Fully GDPR - Compliant

Maps are built with consent, not surveillance, and participants own their data.

How it Works

1: You meet with us to talk through your community journey and how a map can support it.

2: We design the question set and analyses that ensure the map will gather and display the data in exactly the right way to meet the brief.

3: You book us to run the mapping workshop, or we help you run your own.

4:The community gathers in real life or on videoconference to fill in the 10 question form and the live network map builds in real time.

5: Everyone leaves with insights, evidence, a shared story, and a map your community owns.

The process takes 4 weeks and you can run the process as many times as you like from Step 3 to build more people and organisations into the map as needed.

Participatory Mapping

With our roots in game design and interactive theatre, and years of experience running participatory action research in communities, we have participation running through our core.

We started Free Ice Cream as an answer to seeing an increasingly complex and alienating world, and we knew game design and technologies, deployed carefully, could help. In games, you can pull levers and push buttons inside a model of something real- you have agency. With technologies and data, you can bring more information into the conversation quickly, and use them to think more clearly about how lived experience is constructed - as long as the technology/data is firmly held in its place as a tool, and not a set of answers.

We started Parlour as the non-profit governance structure for our Understory project- a 7 year long participatory action research project into how we create the conditions for communities to prepare for plausible futures and build connections to thread more joyful futures through them.

This means that when we had a product, we made sure that participatory design is built into every code line of it. With the Relational Mapping Toolkit we reject any form of data scraping, extraction and unjustified privileged access.

Our users see this. From the set of principles everyone signs up to promising to protect the collective data, to the insights presented to everyone as soon as the map is built, to the logins they walk away with that give them access to the distributed knowledge that can be easily acted upon to help participants in their own work.

Our intentions are clear (and if they’re not, let us know!)

Social Network Analysis

We are geeks. We are excited to work at the intersection of social network analysis measures, and collectively gathered, community-held knowledge. SNA has its roots in academic research but has been proven in many domains for years- and yet not many people are operationalising that research in community work, so integrating these worlds opens up exciting new conversations and opportunities for the communities we work with.

Our tools have key SNA measures that can be deployed on any project:

  • Degree Centrality : The number of direct connections a node has, indicating immediate influence or activity. It includes in-degree (incoming) and out-degree (outgoing).

  • Betweenness Centrality : Measures how often a node acts as a bridge along the shortest path between other nodes, identifying brokers of information.

  • Diameter : The longest shortest path between any two nodes, indicating the maximum distance to communicate across the network.

  • Clustering Coefficient : Measures the strength of division of a network into clusters or communities.

Snowball Sample Data Gathering

It is often the case that the people commissioning a community map are doing so to get a broader picture of everyone involved, and for these projects we use something akin to snowball sampling (relational sampling?).

The first group of people come along to a mapping workshop- it can be as small a group as 15 people- and they answer the question set and populate the node map. As they do, they will share names of people they associate with in that community in some way, and then that group of people can be invited into the map. The map builds out in waves of invitees. This is best managed with multiple workshops but can be done using email invitations only.

Under GDPR, everyone who is named who is not in that workshop needs to be told that they were named, so our data protection methods often invite this kind of map expansion anyway.