In 2009 and 2010 I began to try to find interns who would use social network analysis to understand the networks of people who were being connected to each other through the May and November Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conferences, as well as this Ning site.
At that point the KUMU mapping tool did not exist. However, it's now a potentially useful tool. Here's a video intro to SNA Network Mapping using KUMU.
Here's a blog article showing analysis of participation in 2008 and 2009 conferences.
On this page you can see two projects done in 2012 to analyize the 2007-12 participation on this Ning site.
This blog article shows work done by graduate students in the School of Information at Indiana University to analyize participation in 1994 to 2014 conferences.
This page shows conference participation using GIS maps.
In each of these the goal was to understand who was participating and who was missing. To succeed in achieving the Tutor/Mentor Connection (1993-present) and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC (2011-present) goals we needed to get a mix of leaders from every sector involved. Our maps show that we did not succeed in doing that.
However, I think people can learn from my efforts. Every major city still needs a wide range of youth tutor, mentor and learning programs that reach k-12 youth in all high poverty areas. They also have many other issues that need to be address. Leaders and intermediaries need to take on organizing roles. If they can recruit a team to analyize on-going participation I feel they can do more to keep people together for more of the time needed to understand and solve a problem, and do more to recruit people who might be missing from their process.
As part of network building I created two concept maps in more than 10 years ago to show the range of talent and networks ideally involved in solving a complex problem. View these here and here.
Reach out to me if you'd like to discuss my experiences.
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