Collaborative Sensemaking Support: Progressing From Portals and Tools to Collaboration Envelopes™

Abstract

Sensemaking involves incomplete discovery, inaccurate interpretation, and imperfect action that will fail in someway and likely alter the situation in some unknowable way. Sensemaking demands intense, deep collaboration with participating agents, who many times are physically distributed and come from different groups and organizations. Incorporating collaboration functionality in a piece-meal approach in different ways as add-ons within a portal-based architecture can place heavy demands on users to learn, organizations to train, and ultimately limit the potential of collaboration technology to achieve organizational goals. It is proposed that individual and group sensemaking is a better starting point from which to build architectures to mitigate socio-cognitive limitations of participating agents collaborating to make sense of things. Three levels of Collaboration Envelopes™ are presented and architectural considerations presented to guide development of technology to better support collaborative sensemaking.