Why we started Syria Data Science
- Community
There was no plan for an organisation. In early 2025 two of us wrote a short post asking whether anyone else in Syria was working with data and wanted to talk about it. We expected a handful of replies from people we half knew.
What actually happened
Within days there were hundreds. Analysts inside the country, engineers who had left, students who had taught themselves SQL from tutorials with no one to ask when they got stuck. More than five hundred people asked to join.
The number mattered less than what it implied: this many people had been doing this work alone, and none of them knew about each other.
What we learned from the replies
Three things came up again and again:
- People wanted practice, not more theory. They had watched the courses.
- People wanted someone to ask. Not a mentor programme — just a person who had hit the same wall before.
- People wanted work that connected to here. Examples built on other countries' data did not transfer cleanly.
The goal was not scale. It was connection.
That shaped what the community became: meetups, workshops, and open discussion, rather than a curriculum.
Where this goes
We are still small, and deliberately so. The useful thing about a community this size is that you can still get a real answer from a real person. As it grows, keeping that is the work.
If you are reading this and have been working on data by yourself — that is the whole reason this exists.