Last week I found two visualizations that really excited me. They were created using Kumu.io software.
The first was this presentation, showing the 2023 Women's World Cup teams and players, created by Morgan Wills. I show one of the views below.
Morgan writes, "This visualization allows for an interactive exploration of players in the FIFA 2023 Women's World Cup. Who were the top ranked? Who was in what position on what squad? What is the distribution of ages? Who were the strongest passers, and can we see that according to position? The buttons on the map of players allow you to explore all these things and more for all players in the 2023 World Cup!"
The second presentation, created by Deniz Cem Önduygu, explores the History of Western Philosophy. He wrote in this explanation, "I concluded that there should be a global and systematic way to see all the agreement (similarity, expansion) and disagreement (contrast, refutation) relationships between philosophers and their ideas."
Deniz had been collecting this information for more than 10 years before he discovered Kumu.io as a way to share it.
Open both presentations and explore the way information is shared. These are powerful examples of tools like Kumu.io.
For a long time I've been troubled by one thought. How do I connect the people I know, and have interacted with often over the past 30 years, with each other?
I was introduced to social network analysis tools in the late 2000s through the work of Valdis Krebs. He spoke at our Tutor/Mentor conference in 2009 and then donated his Org.net software. In 2010 he did a workshop for three interns who had volunteered to help me. This Ning group was set up to support their work. This blog was one outcome. It shows participation in the 2009-10 Tutor/Mentor Conferences and is an example of what I hoped would be done on an on-going basis.
In 2011 I did some network analysis work myself, using tools that looked at my LinkedIn and Facebook groups. This presentation shows maps created in that process, like the one above that shows my Facebook network. Connecting people across these clusters with each other has been my goal for a long time.
So I've had a long commitment to network analysis as a way to help people understand who was in my network and help them connect with each other. But I've never had the money to hire anyone to do this work consistently and I've not had the time to learn and do it myself.
That does not mean I've not used concept maps for a long time to visualize information I've been collecting and sharing. Below is a map of my library. It's one of many concept maps that I've created using cMapTools that you can view on this page.
So how do I motivate some visual scientists to spend time converting my concept maps to interactive formats like Kumu, then recording them on YouTube so more people see and use them?
Maybe this is a possibility.
As I looked at the many posts about athletes supporting mentoring, and the NFL Honors videos showing athletes supporting many different efforts in their communities, I wondered if anyone had tried to create a web library, and/or concept map, building lists of athletes/celebrities from every sport, focused on specific issues.
I wrote, "Why collect this? To learn from each other and improve work being done.
This should be a no-brainer for sports professionals. Coaches are constantly learning from each other. They have libraries of film that they study to spur innovation and constant improvement."
What if a major donor put up the money to establish a Tutor/Mentor Connection study program at one or more universities, where students learned to do this type of visualization work and the on-going communication needed to motivate more people to view the information and use it.
And, I invite you to visit this page and help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.
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2 comments:
Hello Daniel, thank you so much for featuring my Kumu project! I am so with you on seeing the power in visualizing libraries and networks interactively, and craving the time and money to build out so many ideas around mapping social systems. It's interesting b/c a lot of people in this space are systems thinkers, and I've noticed a strong shift away from cause/effect A to B kind of work, and I struggle to imagine what that would look like in terms of any sort of shift in the social sector to further embrace network and systems visualizations. It's a lot about being honest about where a system is at and what one's leverage can be, but I'm usually so busy making maps that I am ironically not feeling as in touch with the system I'm interested in understanding! In my work with Network Impact, we help nonprofit networks around thematic areas understand their networks, but at the end of the day, the visualization is much more a tool for discussion and understanding than it is the end all/be all. Unless it's a natural affinity, people don't seem to fall in love with network maps as much as they do seeing their place in them. And the platform/visualization itself isn't something they seem to come back to regularly once they've learned what they need to. I think you'd really like what SocialRoot and Christina Bowen are doing!
Hi Morgan. Thanks again for the work you do, and thanks for leaving a comment here. I just learned about Social Root a couple of weeks ago.
I often say to people, "if you look at articles on my blog you'll see systems thinking, network building, network analysis, mapping as topics. These are all inter-related in the "what are all the things we need to know and do to help more kids in high poverty areas get the extra, on-going support, needed to move through school and into adult lives?"
The problem is, there are too many articles and few people with the time to dig through them.
That's where systems mapping, like you and others are doing, can help. They can show people and ideas and how they are inter-connected. They can help guide people through vast libraries.
However, they are only tools. That process needs to be part of larger, on-going efforts that get people involved, keep them involved, and generate resources needed in thousands of places.
I look forward to continuing conversation with you here and on LinkedIn.
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