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.

Use this resource to map and analyze your networks

The information below is from a new page on my website that I launched to show work done by a team of students from the Information Visualization (IVMOOC) class at Indiana University. This is a project they had been working on for me since September 2025.  

I'm very impressed with the work they did. This visualization shows participation in one of the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences held in Chicago between May 1994 and May 2015. You can see it in this article.  Open the Kumu map - click here

In the article and on my website I show several other views that I created from the interactive Kumu project. However, this was only a demonstration of what's possible.  On social media I've been encouraging youth and volunteers from Chicago tutor/mentor programs to dig into the map and find their own organization, then share a screenshot showing what conferences you were part of.

To understand the value of this project, I urge you to read the IVMOOC team final report (click here).

Then take time to study the "Open Source Network Mapping" app created by the team. (click here).

Then look at the "How-To-Guide" that provides step by step information.

In the Project Overview the IVMOOC students wrote: "The Network Map is an event network visualization platform that helps event organizers collect participation and connection data, automatically convert it into network-ready nodes and edges, and explore insights through an analytics dashboard. Outputs can be exported to tools like Kumu.io and Gephi for deeper relationship mapping and network analysis." 

Then, look at the Git Hub page for the project. click here

On the home page you'll find this description. "Network Map - Event Network Visualization Platform. A full-stack web application for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing participant connections from events. Transform survey responses into interactive network graphs and analytics dashboards."

The Network Mapping project was the work of one IVMOOC team. Another looked at the data and created a dashboard showing participation by zip code. See it in this article.

This is the third time since 2008 that the IVMOOC project has looked at the Tutor/Mentor Connection (which has been led through Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC since 2011).  Click here to read the 2015 project report.  I'm hoping to be a client for the Spring 2026 IVMOOC, too. 

I've been reaching out to universities for help since the 1990s. It's part of an on-going invitation to engage students, faculty and alumni of universities in Chicago and throughout the world.

Read this post and find a PDF that shows 30 years of engagement, yet also shows no strategic, long-term effort where a stream of students work on the T/MC project while in college, then when they are alumni, with the goal of creating long-term impact on the lives of people living in high poverty areas. 

I invite students and faculty to help me do that, by learning about the tool, and why it's important by reading articles on my blog and in my library.  Then, by creating your own event mapping project, perhaps showing how people at your university are connected around specific issues.

Please connect and introduce yourself to me on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (see links here). 

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.

Engaging Universities - Who's Connected?

In 2009 Chris Warren, a Northwestern University graduate and Public Interest Fellow at Cabrini Connections and the Tutor/Mentor Connection, created the concept map shown below and shared it in an article titled "Mapping Northwestern University for Tutoring/Mentoring Programs". 

He wrote, "So as I've mentioned in previous posts, Colleges and Universities are full of valuable assets for Tutor/Mentor Programs like ours. They are chock full of smart and engaged people who want to make a difference. However, for better or for worse, universities are multifaceted communities, with a wide variety of buildings, departments, offices...etc. They also have an unfortunate tendency to be composed of various organizational silos that inhibit communication between different parts of the university. In fact many a program coordinator has been frustrated by the seemingly endless amounts of emails and phone calls necessary to reach the right administrator who can actually begin to help forge a mutually beneficial relationship.

Therefore, after facilitating a workshop about ways to constructively engage Northwestern University at our May Conference, I decided it would be beneficial to put together a concept map of all of the different parts of NU that could help a tutor/mentor program like ours. From the various service learning, work-study, internship and practicum opportunities available for non-profits to secure skilled and committed volunteers to the various philanthropic wings of the university, consider this map a guide to the assets of Northwestern University."

Unfortunately, Chris was with us for only one year and no one at Northwestern picked up his work, and kept updating his concept map.  So, the silos still exist.

I wrote an article earlier this year showing my 30-year effort to build strategic alliances with universities. In that, I pointed to a strategic plan developed in the early 2000s by students at DePaul University, and intended to be used by faculty and leaders at universities.  

You can see in the title that this was aspirational. I called it "A Vision of What's Possible".   In the slide below I show a "vision" of a university being the first, or second, resource that anyone in the world visits to learn about poverty and the roles volunteer tutors/mentors can take in helping children grow up safely and move through high school and college into careers."

In this slide I show that "The ABC University T/MC site will unite all stakeholders around actions that help youth move toward careers."

And in this slide I show a benefit to the university that adopts this strategy.

These are just a few of the many slides in this visual essay. I hope you'll view the entire thing and share it with MacKenzie Scott or other billionaires who are making multi-million dollar gifts to universities. It takes only one of them to make this a reality.

So, how might this be done? How would anyone know who was doing needed work in different silos?  Here's a potential answer.

Above is a view of an "Interactive Research Map" created by a team at the University of Central America in El Salvador.  You can view it and find a research paper that describes how it was built and what its purpose is at this link. 

The project is called Micelio (in Spanish) and Mycelium in the English translation.  On the home page it's described as a platform that "seeks to promote collaborative work among researchers and research networks, in order to share the  University's scientific output with the academic world and highlighting the importance of knowledge exchange within a single network."

Open the interactive KUMU map and you can search by any of the topics shown across the bottom. Here's one view.

You can zoom in to enlarge the map and you can click on any icon to see connections between it and others, as well as a text description showing who that person is.  

They also have linked the data they are collecting to a GIS map that shows "where" the work focuses on.

The project developers wrote, "This tool provides users with the ability to visualize the geographic distribution of research projects, thus enriching the user experience and offering a broader perspective on the geographic impact of the research conducted."

I began creating maps to show who was participating in Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences in the late 2000s.  The November 1988 conference map is shown below.

And, in 2010 I began to try to show connections using network analysis maps. One example is shown below. 

The volunteer who built the Tutor/Mentor Conference website in the mid 2000s created an on-line registration form that collected information showing what zip code the person came from and what type of organization (program, university, business, etc). With that, these maps could be created. Visit this website to see these maps and graphics. 

Interns from Chicago area universities worked with me in 2010 to create the network analysis maps, and teams from Indiana University did research projects in 2014 and 2015 that used the data to create new maps. You can see their work in this article.

Unfortunately, the work was being done by myself and interns working with me. It was not sustainable. I've found no example where someone within a university is collecting this type of information, or the information Chris Warren shared on his map, and used it to build connections and foster collaboration within a single university and across many universities, as I've envisioned in the  University T/MC strategic plan. 

Thus, I'm thrilled to connect on LinkedIn with Kevin Amilcar (Kevin Gutierrez) who created the KUMU maps for the Micelio Project.  He shared this report with me. Since it's in Spanish I used Google Translate to create an English version.  This is an example of what's possible, and has commitment from within a university.  

The report shows an intentional effort to share the Micelio project and recruit more participants. This is the type of work students in a University T/MC could be doing on an on-going basis.    

The report states, "The implementation of Micelio as a centralized platform for managing research outputs has proven to be a significant technological advancement for our institution. This tool has enabled the efficient management and dissemination of products that, until a year ago, could not be managed on any institutional platform. These products include researcher profiles, projects, research studies, and datasets. The value of this implementation lies in its ability to facilitate the organization of and access to critical information, which in turn fosters greater collaboration among members of the academic community. The growing participation and interest in the platform demonstrate its relevance and potential to improve the visibility of research and promote knowledge sharing. 

Furthermore, Micelio has transformed how research results are managed internally, providing a crucial data infrastructure that not only optimizes internal processes but also expands opportunities for dissemination and external collaboration. This change not only improves operational efficiency but also positions our institution as a leader in academic knowledge management, thus contributing to the strengthening of the research ecosystem in academia. To this end, a workflow is proposed that aims to be replicable by other academic institutions for managing scientific work. This process diagram seeks to illustrate the life cycle of a research project, from its planning to the self-archiving procedure in Micelio." 

I'm working with another IVMOOC team at the University of Indiana this fall, with a goal that they could create an on-line event registration/network analysis form that could collect the type of data included on my maps, and Kevin's maps, and could be easily fed into platforms that create KUMU maps, and GIS maps. 

If such a tool were freely available, would it be  used?  Do other universities in the USA or the world already have a project similar to Micelio?  If you know of one, please share the link below or on LinkedIn.

11-17-2025 update - The Global Futures Society's Network Map does much of what I envision. https://kumu.io/gfs/gfs-mapping#gfs-map

11-18-2025 update - This is a map showing four departments of the University of Navarra - https://en.unav.edu/research/mapa-tematico

This is a 1994 article in the Chicago SunTimes showing how I left my corporate job for a career of helping kids in high poverty areas.  It includes one of the first maps we created to show where poverty was concentrated in Chicago, and where existing volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs were located. You can see more stories generated by this strategy on this page. 

Imagine how much attention a University T/MC could generate if it adopted the ideas shared in this article.   That would be a good thing. 

Here's a recent example of a major donation to a Chicago university. I hope the research team is reading some of my blog articles! 

Thanks for reading. I hope you'll connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, BlueSky, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms.  You can find links on this page.

Furthermore, I hope a few will give support through my December 19th birthday campaign or annual Fund T/MI campaign.  See links on the www.tutormentorexchange.net site. 

By the way, I'm still connected on Facebook to the student shown with me in the 1994 article. She's now a mother with one son in college and another finishing high school, has two Masters degrees, and a great job.  That was our goal when we created Cabrini Connections in late 1992 and launched it in January 1993. 

Mapping event participation

A few weeks ago I created the concept map shown below to help people find some of the articles I've posted about network building, network analysis, social capital, and community building.  

I included it in this March 2025 article titled, "Mapping ideas, information and networks".  

I follow the KUMU.IO account on LinkedIn and see regular updates where they share new projects. 

This week I saw one that really resonated with me.  It was a map showing participation in the February 2025 SOWTH conference.  The image below of one slide, shows how participation in the event expanded the network for many attendees. 

The SOWTH conference was a gathering in Atlanta, Georgia of more than 1,200 regional producers and food actors.  Over three days, the group "recommitted themselves to sowing a stronger, more sustainable agricultural movement across the U.S. South".  Visit this page and read Kumu's description of the project and find the link to the full Kumu Presentation. 

Another example of mapping participation is this KUMU map created for a Neighborhood Economics Conference held in Chicago in late September 2025. 

Since the mid 2000s I've been trying to develop tools that would visualize and map participation in Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted every six months from May 1994 to May 2015, to demonstrate that they should receive financial support, and to convince others to use the same network analysis process in their own events.

In 2010 a graduate of DePaul University created some maps and blog-articles showing participation in 2008 and 2009 conferences. You can see her articles here.

In 2015 a team of students from different parts of the country adopted the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC as their client in an Information Visualization MOOC (#IVMOOC) hosted by Indiana University. Here's the final report from the work they were able to do in such a short period of time. On this page you can see how goals for this project were communicated.

I shared the data for the all 42 conferences with the IVMOOC team while at the same time inviting students/faculty from universities anywhere in the world to also work with this data. As the analysis of the 2008-09 conferences shows, you can look at this information in many different ways and create quite a few articles making sense of the visualizations.

The IVMOOC team looked at this data from a spatial perspective, using GIS mapping applications, as well as from a social network analysis perspective. This demonstrates a wide range of opportunities for future researchers and writers.

My goal is that as you do this you will convince others who host conferences and large gatherings that focus on poverty, race, inequality, workforce development, health disparities, etc. to apply these tools for their own events. Furthermore, instead of looking for organizers in Chicago, look for organizers in your own city.

Imagine a web site where maps like these from New York, London, LA, Houston, Paris and many other cities who struggle with these same issues are aggregated, so that people who attend different events in each city can easily connect with each other, or can connect with people and ideas from different cities.

While I've not made any progress since 2015 on mapping the events I hosted I've continued to share this idea via several blog articles which you can find here, here and here. You'll find many more in the network building, network analysis and networking collections. 

One idea I want to emphasize is that we need to use this data to not only know who participated, but who was missing.  The concept map below is included in this article.  

Planners need to use maps like this to determine what talents and networks need to be included in their events and conversations.  For instance, talking about building a new playground is good, but if donors and/or policy-makers are not in the conversation, it may be more difficult to find the money needed to pay for the project.  If participation maps don't show these people involved, then an effort needs to be targeted to enlist them.    I'm not sure if I've seen any examples of maps used this way. 

If you visit the resource section of the Tutor/Mentor library you'll find links to more than 2000 organizations and individuals.  Imagine having all of these people connected in active, on-going, learning and innovation networks aimed at helping kids from every high poverty area in the world move safely through school and into adult lives, with jobs and careers where they can raise their own kids free of poverty and systemic racism. 

Read this article and see the eLearning goals that I first posted in the early 2000s.  While I've not held the conferences since 2015 this is still my goal.

Now, Kumu and others are beginning to introduce me to a new generation of technologists, who are spending time collecting information and creating maps that share what they are learning.  I point to their work for the same reason I point to lists of Chicago and national youth serving organizations.  They can learn from each other. They can help each other.  And, they can share the work each is doing so more people find it and use it.

I encourage you to follow the Kumu "Project of the Week" posts on LinkedIn.  Visit their website and view the Gallery of Kumu projects.   And visit this section and this section of the Tutor/Mentor library where I point to many articles about concept mapping and visualization. 

My work with mapping was highlighted in this October 2015 Chicago Tribune article.   

I'd love to see dozens of future articles writing about how mapping event participation led to stronger, on-going networks, learning from each other and innovating solutions to the complex problems facing the U.S. and the world in 2025.

Thanks for reading. Please share this with your networks and connect with me on social media (see links here). 

And, if you're able, visit this page and make a contribution to my "Fund T/MI" campaign.