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Our Docs

Did You Know?

Updating your profile in sumApp takes less time than brushing your teeth—but can help reshape your entire network’s ability to create change.

May 20, 2025 | 8 minutes

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Social System Mapping? Social System Mapping is an expanded version of Network Mapping that is emerging from the increased functionality of the combination of sumApp and Kumu. It’s a mash-up of system mapping, social network mapping, asset mapping,…

January 25, 2025 | 3 minutes

Networkism – The New Cultural Meme

In a March 2015 TED Talk, data visualization researcher Manual Lima explores what he calls the new cultural meme of ‘Networkism’, and a shift he sees in how we represent knowledge. We’re shifting, he claims from a core metaphor of the ‘Tree of…

January 21, 2025 | 5 minutes

The SenseMaking Mode

The SenseMaking Mode: An Ongoing Practice of Inquiry Social System Mapping opens access to a domain we’ve previously only been able to speculate about – the ecosystem just beyond our own ego-network horizons, the connective tissue linking our immediate relationships…

January 21, 2025 | 5 minutes

How to Start Mapping – Create a Pilot/Prototype Map

Social System Mapping means that: All of this makes it hard to know where to start! Without something to show people, they have a hard time seeing the point. But without buy-in, you don’t have anything to show people.  You…

January 21, 2025 | 2 minutes

Map Literacy – Example #1

Just to see what I mean by mapping being a ‘language’ – watch this one minute .gif At first it may see like there’s a lot going on – a lot of dots, lines, names, movement, a couple of colors,…

January 21, 2025 | 3 minutes

It’s a New Language That is Emerging

I like to say that Social System Mapping is one genre in a new visual language that’s emerging from the intersection of interactive online data visualization and graph theory. And because it’s new, because the media that use this language are not yet prevalent, because…

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 | 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.

January 21, 2025 | 1 minute

What is Social System Mapping?

Social System Mapping is an expanded version of Network Mapping that is emerging from the increased functionality of the combination of sumApp and Kumu. It’s a mash-up of system mapping, social network mapping, asset mapping, stakeholder mapping and more. Human beings and their…

January 21, 2025 | 12 minutes

The Purpose of Social System Mapping

Social system mapping (SSM) is a new mapping practice that can present on the surface a sloppy mash-up of better-established and more-well-groomed methodologies.  It was not pre-conceived, pre-defined, pre-justified & pre-proven. Rather, it is emerging from the interaction between what Tim…