Mapping & Analyzing Participation - Spring 2026 IVMOOC

Over the past few months I've shared work done in Fall 2025 by a team of #IVMOOC (Information Visualization) students from Indiana University. They are using history of the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago from May 1994 to May 2015 to build tools that anyone can use to understand engagement in events they organize and/or networks they have been building.   

In this post I'm introducing work done by the Spring 2026 IVMOOC team.

Below is the home page of the dashboard they developed.

Under the heading of "Mapping & Analyzing Participation" they wrote:  "Who shows up to build a community? Which organizations sustain engagement over years, and which sectors are consistently absent? This platform answers those questions using 6410 attendance records from 42 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences hosted by Daniel F. Bassill between 1994 and 2015.

Raw attendance sheets are transformed through a documented pipeline — normalization, network construction, and visualization — so findings can be reproduced, extended, and applied to future events. The methodology is explicit at every stage."

You can explore this at this link. 

Across the top of the page are tabs for "Methodology, Dashboard, Search, Network Maps, More".  

On the Methodology page they wrote: "This project documents a reproducible pipeline for transforming raw conference attendance records into analyzable social network data. Each of the four stages below is codified — the inputs, transformations, and outputs are explicit so the process can be repeated, extended, or adapted for future events."

The Analytics Dashboard is where you can explore the conference data.  I show two views from my own searching. The first looks at 1996 conference participation.  

The Fall 2025 data analysis did not organize the data by category, such as program, college, intermediary, etc.  The 2026 team has created 11 categories.  Thus you can explore by year and by category to better understand where there was strong participation and where it was weak.  The "blue" color represents people associated with volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs based in Chicago and other states. These were the majority at each conference.

The Network Maps page has three visualizations created using the data. Below I show a view created using Map 2 on the page.  

I entered "Lawyers" in the search bar at the upper left, and got a view showing the Lawyers Lend A Hand to Youth Program. When I hovered my cursor over their icon, I received a view showing other organizations who attended the same conferences.

At the bottom of the map are the categories you can search to learn more about participation.  Below is a view that I created by selecting the "college" category, then highlighting DePaul University.

If I had this tool when I was hosting the conferences I could have collected data on what workshops people attended, then mapped this to show more ways people connected with each other.

The "More" button at the far right in the top menu has four sections.  One shows "previous iterations". 

This says, "Before this platform, a student team (Team K) built NetworkMap: a web application for collecting participant data at live events and converting it into network-ready exports. That work established the core problem statement — how do you get from a conference sign-in sheet to a social network graph? — and demonstrated one viable answer. This platform picks up where it left off, extending the pipeline toward rigorous analysis and reproducible visualization."

The Kumu.io visualization created by the Fall 2025 team enabled you to search by year, then look at participation in the two conferences held that year. An example is shown at the left. 

The Spring 2026 team enabled a search by organization, and by category. I showed a couple of examples above.
 
This is what I've hoped for in the past as interns have worked with me.  By having new students learn from past work, they can build improvements into the analysis.   On-going iterations of the work create high quality data and educate more people to use the resource in their own networking efforts.  It's been my goal when I've posted articles like "Reaching out to Universities."

Another page under the "more" tab is the "Project Roadmap". 

This is a detailed review of what work has been done and what work still needs to be done by future IVMOOC teams.  In the "Data Cleaning" column is a recognition that work still needs to be done to clean the data so that organizations who registered under different spelling and/or grammar, don't show on the charts as different orgs. 

For instance, if you use the Organization Search page you can enter the name of your organization and see if it participated in one, or many, conferences.  I searched for "lawyers" and the "Lawyers Lend A Hand to Youth Program" showed up 18 times!  

Mapping & Analyzing Participation - Spring 2026 IVMOOC presentation.  Since this is a formal class project, the team was graded based on the presentation they created, which was shared via a ZOOM call last Monday.

Open this page and view the IVMOOC presentation.  Page 2 is shown below.

This says, "What Problem are We Solving?

 20+ years of conference attendance data exists but has never been fully analyzed in terms of reproducibility No system exists to visualize who participated, how often, or across which sectors. The data is the evidence base for Daniel's network-building work ." 

There is a LOT of information here.  Thank you to the students from Indiana University who worked on  it.  I hope many will take a look and then apply the ideas to their own work.

I have created a "Mapping Event Participation" page on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website.  Visitors can use this to learn about the work done by IVMOOC teams and to find resources they can use to apply this process to their own event management.

What's next.  I'll update this blog as I receive updated materials from the IVMOOC team.  Hopefully I'll be part of the Fall 2026 IVMOOC, or the one after that. There's still plenty of work to do.

Since 1993 interns helped me grow the site-based Cabrini Connections program and the Tutor/Mentor Connection.  In 2006 I asked Michael Tam, and intern from Hong Kong to create a blog to share what he was learning.  You can read his posts starting here.

I've used his blog since 2006 to show work done by other interns since then. My most recent post's headline is "Tipping Point - Role of Universities". 

The work being done by IVMOOC teams illustrates my goal of motivating people to spend time reviewing my blog and websites, reflecting on the work being done, then creating their own interpretations.  This expands the number of people thinking more deeply about ways to help youth and families living in areas of concentrated, segregated poverty and the role of organized, on-going, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs.  

Thus, as you look at the work done by the IVMOOC teams, think of ways you can help others build this event analysis process into their on-going efforts.  And think of ways students from many universities can be helping.  If you have the means, consider making a major gift to your local university to create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection, where there is a multi-decade stream of students looking at this work and building on what was done in previous years.    

I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter and/or Mastodon.  (see links here).

And, if you are able, please visit this page and make a contribution to help me pay the bills.