FediForumTM

Event Listing

Project Map

@fediforum@mastodon.social
@fediforum.org
FediForum April 2026:

Tools for Collective Sense-Making

/2026-04/session/3-b/

Topics:

Convener: Brian Rayburn (@brianrayburn@mastodon.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Setting the Stage (from Convener):

Definition of Collective sense-making

Wikipedia Sensemaking: process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences.

Wikipedia Sensemaking (information science): the process of developing a representation and encoding data in that representation to answer questions specific to a task, such as decision-making and problem-solving (Russell et al., 1993). Gary A. Klein and colleagues (Klein et al. 2006b) conceptualize sensemaking as a set of processes that is initiated when an individual or organization recognizes the inadequacy of their current understanding of events.

Claude Collective sensemaking: the process by which a group of people jointly construct shared meaning from ambiguous, complex, or uncertain situations.

…

Key features of collective sensemaking:

  • Social and dialogic — meaning emerges through interaction, not individual reflection alone

  • Retrospective — groups typically make sense of events after they’ve occurred, not in real time

  • Ongoing and iterative — the shared story gets revised as new information arrives

  • Action-oriented — the goal isn’t just understanding but enabling coordinated action

  • Identity-laden — how a group makes sense of events is shaped by who they believe themselves to be Technical Reqs for Collective Sense-Making

Ability to define relationships between information to contextualize them. Ability to look at aggregates of relatioinships (looking at sets of relationships defined by different people to understand how different people view relationships the same/differently)

Relationships between different pieces of content

Relationships between Notes.

  • eg: Note A – Agrees with –> Note B

Activity would be:

  • User 1 creates relationship(Note A – Agrees with –> Note B)
  • Other potential relationships: Disagrees with, Contradicts, Supports, Is the topic of?, more?

Relationship between pieces of pieces of content

Relationship between assertions in notes. Decomposing a piece of content into more atomic pieces, then looking for relationships between those atoms both within and across pieces of content.

  • eg: Note A created by User 1 says “I like cheese. Cheese is delicious”

    • 2 atoms:

      • User 1 likes cheese
      • Cheese is delicious

  • Note B created by User 2 says “Civilizations across time have celebrated cheese because it is delicious”

    • 2 atoms:

      • Atom 1: Civilizations across time have celebrated cheese
      • Atom 2: Cheese is delicious
      • 1 internal relationship:
        • Atom 1 is because of Atom 2
        • Aggregate understanding

Look at histogram of relationships including a given thing. Ex. Histogram of relationships of cheese adjectives

Other Thoughts

  • Words/Concepts are inherently relational and need to be contextually understood, makes challenging to map content to coherent concepts that exist across instances of concept names. (Eg. Freedom means very different things to different people often with assumptions about what it is applied to: Freedom of speech, Freedom to feel safety)

  • Pluralism: Pluralism is a political theory that emphasizes the coexistence of diverse groups within a society. It asserts that power should not be concentrated in a single elite but rather distributed among various economic and ideological groups. This diversity is seen as beneficial for society, allowing for multiple perspectives and interests to be represented. (DuckduckGo Search Assistant)

  • Relation to Knowledge Graphs, knowls are assertions rather than concepts.

Notes

  • Discussion of prior exposure to “Sense Making”

  • Intros

  • People that bully people (about AI for example), measure to be a couple hundred people

    • Coordinated attacks coordinated on discord

  • Shared goals as ways to convene groups

  • Tea parties instead of salon, somewhat exclusive but still variety that leads to new thought

  • PAUL: discussion of self-sovereign identity

  • PAUL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2bSKmUKdI

  • Discussed censorship and difference between what’s technically possible and what is protected by the social contract (such as ATProto servers censoring at the relay/PDS layers).