In this tribute to Michael Gurstein, we first summarize three of his key concepts: Community Informatics, Effective Use, and Community Innovation. We then apply his ideas to a case on participatory collaboration mapping in Malawi. We end the tribute with a reflection and re-iterating Mike’s call for Community Informatics research and action to keep meeting.
Public libraries are cornerstones of civil society. They form the “third places” where individual citizens meet and mingle, get informed, learn, as well as form and share opinions. Increasingly, however, public libraries are also seen as the meeting and co-working hubs of the many communities making up the rich fabric of urban society. Thus, public libraries are getting new, societal roles as city labs and social innovation catalysts.
The Tilburg Public Library is known for its groundbreaking library innovations, such as the recently opened LocHal, which is truly a “world-class urban living room for Tilburg in an iconic former locomotive shed of the Dutch National Railways”. More about that in a future post. Another one of its strategic innovations concerns the KnowledgeCloud, the “network in which persons, communities and organisations meet one another both online and offline to discuss current, societally relevant themes”. It has grown into a national library project, including several other Dutch public libraries as well as the Dutch Royal Library.
From 2013-2015, I was the project leader for developing the initial demonstrator of this KnowledgeCloud. In the project, I used my experience with knowledge sharing for social innovation to help conceptualize the KnowledgeCloud methodology, network, and platform. This rich experience has convinced me even more of the crucial role that public libraries all over the world (should) play in dealing with many of the complex, “wicked” problems playing out at the local and regional levels.
Because of my relevant expertise, I was asked to participate as an external expert in the CIDES project. Since 2017, I have been on several working visits to Brno and Prague. It is a very inspiring project to be involved in, because of its scope and importance, as well as the professionalism and dedication (not to mention the great sense of Czech humor ;-)) of the library studies team involved.
CIDES focuses on (1) collecting and analyzing practical social innovation lessons learnt by public libraries across the country, (2) refining and extending the most promising of those lessons through a range of incubators and accelerators – and (3) disseminating these lessons nation-wide. Underlying the approach is a solid methodology, of which the CommunitySensor methodology is becoming an integral part.
One way we use CommunitySensor is to chart the local social innovation collaboration ecosystems around participating Czech public libraries. As we are using the same mapping language for all library maps, it also becomes easier to do cross-case analysis, integrate maps, and even see connections at the national level.
More Czech connections: mapping public library social innovation ecosystems together
We have also done several mapping experiments to test and validate the participatory aspects of the methodology. Two of these experiments – one in Prague and one in Brno – nicely demonstrate the gist of the approach:
Mapping the social innovation ecosystem around the Prague Public library
In March 2018, we conducted a mapping experiment with around 35 librarians of the Prague municipal library. In break out groups, the librarians were to come up with local social innovation themes, then select and map existing or proposed initiatives that would fit those themes. We then all together tried to make sense of the emerging bigger picture in the concluding plenary discussion. This process was considered very valuable by participants for building a joint sense of understanding and ownership. It also helped to validate and inform the CIDES methodology for collecting, connecting, and scaling up social innovation lessons learnt with public libraries. This visual impression should convey the spirit of the mapping session:
Mapping the collaboration ecosystem around the #Brno2050 common agenda
Another experiment took place in Brno in October 2018. The city of Brno has invested heavily in an ambitious public agenda setting process to ask local stakeholders what their city should look like in 2050: #Brno2050. By design it has been a very participatory process to come up with the themes that matter to and are co-owned the citizens of Brno:
However, how to make these themes work in practice? How to go from idea(l)s to working, aligned initatives, projects, and programmes with collective impact? How to pool resources that were already there, acknowledging that Brno is a truly smart city in terms of its large social capital formed by its many vibrant communities?
To support this common agenda setting process for the city, we explored if and how we could use our emerging participatory collaboration mapping approach for social innovation in and by public libaries.
To this purpose, we held an initial meeting to do a quickscan of the existing Brno collaboration ecosystem, using the #Brno2050 city themes as a starting point. About 30 participants – including many stakeholders representing various Brno social innovation initiatives – gathered at the Brno Jiří Mahen Library. We asked them to make a rough inventory of their own and other initiatives that they knew of. On the fly, we added as many of these initiatives as we could to the draft #Brno2050 ecosystem map, so that many of the hidden connections between the initiatives were made visible immediately. We then again had a lively plenary discussion in which the participants commented on the collaboration patterns they saw emerging. It was a very fruitful and spirited exchange of ideas. Participants indeed saw this approach as a way forward to keep building momentum on not just dreaming about the long term city strategy, but also making it actually work in the long run. Representatives of the municipality were enthusiastic and committed to investigate if this approach could become part of their urban planning process.
To conclude this post, a visual summary capturing the involvement of the workshop participants building (on) their common city agenda:
More details about our methodology and the experiments we conducted will be shared in future research papers. This blog at least should give you a sneak preview of the cutting edge work currently being done in the Czech Republic on making public libraries catalyze social innovation.
This Southern African country has an agricultural governance system consisting of many layers of organizational structures between the national and the village levels. This can result in collaboration inefficiencies if not carefully coordinated. In a joint initiative by INGENAES (Integrating Gender and Nutrition within Agricultural Extension Services) and the Malawi-based SANE (Strengthening Agricultural and Nutrition Extension) sister project – both being implemented by the University of Illinois – a pilot was started to use participatory collaboration mapping to strengthen the District Agriculture Extension Services System (DAESS). This is the country’s decentralised extension framework for enabling agricultural stakeholders to enhance coordination and collaboration. Our aim was to engage in a participatory process of identifying and organising agricultural issues for collective action within and across the governance levels.
The pilot is being co-ordinated by the Malawi conference participants who had proposed this seed action. It started a few months after the INGENAES conference in 2017, and is still ongoing. Pilot activities so far have included:
defining a community network mapping language based on the community network ontology described here;
creating a seed map using this language to capture the essence of the Malawi agricultural collaboration and governance ecosystem;
training by CommunitySense of 10 Malawian agricultural extension professionals in the CommunitySensor methodology and Kumu tool;
two field visits applying the methodology to local agricultural communities;
a stakeholder sharing session with national Malawian agricultural organizations;
continuing to use and expand the mapping approach at the regional, district, and national levels.
Key to the Malawi implementation of our participatory collaboration mapping approach is that local agricultural communities are owners of their own maps. The mapping approach is being used by agricultural coordination platforms made up of diverse agricultural stakeholders (e.g., businesses, farmers, researchers, extensionists, etc.) who map initiatives within the communities where they work. As most villages do not have electrical power, posters are used to map several local initiatives at each session, thus spanning the digital divide. These initiative maps are then presented in turn to the overall session group by the community members. Symbolic connections between elements that the initiative maps have in common are made by connecting the posters with pieces of thread. The posters remain with the communities, since they are the owners of their own content.
The trained agricultural stakeholders take pictures of the posters, then add the posters to the online Kumu maps when back at their local office. During their next visit, they bring prints of the revised online maps, which can be discussed and further annotated, The Kumu tool then allows for individual online agricultural community maps to be aggregated into new views, so that interesting connections and patterns in the combined maps at the higher (area, district, and national levels) can be discovered. An example could be a certain stakeholder role prevalent in many local agricultural communities, thus that role could bridge community initiatives across villages, regions, and districts, spawning further sensemaking activities:
Stakeholder roles connecting different local agricultural community initiatives
All of this may sound rather abstract. To show rather than tell about the essence of the mapping process – which are not the map artefacts but the PARTICIPATION process – below you find some photo impressions of how very much alive the various kickoff participatory mapping processes were. They capture the flow (and fun!) of participants mapping together in four subsequent steps: (1) training the agricultural extension officers in the capital Lilongwe; (2) the first mapping workshop with the Kalolo ASP (Area Stakeholder Panel) representatives, (3) the second mapping workshop with their peers of the Mbwadzulu ASP, and (4) a sneak preview of the subsequent scaling up the approach.
Before we continue, you should keep the following in mind: it is very easy to get lost in the cool tools and mesmerizing maps. However, the maps are not a goal in themselves. What matters is how they can help trigger processes of people coming together, better understanding one another, building trust and respect for them to engage in collective action that ultimately leads to lasting change for the common good, and an – at least – somewhat better world. The sense of energy, focus, fun and community that emanates from the below photo galleries, are exemplary of what community empowerment can be unleashed by making the invisible visible together…
So, join us on our Malawi mapping journey…
Step 1: Training the agricultural extension officers
The Malawi case is ongoing, and results are still being written up. However, we hope that – like in the INGENAES conference case – this succinct case description gives a flavor of the community empowerment participatory collaboration mapping can generate. This point is stressed by a quote from one of the district level representatives:
“DAESS mapping provides a remarkable opportunity through which districts and DAES may easily plan and monitor the performance of the system in relation to delivery of extension services. The more people are oriented and the sooner the approach is rolled out to other districts, the more DAESS will become a force/system to reckon in the councils and at national level.”
Capturing the mood at the end of the stakeholder meeting in Lilongwe where the initial results were presented
Acknowledgments
The Malawi mapping project was partially supported financially by USAID. Many thanks to SANE, the local pilot project team, in particular Stacia Nordin, the Lilongwe and Mangochi DAESS and the Kalolo and Mbwadzulu communities for their contributions and enthusiastic participation in helping to make this methodology their own, and sharing their stories. Pictures taken by Aggrey Mfune, Stacia Nordin and Aldo de Moor.
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.
Making CommunitySense 
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