This presentation outlines an approach for participatory community mapping, illustrated by the Tilburg urban farming community case. It ends with lessons learnt and a set of key open questions.

1. Making community mapping
work: the Tilburg urban
farming community case
Aldo de Moor
CommunitySense
WWW.COMMUNITYSENSE.NL
Berkeley meetup, March 22, 2016

2. Urban farming – sprouting seeds
2

3. Urban farming – growing the movement
• “urban farmers have a need for being involved in and
empowered by engaging, informal practices that lead to the
creation of viable tools and processes underpinning community
practice (CITIES Foundation 2012)”
3

4. Community sensemaking
• Communities can be seen as sets of relationships where people
interact socially for mutual benefit (Andrews, 2002)
• Sensemaking is the process by which people
give meaning to experience
• Complex properties (Weick, 1995)
– Identity and identification
– Retrospection
– Enacting in dialogues and narratives
– Social
– Ongoing
– Extract cues
– Plausibility over accuracy
4

5. Community mapping
• A core communal sensemaking activity
is community mapping (e.g.
geographical, knowledge mapping,
social network analysis)

6. Community mapping - geographical
• Mapping for Rights http://www.mappingforrights.org/participatory_mapping
6

7. Community mapping – content
• It Takes a Village http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-
l0lwFwPQO98/Tz0oOIs6bTI/AAAAAAAADEk/TLx1uuaMHH4/s1600/villagecmap_large.jpg
7

8. Community mapping – dialogue
• Dialogue mapping http://pictureitsolved.com/resources/practices/dialogue-mapping/
8

9. Community mapping – social networks
• NodeXL community detection
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Images/Image.ashx?graphID=55296&type=f
9

10. Participatory community mapping
• A core communal sensemaking activity
is community mapping (e.g.
geographical, knowledge mapping,
social network analysis)
• Participatory community mapping
– How to make sense of the current state of
the community?
– How to use the maps to inform active
community building efforts?
• Our challenge: how to weave the
community mapping method (language,
tools, and process) through an iterative
process of community-building?

11. The community mapping language
• Elements (based on collaboration patterns, De Moor, 2013)
– Participants (Persons, Organizations,
Communities/Networks, Roles)
– Activities
– Results
– Tools (Online Tools, Physical Meetings)
• Connections: increasing degree of involvement (based
on Conceptual Model of Community, Carroll and Rosson in (Carroll, 2012))
– Informedness
– Membership
– Involvement
– Producing

12. The community mapping tool
• Kumu http://kumu.io (web-based tool to track,
visualize, and leverage relationships)
• Key participatory community mapping features:
– Storytelling, shareable/embeddable
– Perspectives: decorations, foci, filters

13. Community map

14. Community perspective: decorations

15. Community perspective: focus

16. Community perspective: filter

17. Making common sense @ lunch

18. “Friendly competition”

19. Map as community catalyst
Retweeted by

20. Different communities, different maps

21. Maps starting to bridge communities

22. The community process:
some lessons learnt
• Capturing the data
– Dedicated map maker role, master/domain map makers
– Balance completeness and feasibility
• Make choices frequency & granularity
• E.g. quarterly official updates, only organizational
participants
– Motivating community members: friendly peer pressure
emerges
• But: avoid gaming the system
• Interpreting/using the maps
– Community members: participant/activity perspectives
– Community managers: management & accountability

23. Key open questions
• What types of nodes and edges work best?
• How to link empirical and “aspirational
(goals/best practices) maps”?
• How to make the maps fully owned by the
community?
• How to link maps (and their communities) to
scale for collective impact?