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Did You Know?

Paradigms are like lenses: shift them, and suddenly new patterns come into focus. That’s the power of Social System Mapping.

January 21, 2025 | 1 minute

The Opt In Form

Are you starting a new mapping project? The Opt In Form is one way to help get new map members into your sumApp mapping project. In the video below, we discussed how to use the Opt-In form and ‘My Preferences’…

January 21, 2025 | 4 minutes

Turning Data-Flows Into a Practice

Moving data around is by far the most confusing, time-consuming, mind-numbing part of data-visualization. It’s the part of this whole mapping process with the most potential to drag you down a nasty rabbit-hole and cause you to beat your head…

January 21, 2025 | 2 minutes

The Mapping Phase: The Technician Carrier

Once the vision is seeded and the design begins to take form, we enter the Mapping Phase — the part where that vision gets translated into structure. This is where the Technician Carrier comes into play. This role isn’t just…

January 21, 2025 | 3 minutes

Planning for Kumu When Defining Field Types

Most surveys aren’t designed with complex data-visualization in mind, so even people are adept at making surveys sometimes overlook the fact that the mapping context is different. Defining survey questions and field types in the context of Social System Mapping…

January 21, 2025 | 3 minutes

Understanding Connections in the Social System Mapping Context

The Connections Page of the Member View represents the key functionality of sumApp, enabling network members to show their relationships on the map in Kumu, and to keep the map as up-to-date as possible with as little effort as possible – while at…

January 21, 2025 | 0 minutes

How To Insert The Live JSON Link Into Kumu

January 21, 2025 | 3 minutes

Understanding Segments

Purpose of Segments Segments are used to separate out your member list into smaller, more manageable chucks in the sumApp member view connections page. This is useful when you have large populations and don’t want to require everyone to go…

January 21, 2025 | 4 minutes

The Three General Phases

Social System Mapping unfolds in three fluid, overlapping phases — Envisioning, Mapping, and SenseMaking — all woven together by Storytelling. This isn’t a linear path, but a living, iterative cycle that deepens over time.