Who are the tech people?

##Who are the ‘tech people’?

Tech people are not necessarily your IT staff. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be your IT staff, who are likely overworked and under-resourced as it is. Moreover, there is a distinct difference between a technologist who works with data and uses code to build tools and an IT expert whose wheelhouse is likely hardware and systems administration.

Like data people, tech people come from a variety of professional backgrounds that go beyond computer science. You should look for people who self-identify as developers, either front-end (the stuff users see), back-end (the stuff that makes the stuff users see function), or full-stack (the unicorns who do it all). User experience and visual designers are often tech people. The same is true for digital cartographers, multimedia producers, and of course, data scientists.

Tech people may also not have backgrounds in policy, statistics, or data, and that is okay. As with data people, the key factor is interest -- everything else can be learned.

There can be a fair amount of overlap between data and tech people, but someone who would self-identify as a ‘data person’ probably approaches a given project from a different angle than someone who calls herself a ‘tech person.’