Stakeholder Mapping Exercise

Map key stakeholders and their roles. Create documentation that maps open source works to key stakeholders and their method of participation in the community.

Map key stakeholders and their roles. Create documentation that maps open source works to key stakeholders and their method of participation in the community.

1. Introduction 🔗

Stakeholder mapping is the process of identifying and visualizing the stakeholders in your open source project. This visual map can help you understand the composition and roles of the community that influences and builds your project.

Your open source community should include internal stakeholders at your company along with external stakeholders. If your company already has a way to define stakeholders, use that to avoid context switching. If not, use whatever makes sense for the people and partners around your open source project.

2. Exercise 🔗

Exercise: Map key stakeholders and their roles. Create documentation that maps open source works to key stakeholders and their method of participation in the community.

This is a great exercise to do in person using sticky notes, or using a tool like miro.

  1. List all your stakeholders. This could include:

    • Contributors / potential contributors / ideal contributors. This can be broken out into different types of contributors: documentation writers, help desk, engineers, designers, etc

    • Current and potential partner organizations

    • Users / customers / early adopters

    • Internal stakeholders: executives, product owners, engineering / design

  2. For each stakeholder group, list the role they have (or could have) on your open source product. This could include:

    • Contributing ideas or feedback

    • Contributing code / design

    • Answering support questions

    • Using the product

    • Project leadership / decision making

    • Setting vision

    • Project management

    • … and more!

  3. For each stakeholder group, list their interest or motivation in your open source product. Why do they use or contribute to this project? You may not be able to answer this for each group, but complete what you can. This information will help you build a community engagement plan. This could include:

    • To learn / get mentorship

    • The impact on sustainable development goals

    • To contribute to the project mission

    • To solve a problem they have

    • It’s free

  4. Do your stakeholders groups interact with each other? If so, draw a line between the groups and label their relationship.

3. Template 🔗

This exercise works best in a more visual format where you can move notes and draw lines to represent connections. If that’s not available, here’s a table template.

Open Source Community Mapping Template

Stakeholder Role Motivation Open Source Work
< stakeholder 1 >
< stakeholder 2 >
< stakeholder 3 >

4. Examples 🔗

Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons - stakeholder map CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Foundation

Mapping out stakeholders CC BY-SA 2.0 Kennisland on Flickr

Updated on 19 Sep 2022