Open Data Is Not Enough: Creating Reusable Census Data Infrastructure

🎉 Event Announcement: UNILORIN R Users Group Meetup Series
📌 Event Theme: Open Data Is Not Enough: Creating Reusable Census Data Infrastructure
📅 Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2026
⏰ Time: 5 PM WAT
📍 Venue: YouTube Live

Join us for another insightful session in the UNILORIN R Users Group Meetup Series.

Open data has become a cornerstone of transparency, research, and evidence-based policymaking. However, making data publicly available is only the first step. Researchers and practitioners often face significant challenges when working with historical datasets scattered across reports, spreadsheets, and other formats.

In this talk, Andrea Gómez Vargas will share lessons learned from developing arcenso, an open-source R project that transforms decades of Argentine census data into reusable and reproducible resources for research and public policy. Using this experience as a case study, the session will explore the gap between publishing data and creating data infrastructure that is truly accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

The talk will cover practical challenges, design decisions, and the role of open-source communities in improving access to official statistics, offering insights relevant to anyone working with public data, research infrastructure, or evidence-based policy.