggs, XR Navigation and The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute

The lunch was stupendous. I heard plenty of laughter across the table as discussions, ideas, and excitement bounced back and forth across everyone. This was really quite a dream come true.

At CSUN it was also a special treat to finally meet Léonie, Doug, and Ted in person for the first time. Doug (especially) was wild to finally meet since we have spent hours and hours chatting about all kinds of things over the years (accessibility, politics, standards, visualization, video games, dungeons and dragons, business, and bullshit). I consider him to be a good mentor and friend, so that made the week by itself. When I first saw him in the hallway I told him it felt like an “out of body experience” to which he responded, “well Frank, it’s actually an in-body experience!” A perfect response from Doug, in his signature style of wit. What an immaculate person.

Continuing to explore making Second and a Half places for folks like us

We are all like bridges in a way, between different spaces and places in our lives. And depending on what those spaces are (visualization, data, accessibility, testing, design, engineering, academic research, product research, software, hardware, and more), we may really feel like we don’t belong at times. But these second and a half places I hope to continue curating can be a place-between-spaces for folks to find others, be found, and find themselves.

So far the approach that seems to work well is: bring people together who have existing and similar expertise, create a space for ideas and connections to flow freely, and remind everyone explicitly that they are invited and belong to be there. (In particular, the folks who couldn’t make it to the CSUN lunch: I hope they know that I would have invited them if we had room on the reservation but our list was simply too long!)

Looking forward to next time. Cheers to you all and don’t be afraid to assemble your own spaces into places, too. Even when folks can’t make it, being invited is still a good reminder that you’re thinking of them.