Why We Do Mapping Workshops

In Malmö - at Organize! - we delivered the third iteration of a workshop we first concocted for the New Organising Conference in 2024. A few things have changed, a few things have remained constant, and one aspect of the workshop has emerged into something approaching clarity: the reason we need to keep doing these workshops.

Firstly, what has remained constant is the importance of conveying the fundamentals of what a map is. That doesn't mean having some ultimate definition of “map”, but to be able to describe it in the abstract is crucial, so that participants are guided to a generalist perspective: seeing that the important characteristics of mapping are the same regardless of the format of the map. Geographic maps, relational maps, power maps: they are all the same type of object with different expressions, and to see them this way helps to cement the understanding that a map is a semantic device, and mapping is a powerful process for extracting meaning from complex information.

What has changed - and more specifically what has reduced in each iteration - is the background & related political context that we include, even though we find it interesting, important and salient to our work with maps. If it's important, why did we drop it? I think the reason for this is that filling participants’ heads with lots of ideas (especially ones that we hold dear ourselves) is a great way to distract them from the core learning objectives of the workshop! Fast-forward - from a 45 minute version of the workshop in January, to a 2-hour version here in Malmö - and this time we didn't talk about critical cartography or counter mapping at all, or give a large number of examples from different areas of the movement. Instead, we launched them straight into doing ; within 10 minutes, they were making maps, and they didn't really stop until the end.

Which brings me to the clarity: this workshop exists to help people think like mapmakers . We have been developing a platform - Mapped - for several years now, and the project is going well but it has become increasingly clear, as we've developed it, that there is a conceptual gap that exists in the space between the user interface of the tool and how we hope people will use it. We run onboarding sessions with organisers, and some of them have really taken the tool and run with it and are using it in exactly the way that we think makes it powerful for guiding tactics and strategy, but those organisers are very much in the minority. There's a limit to what a software onboarding session can really provide; it can give users the literal understanding of how to use the tool, but it can't give them what they need to think like a mapmaker.