About the Conference
Change is the only constant
or how to make statistics in a world that doesn’t recognize itself
The overall aim of the Nordic Statistical Meeting (NSM) is to bring statisticians and users of official statistics together to discuss best practices and innovations in the field of statistics - and specifically the challenges facing official statistics in the Nordic countries.
The role of official statistics is to provide relevant, independent and trustworthy statistics and data services to a wide range of different users about many different topics in the service of democracy, the economy and the well-being of citizens.
Against this background, consecutive Nordic Statistical Meetings have addressed user needs, new trends and future challenges for official statistics, shared experience and discussed solutions on many aspects related to the development, production, quality and delivery of official statistics. Often these challenges were related to ‘standing di-lemmas’ like accuracy vs. timeliness, detail vs. confidentiality, demands for new statis-tics vs. requirements for burden reduction, or how to improve quality and efficiency or strengthen innovation.
During the recent decade, new challenges were added: Declining public trust in public service media and the emergence of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ make the provision of trustworthy official statistics all the more important. During the same period of time, the world has gone from one major crisis to another: Effects of climate change, refugee flows, the Covid pandemic, Russia’s war against Ukraine, high infla-tion, increasing economic inequality, artificial intelligence and the impact of ‘tech giants’ in the media landscape. What is happening?
How does this affect our work and our ability to deliver on new information needs? How do we ensure comparability and retain the relevance of existing indicators? How do we identify and communicate the relevant signals and stable reference points among all the noise? And where are the new opportunities among all the problems?
In this context, which by some is described as the ‘acceleration society’, the Nordic NSIs are themselves in the midst of significant transformations: New micro data ser-vices to our users are becoming increasingly important; new types of input data sources are utilized; processes are automated; data and production systems move to the Cloud; AI is moving in; the new generation of statisticians are data scientists as much as they are economists or sociologists – and much of the work is done away from the office.
With this backdrop, the overall aim of the NSM2026 is to bring producers and users of official statistics together to discuss trends and innovations in the current mine field for statistics - and specifically challenges facing official statistics in the Nordics. In addition to plenary sessions with keynote speeches, the conference will consist of presentations and discussions of papers on more specific topics in four parallel themes:
