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.

1. Towards a participatory
community mapping method:
the Tilburg urban farming
community case
Aldo de Moor
CommunitySense
WWW.COMMUNITYSENSE.NL
Communities & Technologies Conference,
27-30 June 2015, Limerick, Ireland

2. Urban farming
• “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)”
2

3. Community sensemaking
• Communities can be seen as sets of relationships where people
interact socially for mutual benefit (Smith 2002)
• Sensemaking is an ongoing retrospective development of
constructing plausible images from a social context (Weick et al.
2005)
• Formalization of sensemaking efforts helps to reduce ambiguity
and to create common foundations for collaborative action
(Vlaar et al. 2006)
3

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

5. 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

6. 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

7. Community map

8. Community perspective: decorations

9. Community perspective: focus

10. Community perspective: filter

11. Map as community catalyst
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12. 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

13. Future research
• Language
– Expand conceptual model of community (Carroll et al.), in
particular Belonging-construct
– Draw from community /social networking theory, e.g. community
bridges, community clusters
• Tool
– More advanced SNA, e.g. NodeXL
– Integrating in social media ecosystem for community activation
• Process
– Develop operational/governance roles, e.g. Reader-to-Leader
(Preece and Shneiderman, 2009)
– Draw cues from proven participatory design methods, e.g.
geographical community mapping, Knowledge Art, Socio-
Technical Walkthrough (Herrmann et al., 2009)