Our current era of big data coupled with the popularity of internet-connected mobile devices offers the opportunity for data collection, analysis and visualization with an objective to reveal and understand trends and patterns in our communities. As individuals we are usually members of multiple - perhaps overlapping - communities. For example, we are members of a community due to our current professional activity or due to our favourite sport or hobby activities. Graduates from higher education institutes are also members of corresponding alumni communities. There are many alumni communities at national and international level all of which can offer plenty of data regarding individual profiles and experiences of their members. Such data could be collected, analyzed and visualized so as to provide useful insight for graduates, departments and universities and perspective students. Gaining insight on the profile and experiences of students who graduated particular departments/schools could enable the design and development of appropriate recommendation systems for assisting perspective students to make wise decisions on which departments better fit their interests and scientific and professional objectives given their educational and financial background. Universities, colleges and academic departments could also benefit from an insight on their alumni profile and evolvement and thus design and implement appropriate policies for improving the function of the organization and for widening the personal and professional opportunity space for their alumni.

Motivated by these observations and taking into account that our department remains among the most competitive schools in Greece both in terms of entrance requirements and student profile as well as among the most promising choices for professional opportunities for its alumni, we designed and implemented an online application for collecting, analyzing and visualizing alumni profile and experiences data. According to our approach, data collection is designed to be a collective procedure based solely on the voluntary participation of alumni of the department. Participating members of our alumni community are asked to provide short answers to several questions presented in an attractive and easy-to-follow graphical user interface. Questions are organized in two main sections covering profile data and experiences of alumni both as students and graduates. Collected data is then analyzed and visualized by means of popular and easy-to-understand charts presented in publicly available sections. In addition, our application encompasses an interactive graduate map indicating the current geographical distribution of alumni with a vision to strengthen the bonds between community members and to maintain the connection between the department and its alumni.

Our application, which is responsive and developed using state-of-the art web technologies including html, php, and Javarscript, could be used to serve any academic department wishing to keep track of its alumni community as a collective effort supported by the voluntary active participation of individual members via the exploitation of modern information visualization techniques.

Keywords: Alumni data analytics, web application, information visualization, data collection as voluntary collective effort, empowering and strengthening alumni communities.