Diagnosing Communities with the 5Ds: Applying a Framework for Understanding Barriers to Communication and Collaboration in Three Small Texas Communities

The 5Ds framework—Distance, Diversity, Dilution, Demand, and Disengagement—has been used to better understand barriers to communication and collaboration in regional entrepreneurial ecosystems, including the multi-community regions of Northwest Arkansas and the Aichi Prefecture of Japan, and the country of Panama. Can this framework also be applied to provide insight and guidance to individual communities? In this paper, we attempt to do so. Examining three small towns in Texas, each facing unique social and economic threats, we use the 5Ds to better understand their underlying challenges and how each translates into systemic communication and collaboration issues obstructing community members from working together to solve community problems. After using the framework to diagnose collaboration barriers for each town, we compare these results with each other and with previous community and regional findings. Finally, we explore implications for scaling this approach, especially in professional communication research into communities and improve intra-community communication and planning activities.