Social Mapping
The Process
Stages of Social Mapping
Social mapping is an emerging practice of using data to bring together multiple views of communities to reveal areas of particular need or opportunity. It is about discovery and preservation of the connections we have with ‘our place’. It is about preserving the notion of place as an important part of identity, including how we understand our past and how we face the future.
The social mapping system is an emergent process created collaboratively with key stakeholders in a system that focusses on three stages:
Visioning
Technical input and mapping
Sensemaking.
It is a circular, iterative design process and focuses on identifying patterns in a system (both social and environmental) and the relationships that support them.
The social systems mapping process helps us to design effective methods of supporting people to learn to generate, navigate, make sense of and derive actionable wisdom from their social system. The process simultaneously builds collaboration muscles and participants capacity to navigate complexity within the context that is most meaningful to them - their own networks and systems-change efforts. It also facilitates system-shifting, healing, generative learning and restorative wisdom to emerge across a group of seemingly separate stakeholders.
Systems Thinking
“Systems thinking has taught us about complexity, interconnectedness, dynamical change - all things we need to understand and see if we want to help make the world a better place. But we can't represent any of those things in a geographical map. Systems thinking has shown us that what controls our reality is mostly hidden under the surface, invisible (though not absolutely unknowable). We've learned that the world view (our mental models, beliefs, values and emotions) we bring to our actions has powerful impact, and that the world view we've inherited (through no fault of our own) is extremely problematic.
Systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows said the greatest leverage point in shifting a system is in shifting the paradigm that informs the system.”
Where are we going next?
Season 2 will allow us to gather in small groups of local stakeholders and explore some of the key themes outlined above as well as looking at levers in the local ecosystem that we can facilitate positive impact within. We will also be inviting people to join into the social mapping process and add to the growing Calderdale ecosystem map outlines above.
Watch this space we will be updating this page with more information as the social mapping gets underway.