Mapping Black History with Kumu

I've posted many examples of visualizing information and ideas using tools like Kumu.io.  Here's another.

Visit this article on LinkedIn and you'll find links to many Kumu.io maps that focus on Black History and Black History Month.

I've added this information to the Black History section of my library.  

I'd love to find students/volunteers who would create Kumu.io maps showing content in each section of the Tutor/Mentor Library.  Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, BlueSky or Twitter to discuss.

If you receive a tax refund, can you split it three ways?  1) to fund Democratic candidates and/or open news sources; 2) to fund volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs; 3) to help fund the work I'm doing.

Mapping Complex Systems - The Epstein Network

I've posted many articles with examples of mapping networks.  Here's another example.  This should be of interest to many.

I'm reading an article titled, "The "Epstein Files" and the anatomy of hidden social networks: How secrecy reshapes structure and why its analysis is conditional on data."   It includes this graphic, which is a map of 25,232 documents downloaded from the Epstein Files.

I won't even try to summarize what this interactive map is showing and how it's featured in this "Complexity Thoughts" article.  I strongly encourage you to read it for yourself,  then open the map and explore it.  

What this demonstrates is the wide range of data that can be organized and communicated via tools like Kumu, Gephi, NodeXL and others.

What's more, without "sense making", as demonstrated by this article, the size of the database will actually work against creating shared understanding or commitment to agreed-upon paths to solutions.

I'll look forward to learning more.

Planning a conference? Building a network?

Last week I posted an article on Substack.com titled, "Start Planning for Fall 2026 Tutor/Mentor Programs". 

You can view the article here. In it I showed a few slides from a planning calendar that I developed in the late 70s, which helped me grow the tutor/mentor programs I led from 1975 to 2011.  The annual January celebration of mentoring should boost the planning process so that existing programs improve from year-to-year and new programs form where more are needed.  I'd love to find visual essays from other programs that describe their planning cycle.

I started connecting with leaders of other Chicago youth programs in the mid 1970s and that led to the formation of the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993.  One strategy led to the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences which we held in Chicago every six months from May 1994 to May 2015. These were part of the public awareness strategy we launched and an effort to draw leaders and supporters of Chicago area volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs together to share ideas and build relationships. 

A few years ago I created the concept map shown below, as a guide others could use in organizing their own conferences.

At the far right I've added a section focused on collecting data to help event organizers understand who attended, who they connected with, and "who's missing".  This points to the event mapping resource created in late 2025 by a team of IVMOOC students from Indiana University.  

In a previous article I showed the front page of an "Open Source Network Mapping" app created by the team. click here to open

If you open the "learn" tab at the top of the home page  you'll find some really clear information about how to design forms that collect network data effectively and how to turn this into visualizations on Kumu, Gephi or Tableau.  I show a few of the pages below.  Click on an image to enlarge it. 

Getting Started: What This Tool Does

Scroll down on the Getting Started page and you'll see "The Complete Workflow"

Continue scrolling down to descriptions of "External Visualization Software" such as Kumu and Gephi.  

Continue to scroll down and you'll see brief descriptions of "Key Concepts" and "Why Use Network Graphs?"

Next, open the Form Creation Guide tab - click here

Scroll down and you'll see "Every Network Form Needs These 3 Sections"

Next is a section showing "Form Design by Experience Level --  Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced".

Continue to scroll down to "After You Create Your Form". 

Perhaps before you create your form you want to learn more about "Nodes and Edges".  click here and open the page shown below.

The next section shows how to export your data to Kumu or Gephi. click here

The next sections describes some "Real-World Use Cases". click here

Some examples of Kumu Network Visualizations are shown - click here

Another example is the visualization of Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference participants from 1994 to 2015.  I've shared a few examples of this in previous articles, such as this one.

I've also pointed to many other examples of using Kumu and/or NodeXL.  This concept map points to a few of them.  Follow Kumu on LinkedIn and you'll see examples that they post every week.

I hope you'll agree with me that the work done by the IVMOOC team is excellent, and valuable.

Share this article with anyone who is creating events intended to bring people together on an on-going basis, to stimulate learning, reinforce work already being done, and innovate new solutions where they are needed.  Every city in the world should have a group doing what the Tutor/Mentor Connection has been doing since 1993.  This network mapping tool event planning process can become a valuable asset.

Please connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, BlueSky, Twitter, Instagram and/or Mastodon (see links here) and share how you're using these ideas, and work you're already doing.  

If you'd like to connect on ZOOM or another platform to learn more about this resource or any of the ideas I share on this blog, just reach out to me.  

Finally, if you value what I'm sharing, please visit this page and make a contribution to help Fund the work. 

Learn to use concept maps

Over the past few years I've provided a growing number of examples of how concept maps can be used to share information and to help people connect with each other.  I keep finding these on my LinkedIn feed.

Below is one that shows information about "main disciplines, foundations, tools, influences, and products" of a single ecosystem." It's called The Concept Art Map. click here to open

On the "about" page they wrote

"The Concept Art Map started from the struggle of trying to understand the concept art industry just by scrolling walls of text, posts, and random portfolio links. I never felt like I could see the bigger picture or where my own niche actually sat inside it.

So I decided to build a visual version of that picture. As an artist, seeing the whole system visually is the best way to understand how everything connects and how different roles, skills, and tools relate to each other.

I also believe the way we learn is shifting toward more interconnected, systematic presentation of information rather than static, isolated pieces of data and this map is my attempt to reflect that."

This pretty well summarizes my own reasons for creating concept maps.  I point to blogs and websites hosted by other people because most of the time they communicate an idea better than I do. 

I use my concept maps to help people navigate my library. Below is one example, which is showing the four sections of the Tutor/Mentor library. click here

If you compare the two maps you'll see that both are sharing information from a vast library, but in different ways. 

The first was built using Kumu.io.  In other articles I've shown how most Kumu maps are interactive, meaning you can move the nodes around.  And, you can turn layers of information on and off.  In the Concept Map Art map you can zoom in to more easily read the information in each node cluster.  You can also click on different nodes and see more clearly how that node is connected to others.  You can click on a node and get a side bar with descriptive information, often including a website address or social media link.

My map was built using cMapTools.  These don't have the interactive features that Kumu.io has, but at the bottom of each node are small boxes.  One includes links to external websites and the other has links to additional, related, concept maps.  Thus, while a KUMU map might show a vast ecosystem on one screen, the cMapTools map shows layers of information, as you move from one map to another. This section of the Tutor/Mentor library points to other visualization tools that you might use to do this work. 

One feature that I liked about the Concept Art Map was the "how to" page which you can open by clicking on the top right menu bar.

I'm just showing the first view of the "how to" page. You can actually scroll down through several sections that describe how to use the information they have collected.

In the "about" page the creator wrote,

Right now this is v1 of The Concept Art Map. It already covers the main disciplines, foundations, tools, influences, and products, but there are more features I’d like to add if there’s enough interest, things like a "personal niche" views and deeper paths for career development and artist networking.

If you’ve got thoughts, questions, or ideas for where this could go, feel free to get in touch!  

A feedback form is included.

I hope you'll take a look.

Students at every age level (6 to 96) could be learning to create information maps like these.  Volunteers could be helping them learn, and be learning themselves! 

In my "mapping participation" articles I show more examples and reasons to build such maps. 

One application might be mapping ICE activity, aggregating videos and written testimony showing where the law has been broken, and mapping information showing how citizens can respond to the growing Fascism in the USA.

Every day my social media is filled with more and more stories of attacks on democracy and harm to vulnerable people.  It makes it difficult to continue trying to draw attention to work needed to reach kids in high poverty areas with long-term programs that help them through school and into adult lives free of poverty  (and filled with opportunity).

This graphic shows the need for extra youth support in areas where poverty and structural racism mean kids have fewer supports and opportunities than do kids in more affluent areas.  One reason this problem persists over so many years is the random nature of interventions and funding.  I continue to post ideas like this, even in the middle of a full-blown crisis, because of the need for continuous support of programs that connect K-12 kids with extra adult and extra learning.

At the left is a photo of me providing a motivational speech at the annual year-end dinner for the tutor/mentor program that I led from 1975 to 1992.  I'm asking people to return for another year, and do more to help the kids and the program.

I'm still asking for this extra involvement.

Thanks for reading. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, BlueSky, Mastodon, Instagram and Twitter (see links here).

If you value what I'm sharing please visit this page and make a contribution to help me pay the bills. 

Mapping Learning Resources - 2026 and beyond

Over the past few years I've devoted several articles to showing uses of concept maps and other visualization tools to help organize information and ideas and create platforms that engage more people in learning and innovating solutions to complex problems.

Here's another example.  Explore this interactive map (created using Kumu.io) on the Landscape of Consciousness website. You'll find four maps like the one shown below that visualize theories of consciousness.

Scroll down on the home page and you'll find this chart, which details the information found on the concept map. 

This page is really important.  The "Implications" section "explores the real-world consequences of theories of consciousness on five profiled and challenging questions".

The Landscape of Consciousness map was shared on LinkedIn by Deniz Cem Önduygu.   This is where I get my first look at most of the Kumu visualizations that I've been sharing.

Now look at my maps.  This one shows the full range of information in the library on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website.  click here to open

This shows one of the four subsections of the concept map shown above.  This one shares links to information anyone can use to build coalitions and innovate solutions to complex problems.  click here to open

At the bottom of each node are one, or two boxes.  These include links to external website pages, or to additional concept maps.  click here to view this page

I've built the Tutor/Mentor library over the past 50 years, starting in the 1970s when I was looking for ideas for my weekly sessions with my mentee, then when I began to lead a program.  We accelerated this process in 1993 when we created the Tutor/Mentor Connection, then again in 1998 when we moved the library to the Internet, where it has grown for over 25 years.

I've used cMapTools since 2005 to visualize ideas, strategies and the resources in the Tutor/Mentor Library. And, I use blog articles to "make sense" of the information.  

I don't have the energy or motivation to rebuild all of my maps using Kumu or Gephi, but I keep sharing examples of these tools, with the goal that one, or more, people will use my library as a resource and will use Kumu to map what's available.

Last week I posted this article, showing the visualization below, created by students at Indiana University.  It shows participation in the 1994-2015 Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago. They created this using Excel spreadsheets from my library.

Last April, I used this article to show my 30 years of outreach to local, national and international universities.

On page 39 I showed the 2008 IVMOOC project done by students at Indiana University. 

This shows that I've had success in connecting with universities on short term projects. But I've not been able to build any long-term partnerships.  Thus, while each project was valuable, the potential was lost because they were not part of any university-led on-going effort, or relay-race, where future students took the place of current and past students and constantly updated, expanded, and improved on the work done by previous students.

That will only happen if a major donor provides the money.

So as we enter 2026 I call on readers to share this with their networks, reaching out to people who could make major gifts, to a university, to build on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connections, that build on the work I've piloted for so long.

This invitation aims to reach faculty and/or administrators who might develop programs, and grant requests, that find this money.  If you're interested, take a look at this page, where I outline steps you might take.

I'd be happy to explore this idea with you.  Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Facebook and/or Instagram (see links here).  

Thanks to everyone who sent contributions in 2025 to help me do this work. Visit my "Fund T/MI" page to offer your help. 

Take another look at Tutor/Mentor Conferences that I hosted

I've been fortunate to be part of an Information Visualization (IVMOOC) class at Indiana University, several times since the late 2000s.  This week I received the final report from a team that worked on a "mapping participation" idea that I proposed. You can see what I asked them to do on this page. 

I'll be posting more about this in January, but want to give you something to nibble on over the holidays.

The team used my registration spreadsheets from the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking conferences held every six months from May 1994 to May 2015 as a demonstration of ways event organizers can map participation.   They showed the data using KUMU, which I've written about several times in the past.

Open this link and this is the first view that you'll see.

The orange nodes represent conferences and the green nodes are participating organizations. The larger nodes show more conferences attended.

This visualization has a lot of information, so you need to look more closely. At the right side is a drop-down menu listing conference years. When I clicked on 2010 I get this view.

Below is a view of the two 1999 conferences.

Below is a view of the two 1999 conferences plus the two held in 2009.

You can look at each green node to see what conferences that organization participated in.  Below I show BigBrothersBigSisters of Metro Chicago.  

Below is a map for the Circuit Court of Cook County.

And below is a map for Children's Home and Aid.

You can open the KUMU presentation and explore it yourself.  Create your own blog article with screenshots showing what conferences your organization attended.

The data for this came from the registration information we collected for each conference. We converted it to Excel spreadsheets and shared those with the IVMOOC team.  They then created the KUMU visualization.

We did not collect data showing how these organizations connected to each other.  And, since most of these were held before social media became popular, we did not collect data showing LinkedIn or Facebook profiles.

This KUMU visualization is a demonstration of what's possible. In January I'll create a post showing a new open source tool any event organizer can use to create registration sheets that collect data that can later be turned into visualizations, using KUMU, Gephi or GIS mapping tools like Tableau.

At the left is a photo of two volunteers who created our first computer lab in the mid 1980 at the tutor/mentor program I led at the Montgomery Ward Corporate Headquarters in Chicago.  The two students are now in their 50s and raising their own kids. We're connected on Facebook.

Computer technology is much different today, and the Internet is a powerful resource.  

Any youth program in Chicago could have a volunteer-led activity, where students are learning to create visualizations using KUMU or Gephi, that show that organization's participation in past Tutor/Mentor Conferences.  They could be writing blog articles and/or creating videos to show the visualizations they create.  They could be learning how to use the new open source tool to map participation in events hosted by their program, or in their city.  They could be creating a valuable analytics tool.

They could be learning marketable skills.

Colleges could be doing this work too. This article shows a vision I've shared for many years. If you create an on-campus Tutor/Mentor Connection maybe you can find someone like MacKenzie Scott to fund it!

Thanks for reading. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, BlueSky, Facebook, Mastodon or Instagram and I can give you more information about the open source tool. (find links here).

Hopefully you'll share some participation maps created by your students, volunteers and/or staff, that show conferences you participated in, using the KUMU presentation I've shared.

Thank you to those who have already sent contributions for my December 19th birthday, or for the year-end FundT/MI campaign.  These enable me to do the work that I'm showing you.

Map your network! New example.

Last week I shared an example of mapping networks to learn who's involved and to help members connect with each other.

Today I found another example.  This is the Global Futures Society Network Map, which was shared on LinkedIn by Victoria Mulligan, in this post. I'll share a few screenshots.

This view can be seen at this link. 

At the right is a great explanation of how to use the maps.  It starts with a statement of purpose, saying:  "The Global Futures Society (GFS) Network Map is a strategic tool designed to visually represent the member organisations, and individual members in addition to the relationships between them. In a field as diverse and dynamic as foresight, it can be challenging to track ongoing projects, partnerships, and initiatives. The GFS Network Map addresses this by offering a clear, interactive view of how the membership are connected, what they're focused on, and how their efforts contribute to shaping the future."

Here's another view: 

This shows text further down on the right side, that explains what data is shown and how to use the map.  Across the bottom are some search parameters.  They are 1) connected; 2) communicating; 3) coordinating; 4) collaborating. Click any of these and the map reformats to show that data.

On the lower left is another menu. In this case I  selected "academic, or research institution" and "non-profit organization".  The map below shows that view.

The map shows these people and how they are connected to each other.  Note: my screenshot only shows a portion of that view. You can zoom in and out on the Kumu map to see information in much greater detail, or to get a wider perspective.

Here's another view:  Click on any node and at the right you'll find information about who they are, what organization they represent and even "requests to give or share information". 
 

In this case I've singled out Victoria Mulligan, who was part of the team that created this platform.

In the article I wrote last week I showed how a GIS map was used to show where people were doing research.  The Global Futures Society map also has a GIS feature. It shows connections like on the Kumu map, but on the GIS map. See the example below.

Click on any node to learn who it represents.  This has the same filters on it as the KUMU map uses. Zoom in closer to see who is from Europe, the USA, South America, Australia, Africa and the Middle East.  I've not seen anything like this before, but since KUMU offers this feature I suspect I see more in the future. 

Here's one more view.  I circled the menus at the lower left and the lower center.  In the upper right are menus that enable you to choose what view you want to use.

I could spend a lot of time exploring this map and still not find everything that's included.  What I'd love to find is a set of blog articles written by people who are exploring the maps and using it as Victoria Mulligan wrote in her LinkedIn article:

"I’m pleased to say we ended up creating something really exciting, and have now designed and produced these “network maps” for a number of organisations - charitable, philanthropic and global industry groups. They’ve come to us not just for the pretty visualisation (isn’t it pretty though?) but because it’s now the best way of showing where your network is strong, where there are bottlenecks and whether any one organisation has too big a role (or too little) - that their fortunes will affect the fortunes of the whole network. 

Who does this map suit? Anyone working with a network of individuals or organisations working towards a common purpose. It’s particularly useful for funders and industry associations who want to measure progress across multiple fronts, and to understand where there might be challenges. Until now these challenges felt invisible, and tended to be stuck inside the heads of those working on the front lines - we're so proud that this tool can help them articulate their day to day barriers and point to opportunities to help their network thrive!"

Visit Victoria's website at this link. 

I highlighted what I've been focusing on for many years.  How can an intermediary, or member of a network,  understand who's involved, who stays involved, and who's missing?  If they know who's missing (a skill, or a representative of a key network), they can target that person or group with invitations until someone joins.  How can they connect beyond being one face in a big crowd at an event. How can these connections grow stronger over time, and have a greater impact on the work they all are doing? 

I included this "How can we do this better?" graphic in my new post on Substack.com.  

I think one way we could do more to help kids in high poverty areas is to use mapping tools like shown here and in my other blog posts, to understand who's involved and to recruit those who need to be involved.

Are you doing this?  Read what I wrote last week about mapping universities.  Such research should identify faculty and departments where students are learning these tools and who might support their use in area nonprofit and social benefit organizations.  

What if this were a project within a tutor/mentor program, showing volunteers who were involved, and who had been involved in past years?  Could youth in such programs learn to build and maintain such maps?  

If you have examples, please share them.

Thanks for reading this. 

Please connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon. Better yet,  please represent these ideas on other platforms where I don't have an account.  

And, if you're able to help, please visit the contribution links on the http://www.tutormentorexchange.net site and send a year in donation.