Addressing societal wicked problems requires collaboration across many different community networks. In order for community networks to scale up their collaboration and increase their collective impact, they require a process of inter-communal sensemaking. One way to catalyze that process is by participatory collaboration mapping. In earlier work, we presented the CommunitySensor methodology for participatory mapping and sensemaking within communities. In this article, we extend this approach by introducing a community network ontology that can be used to define a customized mapping language to make sense across communities. We explore what ontologies are and how our community network ontology is developed using a participatory ontology evolution approach. We present the community network conceptual model at the heart of the ontology. We show how it classifies element and connection types derived from an analysis of 17 participatory mapping cases, and how this classification can be used in characterizing and tailoring the mapping language required by a specific community network. To illustrate the application of the community network ontology in practice, we apply it to a case of participatory collaboration mapping for global and national agricultural field building. We end the article with a discussion and conclusions.
Participatory community network mapping can support collaborative sensemaking within and across communities and their surrounding stakeholder networks. We introduce the CommunitySensor methodology under construction. After summarizing earlier work, we show how the methodology uses a cyclical approach by adopting a Community Network Development Cycle that embeds a Community Network Sensemaking Cycle. We list some observations from practice about using community network mapping for making inter-communal sense. We discuss how extending the methodology with a pattern-driven approach benefits the building of bridges across networked communities, as well as the sharing of generalized lessons learnt. To this purpose, a community collaboration pattern language is essential. We show initial work in developing and using such a language by examining the cross-case evolution of core community network interaction patterns.
In the spring, I decided to go on a “research road trip” to Silicon Valley and Northern California. The overarching research theme of my road trip was to engage in some deep learning and sharing on my main current R&D focus: community mapping. I was going to visit and stay over at friends and colleagues doing great related work in their “natural habitat”. Some of them I had not seen in years, or even only met online: Jack Park, Eugene Kim, Nancy White, Jeff Conklin, Jeff Mohr, Howard Rheingold, Bev Trayner, Etienne Wenger, and Marc Smith, it’s been so good to meet (again)!
Of course, a road trip is nothing without a car, although fortunately the Bay Area does at least have some decent public transportation when travelling within the metropolitan area. The car also afforded me to visit some of the stunning natural sights dotting the northern part of this great state, including magnificent Point Reyes National Seashore and South Yuba River, as well as the mesmerizing shorelines of Big Sur and Point Lobos State Natural Reserve. Interspersing meaningful and intense personal visits with days of regenerative solitude in nature turned out to be a strong stimulus of my “Deep Thinking processes”, very much in line with my “thinking communities” philosophy.
To get some idea of the spirit of the research road trip, watch this video shot by my long-time friend and colleague Eugene Kim while I was visiting him in San Francisco:
The Berkeley meetup
One of the spin-offs of my journey was that Eugene invited me to give a talk at The Collective Spark in Berkeley. Hosted by Will Tam and Adene Sacks, it turned out to be a wonderful venue, atmosphere and bunch of most interesting and bright participants. We were received with drinks & snacks, allowing for people to meet and mingle extensively prior to the talk. After the talk, there were drinks again, so people could continue their animated conversations.
The WHAT of my talk was about participatory community mapping. It included examples from my R&D around the budding Tilburg urban farming community and other cases: using online network visualization tool Kumu to support the collective sensemaking of what the community is about and how to discover opportunities for community growth and innovation. See the slides:
Meshing physical and online community mapping
The novel part of the meetup for me was not so much the WHAT but the HOW. Over dinner the night prior to the meetup, Eugene and I were musing about how we could let the audience grasp the essence of community mapping more interactively than just by giving yet another standard presentation. We decided to create our very own “Instant Meetup Community Map”, taking advantage of the the Meet & Mingle-Introduction stage of this specfic meetup format.
We therefore asked the participants to not just have nice chats with various people before the start of the talk, but also tag each other with relevant topics that emerged during their conversations. This was to be done – very low tech – by putting sticky labels on each others’ sleeves.
As I was concentrating on getting to know the participants and preparing for the talk, Eugene acted as the community mapping facilitator. While everybody was still chatting away, he entered the participants and their associated topics in a simple Google Sheet. Kumu allows for maps to be generated automatically from such spreadsheets , so the emergent map could be visualized on-the-fly.
Just before my I started my presentation, we all had a look at the completed map together, with Eugene guiding our group discussion on what the patterns we distinguished might mean. The grey nodes indicated participants, and the orange ones topics. From the map overview, it’s easy to see how dispersed the interests of the group members were, yet there were a few common starting points, such as the topic of “consultant“. Still, the very fact that all participants were physically there to immediately tell stories about their more exotic topic assignments, provided lots of food for conversation.
It was a fun and inspiring exercise, resulting in both an aha experience of the power of community mapping and a nascent bonding between the participants, who were discovering surprising things they had – or did not have – in common. This lived experience must surely have made the participants more receptive to and understanding of the more general community mapping principles I was explaining subsequently in my talk.
Communities are the building blocks of collaboration in today’s networked organizations. They consist of people working together for mutual benefit, developing strong relations, and weaving a web of vibrant interactions.
Communities of practice, communities of interest, innovation communities, and so on, help to bridge knowledge gaps and cross collaboration barriers within and between organizations. However, successful communities do not emerge just like that. They often emerge in a very fragmented collaborative landscape of diverse stakeholders, activities, and resources.
To improve their collaboration, community members and stakeholders therefore need to continually make sense of it. This collaborative sensemaking involves developing a common process of reaching a shared understanding about their collaboration, including the various perspectives and interests of the community members and surrounding stakeholder network. Collaborative sensemaking helps community members find out what their collaboration is about, what relationships and interactions their community consists of, what collaboration resources are available, and what concrete opportunities exist for better working communities.
Participatory community mapping method
To support this collaborative sensemaking process, I am developing a participatory community mapping method and applying it to client cases via CommunitySense. Using this method, community members map their own community network by visualizing the many pieces of their collaborative puzzle into relevant maps and views that help them better understand where their common ground is and the next actions needed to make their collaboration grow.
Why Kumu?
To make and share the maps, I use Kumu, a powerful tool for network visualization, analysis, and sharing. What makes Kumu so powerful are the combined features of:
Elegant layout and multimedia content, such as embedded images and videos to make the maps look appealing and useful for storytelling.
Enabling different views on the map, best reflecting different stakeholder needs and interests.
Social network analysis options to, for example, determine what the hubs of activity are.
Web-based environment, so that parts of maps and views – each with their own permalink – can be shared and integrated with the daily activities of participants.
What’s in Kumu-based community mapping for you?
Kumu-based community mapping can serve many purposes for your organization, network, or community:
Presentation: tell the many rich stories defining your community network using Kumu’s online text, images, video, and style options.
Community-building: develop “cockpits” for community building, for instance, to see where the centers of community activity are. Use these cockpits for sensemaking and agenda-setting sessions with your community members to plan your next actions.
Accountability: show your sponsors and boards how your community network is about so much more than just producing “deliverables”: instead, how it is an essential hub in a growing stakeholder relationship and activity network, directly serving the mission and strategy of your organization.
My services
I help organizations, networks, and communities to design and set up relevant community maps, to answer the right questions to fill the maps with meaningful content and to discover customized ways to integrate the use of maps in their workflows and business processes.
As a consultant, I can help you to efficiently set up a Kumu-based community mapping process tailored to your specific collaboration needs. My community mapping services include:
Strategic advice on the relevance of community mapping for your organization
Consulting on how to use community mapping to improve your business, management, and communication processes in practice
Defining the scope of your own community mapping process
Designing the architecture of your community maps
Creating your initial community maps
Facilitating workshops to roll out community mapping in your community network
Training your staff to become their own map makers
Contact me if you are interested to learn more to discover how community mapping might benefit your collaboration.
Urban farming communities often consist of many disjoint initiatives, while having a strong need to overcome their fragmentation. Community mapping can help urban farmers make better sense of their collaboration. We describe a participatory community mapping approach being piloted in an urban farming community-building project in and around the city of Tilburg. The approach combines (1) a basic community mapping language, (2) a state of the art web-based community visualization tool, and (3) a participatory mapping process to support the community-building efforts. We outline the approach being developed and present initial results of applying it in the Tilburg case
Public libraries urgently need to reinvent their role in society. Through social innovation, libraries may adopt new functions and roles and even act as innovation catalysts in networks of increasingly interdependent stakeholders from different sectors. We investigate how to design such inter-sectoral public library innovations that are embedded in existing organizational practice and are both sustainable and scalable. We outline a practical social innovation sensemaking method based on a combination of a social innovation collaboration network model and process model. We show how we did an initial validation of the method using the results of two exploratory workshops with professionals in the Dutch public library world. We discuss the implications of this approach for expanding the role of public libraries from providing access to collections to becoming social innovation and community catalysts.
Researching with Communities: Grounded perspectives on engaging communities in research
Edited by Andy Williamson and Ruth DeSouza
Researching with communities presents a range of personal and grounded perspectives from academics, researchers and practitioners on undertaking research in ways that promote and privilege the voice of the community, is respectful of local or indigenous practices and is culturally safe.
Most definitely not a ‘tick list’ for approaching community-inclusive research, this book provides grounded exemplars, guides and discussion about the experiences of doing research respectfully and inclusively. It does this by drawing on the perspectives of researchers and community practitioners and by providing a range of reflective chapters that explore what community-based research means in a range of settings and for a range of people. Like the communities in which they are grounded, undertaking research in this way is always a unique experience.
This book is a valuable resource for researchers, evaluators, students, community practitioners and policy makers. The international authors cover disciplines from community ICT to health and refugee and asylum seekers to community development.
The book can be ordered online, priced at £24.95. For more information and to order your copy, please visit http://www.lulu.com/content/1550518.
Making CommunitySense 
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