Designing Representational Coherence into an Infrastructure for Collective Sensemaking

We discuss issues arising from the design, implementation and first use of a prototype infrastructure for distributed collective practice (IDCP), and reflect upon their intersection with some of the themes emerging from the Paris 2000 IDCP workshop. The problem of maintaining coherence in a distributed system is of central interest to us. We focus on the notion of representational coherence, and consider both process issues (the evolution of a discourse structuring scheme; tracing infrastructural history), and the affordances of the resulting product (uncertainty with respect to the scheme’s application; ways to map the topography of the emergent representation, with particular interest in graph theory). Throughout, we highlight issues that could have broader implications for IDCPs.