Circle Map Software

Hey!

I wanted to open a topic to see how people keep track of share their circle structures.

We use kumu: Valley Housing Co-op • Kumu

But I think that SoFA started using some new tool instead, but I can’t remember what it was called cc @TedRau.

We also store all of our circles in discourse, with different groups for them, so I was thinking of trying to maybe generate our circle map from that… there is always the issue of when something is recorded in multiple places its easy to get out of date.

The things that might be helpful on the circle map, besides just a list of all the circles and their parent/child relationships, is the roles people hold in each circle, and the members of each circle, as well as the aim/domain of the circle, and also member bios specific to each circle.

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Hi Saul! Until last year, we also used Kumu. We started by linking our Kumu instance with a Google Sheet; this worked fairly well, but I was wanting something that had a more robust database as the backend, so I set that up for a while and had a CSV export and import workflow to make updates. I like Kumu a lot, but of course it doesn’t know anything about sociocracy, just graphs. :slight_smile:

Several months ago we decided to switch to using Peerdom for our organizational structure mapping, and we are also including our circle and role descriptions in that tool. The Peerdom model allows for encoding circle relationships, roles, circle members, and a free-form (though marked up with MarkDown) description for circles and members that you can use for human-language descriptions of aims, domains, and biographies.

Some of our groups here on this Discourse instance correspond to circles. I could imagine automatically generating visualizations from that, although I don’t immediately know how I would model links between circles.

I certainly agree about the difficulty of having formal representation of a model in multiple places, particularly the challenge around keeping them synchronized.

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Which is exactly why I like tools like Peerdom.
And what @john.l.clark said!
For you but also for others who might read this, there are other tools: www.sociocracyforall.org/it-tools

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