How to map governance assets

As an organisation or community leader, first explain to your members the importance and benefits of mapping the organisation’s or community’s governance assets, then you can follow these steps to map your governance assets.

1. Form a community or organisational mapping team.
2. Engage interested people at the beginning, as governance mapping also involves building governance capacity.
3. Identify and define the purpose of the governance map. Decide on the governance issues or problems that need to be addressed.
4. Identify the target audience of your governance map. This will affect what kind of information you need to collect and how you present it.
5. Decide on the most appropriate scale for the mapping project. Determine whether you will focus on:
   1. your particular local community
   2. your community and its outlying outstations or neighbourhoods
   3. two related communities
   4. two or three related groups or organisations within a wider community, or
   5. your location as a discreet settlement or as a dispersed set of groups.
6. Hold a training workshop to enhance community mapping techniques and skills. Make sure everyone involved in governance mapping takes part and that the workshop is controlled by your community or group.
7. Identify and collect relevant information from local people, as well as statistics, administration data and other sources. What you want to do may have been tried and tested already.
8. Create a physical map or series of illustrations using your data. Use Indigenous materials, photos and paintings that define the governance of your organisation and community.
9. Promote your governance map by sharing it with the community and your target audience.
10. Conduct a workshop to discuss the content of the map and to identify possible gaps, strengths and collective opportunities for building stronger governance.
11. Use the map to start practical activities that will help address any governance problems or weaknesses. Do not just stick it on an office wall.
12. Make sure people in the community and organisation take part in these practical activities and that they have ownership of the map’s information and its outcomes.
13. Recognise and respect the diversity of rights, values, ideas and opinions that exist within the community and organisation.
14. Make sure this governance mapping work is closely linked to real results that are important to the group, community and organisation.