Who attended? Who's missing? How do you know?
As you plan your event are you building in a data collection process so that after the event you can create maps that help you understand who attended? As you view the information shown below, follow the blog articles. I'll be updating this page throughout 2026 and post new blog articles each week.
I hosted Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences in Chicago every six months from May 1994 to May 2015. This is a graphic that shows an interactive visualization of conference participants created by students in a Fall 2025 Information Visualization (IVMOOC) class at Indiana University. You can use the search bar at the upper left to select a year to review. You can zoom into the map to find names of organizations. See images created from this and a description of its purpose in this article.
This was part of an on-going effort to answer the big questions of a) who is attending?; b) what networks are they part of? and c) what geography do they represent?.
I've used GIS maps since 1993 to show where volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are most needed, based on indicators such as high poverty, poorly performing schools, crime rates, health disparities, etc. Beginning in May 1994 we used data collected from our Chicago program surveys to invite tutor/mentor program stakeholders to gather and share ideas. These were part of a larger goal aimed at drawing more consistent attention and resources to each of the volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs in the Chicago region. Since 2010 I've attempted to use maps to show participation in the Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences that I hosted in Chicago. You can see an example below.
You can review the conference goals on this page. While I've not hosted a conference since May 2015, I continue to try to draw attention to the resources in the website and to my lists of youth-serving programs almost every day, using social media, my blogs, my websites and email newsletter. In the 1990s I also had a printed newsletter and a PR firm helping generate media stories.
The map shown above is from the November 2008 conference. See it and other conference maps on this page.
In December 2025 a team of students from the Information Visualization (IVMOOC) class at Indiana University shared the project they had been working on for me since September 2025. I'm very impressed with the work they did. The interactive visualization at the top of this page was created by the team to demonstrate how you can convert conference registration data into interactive visualizations using Kumu.io, Gephi or Tablueau. You can see it in this article. In the article I show several other views that I created from the interactive Kumu project.
However, this was only a demonstration of what's possible. To understand the value of this project, I urge you to read the IVMOOC team final report (click here).
A second Fall 2025 IVMOOC team also looked at the conferences. Below is a dashboard they created, which reviews participation by zip code.
It's described in this blog article.
A Spring 2026 IVMOOC team expanded on the work done by the Fall 2025 team. Below is an image from a dashboard they created.
The Spring 2026 team picks up where tje Fall 2025 team left off, extending the pipeline toward rigorous analysis and reproducible visualization. The 2025 team built NetworkMap: a web application for collecting participant data at live events and converting it into network-ready exports (see below). 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. The Spring 2026 team's analytics dashboard is shown above. The menu across the top of this page shows sections with additional analysis of the conferences.
You can find further information about the Spring 2026 IVMOOC dashboard and links to analysis done by the student team in this article. These demonstrate work any organization could be doing to build a better understanding of "who's attending" and "who's missing" from their network building efforts. They also demonstrate roles students in any university could be doing to support such efforts. While the IVMOOC reviews of the Tutor/Mentor Conferences look at past data, others could be using the tools to understand participation in future events.
The Fall 2025 IVMOOC team created an open source resource that you can use to collect and analyze data from the events you host.
The goal of having IVMOOC teams look at Tutor/Mentor Conference history was to demonstrate how others might build a similar analysis into their own efforts. The Fall 2025 team created an "Open Source Network Mapping" app (click here). They also created this comprehensive "How to" guide (click here).
In this blog article I show some of the pages from the Network Mapping app. I'll be adding more articles like this, which you can find by clicking the IVMOOC tab on the blog.
All of this information is FREELY available on GitHub.
You can find the link to the GitHup page in the menu bar at the top of the Network Mapping app. You can go directly to it at this page. The IVMOOC students did a comprehensive job of describing the benefits of using these tools, as well as the features available and step-by-step instructions for using them. If you connect with Dan Bassill on LinkedIn, and follow his posts, you'll soon be able to connect directly to IVMOOC team members and to others in the larger network analysis community who Dan has learned from over the past 18 years.
Spend time reading some of the blog articles I've posted about network analysis and mapping participation.
This concept map can be a study guide to deepen your understanding of the use and value of mapping visualization and strategies. Recruit a team of students/volunteers and lead them through this information. As they create and share their own maps they will contribute to a wider acceptance and understanding, and hopefully, better outcomes for those working to solve complex problems.
As you plan an event, think of the timeline you'll need. Think of how you might use registration data in more ways.
This concept map shows the timeline I followed to organize Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago every six months from May 1994 to May 2015. If you organize events, do you have a timeline like this? At the far right I've added the questions "Who attended? Who's Missing?" which is an analysis every event organizer should be doing if the event is part of an on-going effort to solve any specific problem. In my cases, the conferences were part of an on-going, year-round strateg intended to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs grow in all high poverty areas of the Chicago region.
Create and Share Your Own Visualizations
If your organization attended one of the past Leadership Conferences you can find it on the interactive Kumu map, then create an image showing all the conferences you were part of. This one shows Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago, who participated in many of the conferences.
eMail Dan at
Social Media Connections
Do a web search for "tutor mentor" and you'll find Dan on many platforms.
BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/tutormentor.bsky.social
Dan Bassill on LinkedIn
Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLCon Facebook group
Dan Bassill on Facebook Page
Dan Bassill on Mastodon - https://mastodon.social/@tutormentor1,
https://mastodon.garden/@tutormentor1 and @
Dan Bassill on Instagram and on Twitter (X)
Dan Bassill on Medium - https://medium.com/@danielfbassill
Dan Bassill on Substack.com - https://substack.com/@danielbassill319958?