Choosing the right approach for your project
Influence mapping projects use varied methodologies or create tools that help to find evidence, stories and visualisations that aim to hold those in power accountable for their decisions.
In this section we will be discussing methods and approaches you can use to implement your influence mapping project. If you will build software you might use agile or waterfall methodologies. When considering design and user experience you might choose participatory or top-down approaches. If there's a research aspect to your project, you might be adopting action research or comparative research. In other sections we address specific methodologies for collecting, organising and publishing your data.
Design Methodologies There is a very large amount of resources around design practices and methodologies. If we narrow it down to those relevant to the influence mapping field, we're broadly looking at designing user interfaces (a subset of interaction design) for navigation or exploration of complex facts and narratives, designing for participation, for collective sensemaking, viral engagement and facilitating action.
You might want people to participate during various phases of your project. With crowdsourcing, your audience helps you collect or even verify your data. Folksnomies is a term used to describe the collaborative creation of taxonomies which can help organise data. There are tools that will allow audiences to create their own interpretations from data sets and share them.
One of the relevant current trends in design overall, is user centric design also sometimes included within human-centered design. This approach focuses on involving the audience or end-user from the beginning and throughout the project implementation, in order to stay focused on meeting their needs. User centric approaches have spread beyond the interaction design realm and into technology, public services and business.
Technology Methodologies For years, technology has been developed with an approach called "waterfall model". This meant that each phase of the project would follow the previous one, for instance a feasibility phase would be followed by a proof of concept phase, leading to detailed requirement gathering, feeding into detailed specifications before even starting to write code. In the past 15 years, a more iterative approach has gained widespread adoption. In this method, agile software development, software is build in smaller pieces. Each iteration aims to add a few important features which are then released and tested by its end users.
Open source software development, consists of both a licensing model (allowing anyone to reuse and modify software) and a collaborative approach where the software is developed publicly. People can see how the code is progressing and contribute if they wish to. Many open source projects mainly benefit from contributions coming from their own team. Projects which succeed in gathering large amounts of external support are generally focused on the nuts and bolts, for instance the Linux operating system project.
In his chapter, The Social Context of Open-Source Software, Eric S. Raymond points out an important facet of the growth of well known open source projects: > the best hacks [software projects] start out as personal solutions to the author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be typical for a large class of users.
Have you applied or developed a practice that you would like to share with the influence mapping community? Edit this post on Github!