wardley-maps.sgit.ai / Where we lose
Participant disclosure
This site is published by the sgit project. That is not a neutral position, and the specific ways it is not neutral are worth stating before you read anything else here.
What we have a stake in
- The doctrine assessment on this site rates a sibling project — pki.sgit.ai's registry MVP pack — and was written by the party being rated. The page says so at length, which mitigates it and does not remove it.
- The original contributions here come out of our own project. De-commoditisation, the custom-axis verdict, the broken middle, maps-as-graphs and Explorer/Villager/Town Planner were all developed while building something, and they are all conveniently compatible with the thing being built. Ideas that arrive that way are not wrong, and they do need reading with that in mind.
- We criticise an ecosystem we benefit from. Pointing out that
awesome-wardley-mapslists five dead things is fair and useful. It is also the CC0 resource this site benefits from most. Credited warmly, corrected anyway. - Every map here is drawn by the party being mapped. Including the one that maps this site. The corpus asked for "a map that shows us badly" as the test of whether these are analysis or marketing, and it has not been drawn. Until it is, that test is unpassed.
Four places our approach is the wrong one
| Where | Why we lose |
|---|---|
| You want to learn mapping from scratch | Go to Mapping 101 and the book. This site deliberately does not teach the basics, partly for licence reasons and partly because it would be worse at it. Our start page says so on its first line. |
| You want to draw maps with other people, live | We have nothing, and neither does anyone else since MapKeep died on 30 May 2026. Maps in git are a good answer for review and a poor answer for a workshop. |
| You want a doctrine assessment tool | We publish a worked example and a JSON schema. That is not a tool, and calling it one would be exactly the overclaiming this site complains about elsewhere. Forking a JSON file is a workaround for the absence of software. |
| You want maps as queryable data | Our strongest architectural idea has no implementation at all. If you need this today, wardleyToGo and cli-owm are real software and we are an argument. |
What we think we are good for
Three things, stated narrowly. A resource index that checks itself and publishes the date. A doctrine assessment where every rating names the artefact it rests on, which is a format worth stealing whatever you think of the ratings. And arguments about the method that come from applying it to something real for six months and being willing to publish where it did not work.
Everything else here is either someone else's work, linked, or an honest account of what has not been built. The latter has its own page, and it is longer than this one.