Page 71 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS179 Per Nymand-Andersen
terms into non-technical language. We are competing for attention and
people seem to spend less and less time on each topic, with the associated
challenges for explaining complex phenomena in our society.
Figure 4: The statistical concept of digital visualisation – a multidisciplinary
collaboration between statisticians, designers and communications specialists

Source: interactivethings.com

4. Conclusion
Producers of official statistics need to embrace digital and social media
opportunities, as well as interacting and sharing communication concepts,
methods and tools with other statistical organisations, also making them free
for reuse. This is important as we are all engaged, both at national and
international level, in making official statistics known, used and trusted – and
crowding out the increasing volume of low-quality statistics and data.
Statisticians have an underutilised competitive advantage, as we already
possess significant statistical knowledge and knowhow which can be adapted
and shared with minimal effort. We have the benefit of international
methodologies (standards), structured production facilities, similar data
models, coding systems and data exchanges.
The challenge for the statistical community is to proactively extract
relevant statistics and visualise these in order to explain and compare the
structure and dynamics of our society in context, and also in a way that can be
swiftly understood and reused in digital form by professional users as well as
the general public.
The impact of sentiment-based policymaking and the price that citizens
will pay for it greatly exceed the costs of official statistics to embrace the digital
opportunities and build up a proactive user-centric statistical communication
and publication strategy. But who else will safeguard official statistics?

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