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.   The 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.