Overview
The Wardley Mapping community is an active, decentralized network of practitioners who use, teach, and extend the mapping framework. The community's existence and character are shaped by Wardley's decision to release his work under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), which explicitly invited community ownership of the framework.
Open-Source Tools
The community has developed several tools for creating and sharing Wardley Maps, enabled by Wardley's creative-commons-release decision:
OnlineWardleyMaps (OWM): A web-based tool for creating Wardley Maps, developed as an open-source project. It allows users to define maps using a text-based markup language and renders them visually.
MapScript: Various community-developed formats and tools for expressing maps in text that can be rendered visually.
Other tools: The community has built plugins for various platforms, integration tools, and extensions that expand the mapping ecosystem.
Community Activities
Community Character
The Wardley Mapping community has a distinctive character shaped by several factors:
Significance
The community is both a vector for the framework's dissemination and a validation of its utility. The fact that practitioners voluntarily adopt, teach, and extend the framework — without commercial incentive from Wardley — suggests it provides genuine value. The community also extends the framework in ways Wardley alone could not, discovering new applications and refining the methodology through diverse practice.