Accounts Needed for Social System Mapping

Social System Mapping involves the use of two online platforms, sumApp and Kumu.

sumApp

You’ll need a sumApp account to gather your network data. You can start a free 1 month trial here.

You can learn more about the sumApp tiers here.

sumApp is essentially a highly-specialized & super-sophisticated survey tool used for mapping social eco-systems. It’s a data-gathering tool designed to be user-friendly, change-able as your network’s understanding and needs change, and provide time-frames for seeing how your network changes over time. It structures the data so that it works perfectly with Kumu w/o you having to do any wrangling (which is common and time-consuming if you use other survey tools) and can be live-linked into Kumu so you can watch the map develop in real time.

Learn more about the relationship between sumApp and Kumu.

Kumu

Kumu is a data-visualization tool. You use it to create interactive, online maps and views of your network that your whole network can access. It represents your data in whatever ways you need, but it doesn’t help you collect that data, which is why we use the two tools together.

Kumu accounts can be personal (simple permissions) or organizational (more complex permissions & other features).

Projects in Kumu can be public (free in personal) or private (cost depends on type of account).

You need one project per social system map.

Access to projects can be shared with others. Levels of sharing depend on whether the account is personal or organizational.

You can learn more about Kumu accounts and pricing here.

Check out their ‘postcard’ pricing policy here.

Please note: Kumu and sumApp have no organizational or legal relationship to one another.

In this knowledge base, we share tips for how to do things in Kumu, but it’s limited to the kinds of things you’d do with data gathered in sumApp. We don’t provide instruction on everything that can be done is Kumu, and sumApp is not responsible for issues arising in Kumu that are unrelated to sumApp.