Movement Mapping
Understanding connections and capabilities to build collective power
We help create situational awareness and identify potential for collaboration and mutual support, with workshops and digital tools to map and explore social movement landscapes, visualise connections and gaps, and share knowledge about capabilities and challenges.
Why Movement Mapping?
Movement mapping supports collaboration within and across movements by helping us understand what different participants in the movement are doing, how they are connected, how resources are distributed between them, and how movement-level strategy emerges from their interactions.
Mapping has proven to be useful to engage in different ways with others who share our goals: moving from competition to collaboration, sharing resources, and harnessing the power of our diversity.
This enables us to build a more cohesive, resilient and effective movement.
Mapping enables us to
- leverage our connections and capabilities
- share resources and use them more efficiently
- avoid duplicating work
- create a culture of reciprocity and collaboration
- spot gaps and identify key areas of work
- build and harness collective power
Workshops and collective sensemaking
We facilitate workshops with and support organisations, funders and other stakeholders to pool their knowledge and collaboratively develop a map of their environment.
We work on walls and boards, with sticky notes, tape and string, and create tangible artifacts.
Core of the workshops is a process of collective sensemaking, allowing participants to develop a shared understanding of their context.
This is an example of the force-directed graphs generated by the prototype of our software. The environment modelled here is the participatory democracy movement space.
Digital mapping tools
Together with Common Knowledge, we are developing digital mapping tools that automatically generate network diagrams and analyses from movement data collected via simple online forms.
We want them to be useful for movement builders, community organisers, ecosystem facilitators, funders, and whoever works on building collective power. We plan for them to offer:
- An unlimited number of contributors, expanding the available knowledge beyond the room
- Easy maintenance and updates, making the map a living and evolving artefact
- Algorithms that help explore patterns, spot gaps and identify potential for collaboration
- Shareable data and diagrams with fine-grained access control
Interested in mapping your movement?
Whether you want to understand your movement ecosystem better or are interested in our digital mapping tool, we’d love to hear from you.
Discuss a collaboration