Aldo de Moor

Owner CommunitySense, Netherlands

Aldo de Moor is a research consultant specialising in community informatics and the founder of CommunitySense. He has over 25 years of academic and business experience helping community networks discover collaborative common ground.

Humanity faces numerous wicked problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, refugee crises, mass migration, and food insecurity. While many top-down initiatives, led by governments and large organisations, aim to address these issues, they typically do not sufficiently use nuanced local context knowledge. It is, therefore, networks of communities of all kinds- including local communities, communities of practice and interest, and collaborative communities – that are going to make the difference.

Communities are bound together by their unique cultures, practices, languages, perspectives, and interests. Internally, their members have a wealth of common knowledge to guide their work. To effectively address many wicked problems, working towards collective impact is essential. This requires collaboration not just within but also with other communities and outside organisations. Local neighbourhoods need to collaborate, environmental experts and the town hall. Together, they can develop green solutions that meet the unique challenges and strengths of each neighbourhood, as well as satisfy city-wide infrastructure requirements. Similarly, indigenous and farming communities in rural areas can benefit by sharing carefully selected indigenous knowledge of sustainable land management practices that work for the region. This collaboration can reward indigenous communities for the knowledge they are willing to share while making modern farming practices less destructive, more productive, and more resilient in the long term.

Community knowledge plays a crucial role in finding working solutions for the many wicked problems facing humanity and nature. However, sharing communal knowledge with the wider world presents difficult challenges, such as ambiguous knowledge ownership, power imbalances, and intercommunal
misunderstandings. A powerful approach for helping stakeholders make common sense at the necessary scale and impact is to let them map their collaboration ecosystems. This entails visualising the essence of the collaboration, such as the most relevant themes and issues at play, the core interrelationships between the stakeholders and processes in which they collaborate, and the most important resources and tools that they employ. We need better (use of) methodologies and tools for the rightful participatory mapping of collaboration ecosystems around wicked problems. Additionally, these approaches should facilitate the collaborative sensemaking of the maps by stakeholders to arrive at potential courses of action that are both effective and acceptable to all involved. By jointly discovering and building upon collaborative common ground in such more community-sensitive ways, the needs of all participating communities can be better met. These grounded and organically scalable ways of working together across a multitude of communities are essential in setting a humanity in peril on a more just and sustainable path.

Keywords: wicked problems, community networks, collaboration ecosystems, participatory mapping, collaborative sensemaking