I (Christine Capra) fell in love with System Mapping in about 2005 and started making maps at every opportunity. Some time after that, I began to work with intentional change networks and had the opportunity to create some network maps. From this, I began to imagine combining the two map-types. Over time a vision took hold of me - for how mapping could be used as liberatory, paradigm-shifting & systemically regenerative. Maps that grew and adapted with an evolving network over time. Maps that didn't just statically reflect a dimension or two at a given moment, but could inform and wisen ongoing adaptive action, acting as an ongoing scaffold to help see, design and build the change-networks we needed. But the technical tools needed to visualize and data-source the kind of maps my imagination was craving didn't exist. In 2013, as this vision was maturing, nothing even came close.

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Kumu.io was the first step towards that liberatory mapping vision that had grabbed hold of me. Kumu put graph data visualization online and in the hands of non-experts and non-coders. Kumu's maps are available to anyone chosen, able to show an unlimited amount of information about each node as well as for each connection. It is deeply customizable and highly interactive so that each viewer can explore and interpret as they choose, independent of some top-down expert. Access to the creation, viewing, analyzing and interpreting of graph visualizations was democratized - yayy!!!

But we still had a data-sourcing problem - there was no tool that made it easy to gather the kind of data our maps required from large groups of people. Even existing SNA tools were fussy, friction-full and nearly useless with large populations. And manually creating a map of any size was so time-consuming that my vision had no space in which to unfold.

To solve that data-gathering problem Tim and I (and a series of software developers - most recently and importantly Alex Musat) developed sumApp as the second step to creating the kinds of maps I was yearning to create. sumApp is unlike any other data-gathering tool, designed explicitly with the intent of enabling the kind of networked paradigm-shifting and system-transformation mapping work work we wanted to support - data that was:

Updatable
Iterate-able
Accessible
Crowd-sourced
Multi-dimensional
Cross-purposeful
User friendly, especially with very large groups

and over time, it became much more (read more about it here)

Once the technical log-jam was broken, the next challenge to my vision was that all the obvious mapping labels were already being used - differently. 'Network map' already meant several things - none of which came near what we were doing or intending. I tired of explaining why OUR 'network map' was NOT like the 'network map' people had in their minds. Explaining why the shortcomings of 'network map' that they were presenting to me were not shortcomings of OUR 'network maps'. I saw that the existing model in people's minds over-rode everything I said. I spent all my time trying to erase existing mental models and rarely got to paint the actual picture I wanted to present. Just helping people see what I was showing them (even when it was an actual map of ours in Kumu) was so exhausting, that by the time I succeeded in any given instance, I hardly cared anymore.

Kumu and sumApp together are unique. The kinds of maps we can create with them are unique and distinct from any other system maps or social network maps or asset maps or network maps or influence maps or any other kinds of maps people were used to seeing. At first glance they look very similar to other 'network maps', but they play by different rules, they are far more dimensional, and they are successful in different contexts. Most people couldn't see the difference. And that mattered.

First - it mattered because our maps were often dismissed out of hand based on pre-concieved notions of what I was offering.
Second - it mattered because even when creating a map with sumApp and Kumu, people's imaginations were trapped in one box or the other and they wouldn't cross the boundaries in their minds that our kind of mapping was designed to help them cross. This meant that they weren't actually doing what I was trying to enable them to do, and they got only a small portion of the value I wanted them to get from their maps.
Third - it mattered because, while adhering to those old conceptual boundaries, they also adhered to old process constraints which limited their ability to develop and move a map forward. They tried to comply with all kinds of rules that weren't relevant and that hindered their own hopes and progress.
Fourth - and maybe most importantly - it mattered because all those other kinds of maps are products. You define a pre-concieved outcome, implement a 5-step plan, and end up with a product - a thing, a document, however interactive - some experts make it, some others have it presented to them and poke at it a little bit. It's a short-lived object that spends a moment in a spotlight and then ends up in a drawer or at the end of a never-clicked link. Hardly worth the effort. Whereas what we were (and still are) trying to generate was/is a collaborative process, an ongoing network-wide conversation, a lens into the evolving life of a network, an emergent and adaptive tool for both reflection and action that increases the effectiveness of all the network actor's efforts.

Anyway - after struggling with those challenges for the first few years after developing sumApp, I realized that our framing was a huge problem. Using language that had already been applied differently elsewhere was the entirely wrong starting point for a conversation or a process. Whereas, if I gave it it's own name, we'd be starting with a fresh canvas. I could paint whatever picture I wanted and people could see each part of it by it's own merits, liberated from the pre-existing model in their own minds. It became clear we needed a name-change.

So I did some brainstorming and came up with some options, and then did some googling to see which of my options was already being used elsewhere. Other labels I considered: