Regenerate Cascadia is approaching Climate Change, not with a solution, but with questions. It’s our hope that through an emergent process, we will come together to share ideas and solutions. But who has a seat at the table? What voices are missing? What are the new forms of best practices, protocols and governance we are going to use for making these decisions?

The work that the world needs is already happening in our communities. None of us have the entire picture or “the solution,” but together, we have many solutions, already active. How can we empower this work?  

The third component of Regenerating Cascadia is to visualize the community weavers who are regenerating Cascadia. We are doing this by creating a social movement map and bioregional directory of the volunteers, organizers, and groups coming together for the activation tour and summit, and then building active directories by place, category, and in which we can share our lessons, knowledge, and stories with one another. 

A Social System Map is an Online, Interactive Visual Language.

It’s a tool designed to:

• Help build critical mass and momentum behind tipping points;
• Help people within social eco-systems SEE and NAVIGATE COMPLEXITY;
• Amplify and accelerate the system-change efforts of people who are engaged in movements and transformation networks;
• Help network members collaborate more effectively across differences; surface and leverage the dynamic creative tensions inherent within multi-perspective networks, and navigate wisely within self-organizing human systems;
• Increase adaptivity, resilience and (re)generativity in social eco-systems.

A Social System Map Grows Outward From The People

Because the smallest – and yet most powerful – unit of social transformation exists in the dynamics between people, we start our mapping with people to visualize and understand the connections among the network’s ACTUAL ACTORS. People in a specific context, with a specific purpose. Rather than a snapshot of one moment, this social map tracks changes to the network structure over time.

But beyond pure network structure, we’re also interested in how the different social dimensions of the network (such as identity, experience, stakeholder perspective, roles, etc. – as defined by the people in the network) are reflected in the network’s patterns, to help understand the how those dynamics impact the network. We ask about and visualize whatever social differences in the network make meaningful and useful distinctions related to the network’s goals.

From there, we include actions taking place in the network – who is working on what, what goals or challenges are they addressing, what strategies are they using, what motivations are driving their energy.

The more collaborative and crowd-sourced the Social System Mapping process is, the more relevant it becomes to the people on the ground, the greater the learning about systems and complexity among network members, and the more energy and agency can be liberated throughout the whole field.

But this ‘ground-up’ and evolving dynamic, combined with the complexity inherent in mashing all these dimensions together means that the expectations we’d normally to bring to each of those types of maps above tend to constrain our thinking when it comes to Social System Mapping.

With Social System Mapping we loosen the boundaries of what we’re doing and how we do it. We’re looking less for an expert-driven conclusive analysis and more for an iterative, collective, emergent synthesis that leads to next-wise-steps at multiple scales. It’s not a precise definition of a single moment. It’s a fuzzy approximation of complex dynamics – meant to increase our our collective capacity to manage within the actual complexity in the real world.