For organizations working toward stronger data culture, what kinds of Love Data Week activities have helped connect people to the broader strategy (Especially in federated environments where data responsibilities are distributed)?

For larger stovepiped organizations, employees may not have opportunities to collaborate across silos, but as nearly all large lines of business have analytics capabilities/experts of some form, setting up a data-focused venue (e.g. internal conference) where each LoB's analytics teams can brief what they are doing with data and trumpet their accomplishments to others in the name of data literacy, and also attend common-interest data topic discussions can really connect people and drive engagement... every LoB uses data. Our annual "Data Summit" has grown from 25 people to over 900 organically, and I believe a main driver is a thirst / curiosity for what the other "data people" are doing.

you can use Hackathon or Makeathon days or week; where you drive teams to build MVPs for various data/ AI initiatives which can be on their backlogs or new features using open source / internal technologies/ toolsets which are required to be built by business but teams do not have an appetite to pick them in their delivery schedule due to BAU priorities. This way, you use few days to showcase willingness to deliver new features (even if they are not on backlog), with internal capacity. This way you can also get addiitonal change budget as business sees the value of the MVP product. A word of caution, this needs extensive planning, use case selection, technology driven research and finally what would you/ business agree to consider a minimum viable product (MVP).