Response to post on LinkedIn - re making sense of youth unemployment in Tunisia

 As I scrolled through LinkedIn today I saw this map, posted in this article by Mark Oldenbeuving.

I wrote a comment on LinkedIn, but by the time I finished I was 300 characters over the limit.  So I'm posting it below.

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Thanks for sharing your work. As I look at your map I say "there are a lot of people and organizations represented" and from your article I think you have a database of them.

Then I ask, "are you holding conferences, meetings and networking/learning events" that invite people from your database to attend? Have you done this once or twice a year for several years? I assume "yes" to the first, and "no" to the second, since your work is so new.

I started building a database of the youth-service/education ecosystem in Chicago in 1994 and begin inviting people to gather for conferences every six months. Last fall and this spring teams of students from Indiana University's Information Visualization MOOC created dashboards, and Kumu maps, using my participation records, that show "who was attending" and "who was missing". I wish I had had that info 20 years ago! You can view their reports at https://tutormentorexchange.net/mapping-participation

Below is a view from one of the Kumu maps. This shows the two 1999 conferences that I held in Chicago. Each green node is a participant.  The nodes in the middle are people who attended both events.

The underlying thinking is that kids need 12 years of support just to go from 1st grade to high school, and more to get into jobs. Maps can show underserved areas where comprehensive, on-going programs are needed for many years. Drawing attention and resources to these places can be a role taken by intermediaries, as well as youth themselves.

I posted an article earlier today showing a role youth could be taking to collect and share this information. 

As Mark indicated, there are many related issues that all make this more difficult. Building the database and starting an invitation process is a beginning.

The 2025 team created a tool that others could use to collect and map participation from their events. It's open source so you and others might try using it. 

Reaching out through social media to connect with others who are thinking about the same problems is one way I've expanded my own knowledge and grown the library of ideas that I share freely with others.

I hope you'll connect with me. 

Mapping ideas, information and networks

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.

In February 2024 I wrote this article, after watching the annual National Football League "Honors" show.  

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."

7-26-2025 update - I started a list of sports philanthropy websites in the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC library.  Find it here.  These show that there already is a certain level of aggregation.  They also show the type of websites I'd like to find and add to the list.

In my preparation for writing this article I reviewed many articles that I posted in past years.  I found many great examples of network mapping and use of Kumu, as well as how I had been trying to collect and share information for the past 30 years.  Rather than list all of these in this article, I created the concept map shown below to point to some of those resources.

If you explore this map you'll find many examples of using KUMU to support network building and systems thinking.  You'll also see the influence of others, such as Gene Bellinger, who I met around 2011 in a LinkedIn Systems Thinking group.   If you dig through articles I've posted on this blog since 2005 you'll find many more.

What if someone (s) like Deniz Cem Önduygu or Morgan Wills adopted my library and archives and created visualizations to help people find and use the information they contain?  The History of Western Philosophy project is an example of how information in libraries can be shared.  Other projects, such as the work of Morgan Willis, show how people in networks can be identified. That's the first step in building connections.  Interns from various colleges did this type of work for me between 2005 and 2015, but not as on-going, long-term projects.

9-29-2025 update - Here's an example of using KUMU to map winners of the International Network of Social Network Analysis awards winners.  Imagine seeing a similar map showing causes supported by professional athletes, and/or, winners of professional sports awards over a period of years. 

11-7-2025 update - here's an example of using KUMU to map connections within a university.  https://micelio.uca.edu.sv/home  I'd love to find something like this for every Chicago area university. Chris Warren, our NU Public Service Fellow, created such a map, using CMapTools back in 2009. See it here.

11-17-2025 update - Take a look at the Global Futures Society's Network Map, built using KUMU - https://kumu.io/gfs/gfs-mapping#gfs-map

12-6-2025 update - This Child Care Systems map is another example of using KUMU.  What's unique about this map is that descriptions are built right into the map.  Click here to read the KUMU article on LinkedIn. Explore at this link.

3-13-2026 update - This Kumu article shows how Kumu was used to create visual evidence maps that help reveal patterns across the field of digital health.  click here

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.

That's why I write articles like this.

Thanks for reading. I hope you'll share this in your networks and connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Twitter and other platforms (see links here).

And, I invite you to visit this page and help fund the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.