New Features Announcement! Maps without personal data, maps you can map whilst walking, maps that connect the abstract and the physical..
Originally published on Linkedin Jun 2, 2025
In so many ways, we are nothing like a software/product company. We are artists, technologists and community builders who find ourselves running something that looks increasingly like a software company.
There are many traditional tech approaches, mindsets and formulas that we don’t sign up to. We don’t ever design for the technology to be the main part of the experience and we wholly reject gamification and persuasive tech design methods- both on their own terms, and also because the ‘pick up time’/ engagement metrics run counter to everything we think is of value in the world- which is people, peopling...together.
We make it a principle to try to open up the ‘black box’ of technology in everything we do. Wherever possible, in the code systems and data infrastructures available to us (that are themselves based on a capitalist and extractive paradigm) we try to design technologies that show their workings and that keep people’s data visible and editable. That refuse obscure algorithms that only serve to alienate people from themselves and each other.
Having said all that, we have decided that we should be doing one thing that a traditional software product company does, and that’s letting you all know what features we’ve been busy building behind the scenes. There’s a lot to talk about just catching you up on the last six months, so this will be a series of short posts as and when we have a new feature or interface to talk about. Let’s start with:
Feature Bundle 1:
Anonymous/Event Maps
In our efforts to make sure all of our users’ data was securely protected behind a whitelisted-participants-only login wall, we definitely added lots of friction to the user experience. This trade-off was worth it while we were dealing with maps that were just for internal use by a community, sharing potentially sensitive data about their relationships and social values. But there are many situations where you want to make a collective map with a group of people and you don’t need to be quite so strict about access control. So we added a new feature that allows us to open access to our system on a map by map basis. This is particularly helpful when you are running an event and you don’t know ahead of time who will be taking part.
There are obvious limitations to the data that can be shared in this way but there are a lot of use cases where personal or otherwise sensitive data is not needed in the collective intelligence being amassed, and where this kind of ease of access can make all the difference to how people get to participate.
Multi-Answer Sets
Along with the ability to add a set of data to a map without creating a user account we added the ability for users to answer our question sets multiple times. We realise this sounds pretty basic and not worth a feature announcement….but! because our system is designed and built on the basis that users' data remains their own, we have always kept users’ data in the forms themselves, as a point of edit control for users and not as an entry point for that data to be extracted elsewhere. So if after a mapping you wanted to add or remove someone’s name (for example), the forms would be there for you, still complete with all of your data. This strategy was us being serious about user-controlled data, but did mean that our users could only ever submit one set of answers. Now we have put in a new management system and a new pathway with a “my Data” page that means that users can see at a glance how many data sets they have added and then navigate to any of them in order to add, amend, pseudonymise or delete any aspect of their data.
Node/GIS Maps
Ok this is a biggie. For as long as we have been making maps we have had to say “yes maps but not like maps, we make node maps”. Node maps do a whole other thing and that thing has been very productive for us so far. But we also work with communities of place and the physical location of things is often important. So we decided to blend the two types of map into a new kind of map.
Based on OSM mapping data we have now built an integrated map that layers in GIS data and node map data. This enables us to pin certain data points in place, just as you might drop a pin into a googlemap, and then connect that pin to non-geographic data. This means that we can have both pinned data points and floating nodes and connections all in one map. At its simplest the floating nodes act as a kind of additional notation to the dropped pins, so we can see how certain properties are spread out geographically. We can also build full network maps with all of their complexity and overlay those onto GIS maps.
This is one of those features that was fiddly to build but once you see it, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. That said - we’ve never seen it anywhere else. This one is exciting as we start to figure out what new community conversations or insights we can generate with it.
Walking Maps
Once we had added GIS maps, as real world play/arts practitioners we were excited to finally have something we could take to users in the real world. This just meant adding a ‘use my location’ button. So now instead of mapping being an activity that takes place indoors in an abstract way, our mapping can be an activity you do out in the world, in response to what you’re seeing as you go. Mapping can be a walk you go on with a group. It can be a a pin you drop on your way to the shops because you notice something beautiful and you want to add it to your community asset map. It can be a record of where you foraged wild foods or of the place you went late at night that gave you a creepy feeling. We’re yet to make a map from a walkabout, but we’re talking to people who want to test this feature with a group of young people talking about arts infrastructure in their london borough… so we hope to see that working in the wild soon.
New Features Announcement! Maps without personal data, maps you can map whilst walking, maps that connect the abstract and the physical..
Originally published on Linkedin Jun 2, 2025
In so many ways, we are nothing like a software/product company. We are artists, technologists and community builders who find ourselves running something that looks increasingly like a software company.
There are many traditional tech approaches, mindsets and formulas that we don’t sign up to. We don’t ever design for the technology to be the main part of the experience and we wholly reject gamification and persuasive tech design methods- both on their own terms, and also because the ‘pick up time’/ engagement metrics run counter to everything we think is of value in the world- which is people, peopling...together.
We make it a principle to try to open up the ‘black box’ of technology in everything we do. Wherever possible, in the code systems and data infrastructures available to us (that are themselves based on a capitalist and extractive paradigm) we try to design technologies that show their workings and that keep people’s data visible and editable. That refuse obscure algorithms that only serve to alienate people from themselves and each other.
Having said all that, we have decided that we should be doing one thing that a traditional software product company does, and that’s letting you all know what features we’ve been busy building behind the scenes. There’s a lot to talk about just catching you up on the last six months, so this will be a series of short posts as and when we have a new feature or interface to talk about. Let’s start with:
Feature Bundle 1:
Anonymous/Event Maps
In our efforts to make sure all of our users’ data was securely protected behind a whitelisted-participants-only login wall, we definitely added lots of friction to the user experience. This trade-off was worth it while we were dealing with maps that were just for internal use by a community, sharing potentially sensitive data about their relationships and social values. But there are many situations where you want to make a collective map with a group of people and you don’t need to be quite so strict about access control. So we added a new feature that allows us to open access to our system on a map by map basis. This is particularly helpful when you are running an event and you don’t know ahead of time who will be taking part.
There are obvious limitations to the data that can be shared in this way but there are a lot of use cases where personal or otherwise sensitive data is not needed in the collective intelligence being amassed, and where this kind of ease of access can make all the difference to how people get to participate.
Multi-Answer Sets
Along with the ability to add a set of data to a map without creating a user account we added the ability for users to answer our question sets multiple times. We realise this sounds pretty basic and not worth a feature announcement….but! because our system is designed and built on the basis that users' data remains their own, we have always kept users’ data in the forms themselves, as a point of edit control for users and not as an entry point for that data to be extracted elsewhere. So if after a mapping you wanted to add or remove someone’s name (for example), the forms would be there for you, still complete with all of your data. This strategy was us being serious about user-controlled data, but did mean that our users could only ever submit one set of answers. Now we have put in a new management system and a new pathway with a “my Data” page that means that users can see at a glance how many data sets they have added and then navigate to any of them in order to add, amend, pseudonymise or delete any aspect of their data.
Node/GIS Maps
Ok this is a biggie. For as long as we have been making maps we have had to say “yes maps but not like maps, we make node maps”. Node maps do a whole other thing and that thing has been very productive for us so far. But we also work with communities of place and the physical location of things is often important. So we decided to blend the two types of map into a new kind of map.
Based on OSM mapping data we have now built an integrated map that layers in GIS data and node map data. This enables us to pin certain data points in place, just as you might drop a pin into a googlemap, and then connect that pin to non-geographic data. This means that we can have both pinned data points and floating nodes and connections all in one map. At its simplest the floating nodes act as a kind of additional notation to the dropped pins, so we can see how certain properties are spread out geographically. We can also build full network maps with all of their complexity and overlay those onto GIS maps.
This is one of those features that was fiddly to build but once you see it, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. That said - we’ve never seen it anywhere else. This one is exciting as we start to figure out what new community conversations or insights we can generate with it.
Walking Maps
Once we had added GIS maps, as real world play/arts practitioners we were excited to finally have something we could take to users in the real world. This just meant adding a ‘use my location’ button. So now instead of mapping being an activity that takes place indoors in an abstract way, our mapping can be an activity you do out in the world, in response to what you’re seeing as you go. Mapping can be a walk you go on with a group. It can be a a pin you drop on your way to the shops because you notice something beautiful and you want to add it to your community asset map. It can be a record of where you foraged wild foods or of the place you went late at night that gave you a creepy feeling. We’re yet to make a map from a walkabout, but we’re talking to people who want to test this feature with a group of young people talking about arts infrastructure in their london borough… so we hope to see that working in the wild soon.
Why would I want a Relational Map of my community?
Originally published on Linkedin Apr 15, 2025
See who is here and cut through bias
Creating a relational map reveals the breadth of the community. Sometimes those commissioning the map already know all their participants, but more often a map is needed to do the field research into the further reaches of the community. By using something akin to snowball sampling- asking our first participants ‘who else is here?’ - these maps also reveal those hidden clusters of people that those at the ‘centre’ of a community can’t see. We also get to see roughly where the community’s edges are (as seen from the centre) even when there is no clear geographical or conceptual boundary. Whilst a standard map drawn by one person or small committee might accidentally entrench privilege within particular groups of people, these maps invite the community into data gathering, leading to a decentralised view of any given network.
Cultivate trust, reciprocity and community
By making these maps visible to all participants, the mapping process itself bonds the community. As we map, everyone sees the connections being drawn between them in real time. Afterwards, everyone has access to the map and can use it for themselves to make better connections, start projects, and generally feel empowered to pull together towards multiple goals.
Understand how we organise ourselves, consciously and unconsciously:
We all make and remake the world every day with our actions, and relational maps reflect that. We might think, as a community, that we have organised ourselves logically around shared interests, skills, geographies. That’s likely to be true but it is rarely the whole story: we have connections across other parts of the community for all sorts of reasons (shared history, shared values, personalities, happenstance). The outcome of each individual member of the community having their own personal constellation of connections creates a complex and emergent system of relationships, all powering the community in a particular way that is invisible to all - unless you take the time to map it.
Maximise the usefulness and effectiveness of the community for everyone involved:
In lots of communities there is an appetite for conserving energies and pulling together efficiently. A relational map reveals who is unnecessarily doubling up on activities around a shared value, and conversely what values or activities are being neglected or under-resourced.
Bring people in from the margins and distributing power
These maps can show who is holding relational power in a community, and whether or not they are working to distribute it. It can show which clusters of people are seen to be in the margins of the community, perhaps only tied in by one bridging organisation or person and therefore vulnerable to drifting away. And given that it is usually those on the edges of a community that have the potential to bring in change or innovation, that’s an important thing to know.
Expand traditional perceptions of value and impact
It’s easy to notice those high profile organisations that are great at winning funding and working in the spotlight. It’s much harder to spot those organisations who work to direct resources to those on the margins of the community rather than building their own profile. Those that operate as connectors or bridges are often overlooked by funders, but they are visible in a Relational Map, and can be resourced more equitably.
Set up projects that connect the community better
Any member of the community can look at the map and see where they might build collaborations across shared objectives. Our maps put those insights into everyone’s hands to act on as they see fit. However if someone in particular is charged with community building, they can look at how to match people based on expertise or interests. It takes a huge amount of effort to build and maintain a large community, but with a relational map, a community builder can understand where and how to focus their efforts. And this is related to:
Track & resource emergent projects and initiatives
Whilst we can look at change over time in our maps, we will soon have the ability to collect data on what kinds of conversations/interests/themes are emerging in the network in the shorter term, along with who wants to learn and who is already an expert. These tools will give us the ability to connect the network together in a much more responsive way by matching people as they start to be interested in the same thing.
Making the map visible to all for collective leadership and co-ordinated action
It is a core principle of our Relational Mapping toolkit that everyone who is in the map should see the map and be able to explore it for themselves. Not only does this distribute power and effort across the community, but it encourages shared responsibility and collective intelligence so that people can coordinate themselves responsively into action and leadership.
Mapping Alternative Futures with the Onion Collective
Originally published on Linkedin Apr 1, 2025
For more on the Alternative Futures project and the pluralistic, tenacious and joyful movement it seeks to understand, read this beautiful series of essays from the Onion Collective. Really, do - they are hopeful and exciting to read. The essays had such a positive response when they were published that we thought that those interested in the technologies involved in relational mapping might like to hear about some of our design processes along the way.
Whilst everyone we work with to create a Relational Map is looking to understand some aspect of their communities better, this was the first time that the Relational Mapping Toolkit was really put to work for some extensive field research. Our friends the Onion Collective were commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to uncover and understand the network of practitioners working for alternative futures in the UK today, and they wanted to work with the Relational Mapping Toolkit to do it.
The Onion Collective know our toolkit better than anyone- we have been in collaboration with them for many years building Understory together, and it was when working with them with early funding from Innovate UK that we built the mapping system’s key capabilities (foremost, the ability to generate a node map in real time from a question set - which has been the real game changer for communities looking to harness all that relational complexity quickly).
With Understory nicely established and mapping place-based civil society across the UK, we went on to experiment with creating maps for professional communities - such as the grantees of creative R&D programmes. We named this new strand of work the Relational Mapping Toolkit, and have been adding lots more features in response to all those communities’ needs over the last couple of years. So we were excited to put the new features to work with our original collaborators.
Using Relational Mapping to research a field
Relational Mapping is an incredibly effective tool for field research (and the field building that comes after- but we'll do another post on that). By asking ‘name generator’ questions of different types, we can map all the ways in which the trust, admiration, collaborations of the people we do know bring the people we don’t know into view. For example, we might ask ‘who do you see as co-travellers in this space?’, or, ‘who have you collaborated with in the last year?’. The answers to those questions add new names to the map. And in this way, the map can grow to a pretty comprehensive view of a community - even from a small original participant list.
Our standard (GDPR compliant) process at this point is to have our participants send an email to those people they named, telling them they did so, with clear instructions on how to remove themselves if they don’t want to be in there. We also create a plan for pseudonymisation and deletion before the mapping starts depending on the types of people in the map and how sensitive their data might be within that community (professionals or volunteers? Individual activists or established organisations?). For those communities who want to uncover as much of their community as possible, they can spend time ‘growing’ their maps by contacting multiple-named, central people, and sometimes we will run a second workshop to gather those people into the map, growing it out from the edges. The Alternative Futures project was very different: the Onion Collective ran 10 mapping workshops, using each to invite a cohort of newly named people and then walking them through the question set.
With the 10 different cohorts added to one map the network became very large. Maps this big are pushing at the edges of their legibility, and of how well the browsers can render them. The changes we have been making recently are responses to both of these problems. Firstly, we are focussing much more on viewing specific parts of the network that answer specific questions- our new View Builder will be all about creating these more meaningful sub-networks. Secondly, we have restructured to make D3’s powerful animation tools optional. So if the browser will struggle with that much animation, we can now just draw a map that does not animate. This change also sets us up to bring in any number of new visualisation methods. 😍
Hidden nodes
A new feature we built for this project was a hidden node system, so that we could build a part of the network to be only visible to users with particular viewing rights. Requests for this function have come up a few times since we first built the toolkit - those people funding or otherwise resourcing a community occasionally need some demographic data or financial data as part of their broader evaluation work, and they don’t want to map and survey their community multiple times. And on the flip side, communities expect to give their funder that information but don’t want it to be seen by everyone in the community. So ahead of this project, we were already considering making it possible to collect a category of more sensitive data alongside the network data, and keep it hidden in the backend.
For this project, one part of the map needed to be the network data of people’s relationships with funders, and it was decided that in such a fragile ecosystem it would not be appropriate for those relationships to be visible on such a large scale. So we created a feature for toggling on and off a sub set of data in the background before it reaches the map visualiser, and now have the ability to selectively include or exclude the parts of a network that are made public.
We're expecting, however, to deploy this feature very carefully. We've always tried to build as much equity as possible into how we collect, access and analyse community data. Our approach is that anyone who is named in the map gets access to the map, and we spend a lot of time designing the filters and views to be as intuitive and accessible as possible so that anyone can read the map and benefit from its insights. Safeguarding sensitive data in certain cases will enable more users to engage with the maps and access the knowledge there, but having the ability to collect and hide some sensitive data could certainly become extractive very quickly if we don't keep firm grip on those early principles- It's not a community building tool if that knowledge isn't well distributed.
Originally published on Linkedin Sep 26, 2024
Taking some time to catch up on reading in the August lull, we came across this research digest on placemaking from the Centre for Cultural Value.
It makes clear again and again how important it is to pay attention to relationships and power in placemaking projects- and that doing this work helps guard against the kind of large scale culture-washing that ushers in gentrification.
The tools we make help communities trying to create change inside complex systems, and at their heart, these tools are about taking care of the relationships between people, their organisations and their missions, so it was great to read a call for this kind of work from placemaking researchers.
“Brokering collaborations between residents, communities, policymakers, funders and private sector companies is often an essential part of placemaking. It is vital that this work involves careful consideration of the power dynamics in and between different parties to help dissolve imbalances and inequities. Otherwise, there is an acute danger that placemaking work will become exploitative and even destructive… What seems to be surfacing from the literature is a need for a relational approach by all those involved in placemaking.”
Worth a full read, but a few takeaways that interested us were:
Placemaking has a difficult history - gentrification often rides in soon after, perhaps implicitly encouraged, more often just not mitigated as an unintended consequence
Culture, when employed as a tool for urban regeneration, will come to be understood only in terms of economic value
Proper grassroots-led placemaking has better socio economic outcomes whilst also being about process over tangible result. The social processes, the relationships made, are the work.
Placemaking that makes space for, and integrates collective memory (histories, stories, traditions) has better socio-economic outcomes
Very little research has been done into the relationship between placemaking, culture and wellbeing.
The paper also quotes the excellent Cara Courage: “(placemaking projects should) encourage self-organisation and agency and integrate citizens’ existing placemaking practices” (Courage, 2019).”
We are full advocates for this within our mapping work: that helping to build complex communities (or any complex system) requires recognising what is already there. If we want to have good, equitable placemaking projects that contribute to community wellbeing, we need to map what projects are already there, who is already rooted to place, and to expand those existing communities and activities to include other stakeholders on an equitable footing. We can then use that collective space to listen to what people want, what they remember, what they dream of - and make continuing investments in those relationships.
It is also great to see an acknowledgement that the relationships are the work. This has been the theoretical foundation of our partnership with the Onion Collective and our Understory project- when you pay sufficient attention to relational infrastructure in complex systems- and work on the health of those communities, then the outcomes take care of themselves.
Originally published on LinkedIn Jun 19, 2024
From Stakeholder Mapping to Asset Mapping to Outcome Mapping, every sector has its terminology and to an outside eye it’s hard to know whether they are just different terms for similar things or actually very different things.
Given the amount of mapping terms flying around, we thought we should make the name of ours as clearly descriptive as possible 🙂
The Relational Mapping Toolkit, at its heart, maps relationships between humans in a community of practice (or a community of interest, or a community of place- take your pick) and how those relationships structure themselves around purpose, or intention, or working methods (the list is infinite, really).
Our Toolkit is actually a technology with a wraparound service to facilitate the making of the map. We work with the client who pulls together the initial invite list, and then we facilitate the workshop, taking everyone through a simple and short set of questions that generate the map in real time- the relationships, the interdependencies, the boundaries. Everything from the data model to the login methods to the displays are designed around this being a moment of collective sensemaking, with the immediate visual feedback of the network map springing to life as everyone answers the questions together.
And once made, our maps can be used to understand all sorts of things. A community can use its map to understand how people coalesce around shared purposes or services; where those shared purposes are under- or over-resourced; where the potential is for collaboration; how to link in those on the margins; how to best resource the community, and where that resourcing is going beyond its immediate recipients. They can even be used to build impact, when the map is designed and explored through a stakeholder mapping lens (more on that in a later blog post).
The trick is in designing the data model and the visualisation so that you can see and track the community behaviours that no amount of spreadsheets could do for you.
When someone wants a relational map made of their community, we ask lots of questions about what the community convenes around, what its current behaviours are, and what they want the map to show. Once we’ve heard the answers we build the question set, and figure out what the map should display and how (i.e what should be a node, what should be a filter box, and so on).
So we spend a lot of time entering dummy data and staring at node maps.
Here we are in the middle of figuring out how on earth we build a meaningful map of a community that is full of academics from many different departments across 4 different universities:
Those academics are in rich knowledge exchange with each other, but also with small businesses, freelancers and artists in the same community who need to be visualised with an organisation if they have one.
We also want to be looking at impact in terms of how weak ties at the start of the programme have moved to strong ties by the end, both within the team and into the organisations working for a better future in the place we are working in.
Once we get this right we’ll run the workshop, and once everyone has mapped, we’ll be helping everyone explore the map using the filter boxes on the right.
With this being a new tool, we are doing a round of baseline maps for various universities and creative communities, and are looking forward to mapping again later in the year so that we can start to look at how these maps evolve over time, and what that tells us about collaboration, the movement of resources, and how people share power and knowledge.