Flow of Donations from a Networked Response

As a follow up to a post from a few weeks ago, here is an update from Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas.

Pyramid of Peace
Ways to help Kenyans, Kenyans to call, latest news organized by city

The latest emails from Kenya and around the world

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Click on the image above to see a diagram of part of our Pyramid of Peace. We’re thinking through how best to show all the data.

So here is the image referenced above. First, it is really helpful to me to see the impact of Andrius’ fundraising efforts. This is an interesting sort of “front end” of the ROI problem Beth Kanter is wrestling with these days. Second, and more interesting to me, is how we can visualize in some tiny way our impact in a network. A lot of what made me donate was simply trust. But to see this image, it is a positive reinforcement to make the effort again in future situations.

It is not “verified” data, but insomuch that I trust my network, the visualization offers me both a community indicator that together we can do more than I can do alone.

Donation Flow

6 thoughts on “Flow of Donations from a Networked Response”

  1. Did they do the drawing manually?

    I have tracked the relationships via a spreadsheet for one of the smaller campaigns, but got overwhelmed in mapping it. Wondering if there is software that does it automatically?

  2. I think he hand drew it, Beth. But I can ask! (Or I suspect he will see the link and drop by himself.)

    Interestingly I know one of the people in the chain in Uganda from a workshop I ran in Ghana 3 years ago. It is funny how our worlds intersect.

  3. It almost looks like inspiration.

    There is software that can visualize relationships in a network,but I suspect it is expensive. Have you ever used any of those programs?

  4. Beth, there was recently a thread about social network visualization software on the http://www.km4dev.org list which I THINK has been or will be summarized on our wiki at http://www.km4dev.org/wiki but there is some server moving in process, so right now I can’t access it. If you’d like me to forward the emails from the thread, I’d be happy to. Just let me know. As I recall, there was a TON of useful links and tips.

  5. Hi Nancy, Beth, Yes I drew it by hand (using Dia, a diagram editor for Linux). Now I’m wondering how to document and visualize such information in a more systematic way. Greg Wolff of Unamesa Association http://www.unamesa.org has set up a page using Tiddly Wiki. Also, I may try to use TheBrain http://www.thebrain.com But first I will try to make a simple data format (as with a spreadsheet) and find an easy way to create the records and link them to our supporting correspondence and wiki pages. Then I can generate the system of links and show that in different ways using different tools. For the format I might customize the ProWiki that we’re using as at http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?HelpKenyans we are using metadata on wiki pages and drawing reports from that, so perhaps I will create an easy way to make such wiki pages, one for each record or something in that spirit.

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