Participatory Mapping | Part one | Connectivity
Greetings catalyzers everywhere! We’re initiating a community-driven blog discussing tools for the work of the People Centered Internet. I’ll work to serve as a guide and to get more information about the topics that the PCI community will bring forward. We’ll also have some very interesting interviews that will serve to stimulate further discussion for PCI community members as we share our interests in improving the world in some small, and maybe some big ways.
As a brief introduction, I’ve spent my career developing tools to convey complex ideas to at-risk communities, in my case communities potentially at risk from hazardous materials. In the shadows of Doug Engelbart, my basic takeaway is that the community must walk hand-in-hand with folks tasked to reduce danger and/or improve opportunity. The affected community must gain and incorporate enough knowledge to provide the community with true opportunities to modify the proposed outputs. And the change agents must understand that there are costs to any change, even with the most benevolent of intentions. If all the stakeholders are truly included, there is usually a solution that will allow everyone to reach consent, meaning that everyone agrees enough to keep moving forward.
The act of creating participatory maps increases individual ownership in the overall quest; provides easy to manage, very low-cost community activities that provide a common experience and produce tangible products; and in many instances provide a low-risk activity to initiate community change. We’ll spend a good bit of time discussing community hierarchies, but for now, we can note that PMs, created with paper and colored markers, don’t pose significant threats within the community hierarchy, giving time to build trust amongst all the stakeholders.
The first step toward reaching consent is a standard set of words and terms that all stakeholders understand. That’s why all participatory mapping projects start by developing a mutually agreed-on dictionary of terms. Generally, this can be accomplished by having community members draw and label their community. The words that the community identifies, along with associated locational information, establish the basis for the community language.
And because participatory maps can scale, we can act locally on the community level to improve communications and outcomes for individual communities, and then share the process of creating participatory maps and languages at each scale. For example, a community can develop an environmental plan, but in order to fully secure it, that community must also work with the communities “downstream” from it to account for the needs of all the affected communities.
Have you had any personal experiences with participatory mapping? Keep in mind that PM is as much about a process of guided communications as it is about producing an actual map. Many guided conversations would fall somewhere on the PM scale. There are many variations on this idea and we need all the tools we can grab, both to increase the chances of success and to take advantage of different skills that each of us brings to the quest of improving our communities — one world at a time.
In my next piece, I will explore the use of Participatory Mapping to Develop A Common Language for Common Outcomes.
Questions and comments are always welcomed and encouraged.
Richard Hammond
