Measuring collaborative sensemaking

Problems of collaborative sensemaking are evident in major incident response where sharing salient information is key to the shared understanding of the situation. In this paper we propose that differences in sensemaking performance can be captured through quantitative methods derived from consideration of network structure and information diffusion as the group collaborates to achieve consensus in a problem-solving task. We present analysis from a large international study in which groups of people collaborate to solve an intelligence analysis problem. Our initial analysis suggests that 'edge' groups are able to collaborate more efficiently and perform better than those which have a hierarchical control structure.