Mapping Community Stakeholders

Connection to Tech Comm

Megan Bronson, Sweta Baniya, and Liza Potts demonstrated a method for analyzing the rhetorical situation for disasters in their session “Collaborative Strategies for Networks for Collective Action Disasters.” Using examples from Potts’ 2014 Social Media in Disaster Response the three led attendees through the analysis of a disaster, asking that we identify “the people, places, technologies, organizations, groups, etc. that responded to, were affected by, or are somehow involved in a given disaster. Folks might refer to them as actors, change agents, chaos agents, participants, etc.” The group I was in focused on the BP Oil Spill Deepwater Horizon, creating this map:

Participant Map for the BP Oil Spill which includes the BP company, oil workers, protesters, oil costs, beach goers, animals, the oil rigs, people buying gas and automobiles, boaters (including fisheries), and the legal system.

This additional way of mapping the communication related to an event can fold into the communication action projects as well. Whether looking at an event that has happened or planning one, writers need to think through how all these participants impact the messages, the medium, and the messengers. The visual aspect of the analysis seems likely to appeal to students, even if the maps are only used to make behind-the-scenes decisions about the projects.