Tool: Frame Of Reference Map
June 16, 2025
Someone’s frame of reference is made up of their experiences and the stories they tell about them. It is the private source material that motivates their beliefs about and perceptions of the world.
People interpret the world differently. The ability to effectively communicate and coordinate action depends on people’s ability to translate across different frames of reference.
If we’re going to plan and act collectively, we need ways of holding in view and recursively inspecting the value systems of those involved. Myers-Briggs Type and Enneagram do at least the first of those two but they don’t allow people to dynamically dial in or out detail, adapting to the languages of narrow sub-niches and evolving with culture.
This tool is a first step in that direction.
The frame of reference map is a tool designed to visualize a group’s perceptions relating to a topic or idea.
Examples: Social_Maps
The activity designer picks a topic, a key relationship to study, and writes the core questions which will direct the activity.
They invite their community to participate and collectively do three things:
- Nominate subtopics and vote on which ones to explore.
- Place those selected topics on a conceptual map. This is a 2x2 grid defined by the key relationship set by the activity designer.
- Describe their personal frame of reference for their mapping.
Then everyone can explore the map of their collective relationships, inspecting further by subtopics or by user.
This could be performed live over the course of 10 minutes or be a living interactive document that remains open and evolves over time.
Current state of the app is limited but functional. This is an interactive tool that allows communities get feedback about their current state in a way that is decentralized and can evolve over time. That being said, it is very much a work in progress. I consider this to be a minimally useful proof of concept. Here are some ways I’d like to expand its functionality:
Basic functional improvements
- Authentication: for now everyone is anonymous. I’ll add admin authentication soon so individuals can design their own conversations (click here for an invite). Membership for all users will be very useful when there is enough participation to begin connecting across maps. I feel like the basic idea needs validation before I can begin work in this direction though.
- Comment feed: the app feels like it needs more room for conversation. Currently the context comments provide a useful set of information about the map but I think the social atmosphere would be made richer with room for conversation. Here’s my idea: a central comment feed that can be scoped to various domains of the conversation. At the broadest scale this would be all the comments made. Narrower scales would be all comments related to a certain subtopic or particular user. At its narrowest they could focus on to replies to an individual context comment.
- Notification system: the ability to subscribe to an activity so you don’t have to check for updates.
- Timed activities: one way to keep everybody in sync is just to set timer so everyone knows when parts of the activity are closing.
Conceptual improvements
- Filtering: the ability to draw circles on the map in order to specify groups for deeper interactions.
- Sharing: you should then be able to start a new thread in response to a filtered subset of the population, proposing a solution to an observed challenge, suggesting new activities to gain insight into a common state, etc.
- Longitudinal tracking: the ability to observe changes in the community over time.
- Meta-mapping: each activity is isolated. Full maturity of the concept requires a platform for sharing and discussing activity design and social map instances. Again, basic idea needs validation.
Join a frame of reference social map