Collaboratively mapping and understanding communities
“The short mapping session showed us where priorities were shared, ideas for potential collaborations, and how we can support each other's work. Now we have a shared language and set of references that gets us moving in the same direction faster.”
— Simon Lock, West of England Music & Arts
For those supporting, building or resourcing communities, there are challenges:
The community could benefit from taking more agency and distributing leadership across the network.
Long term power dynamics are blocking community energy and initiatives.
There’s a need to build more collaborations across the whole network.
The community needs strengthening, but large events aren’t helping.
It takes more than a database to track complex community behaviours.
People hesitate to start new initiatives because they dont know whats already in place.
With the Relational Mapping Toolkit, it’s different:
Members of your community can input their data via a simple webform, and immediately see themselves in a network map. The video below shows how the information is added into the system and how it is displayed.
This is crowdsourced data: we run workshops in which people get together to answer 10 questions on a simple web form. As they do so, they create a dynamic node map of their community in real time
- and it takes less than an hour.
Everyone gets equal access to the data - so everyone benefits from the insights it enables.
Everyone can see where the potential points of collaboration are, or where they are overlapping.
Facilitate and enable your community to do what it wants to do- connect and grow.
Identify resource gaps *as you go*, and track second order impacts of your resources over time.
Contact Us
Get in touch to request a chat or demo:
Who are we?
The Relational Mapping Toolkit comes from the team at Free Ice Cream. Free Ice Cream specialise in designing playful participation tools for public and digital spaces, civic processes and complex problems.
