Sensemaking is a process by which individuals (or organizations) create an understanding so that they can act in a principled and informed manner.
Who is a sensemaker?
actually, everyone is a sensemaker. We all get information and use it in our work.
For some people, sensemaking is a big part of their work life. They spend much of their time making sense of on-line information and have the most demanding sensemaking requirements. Here are some examples of today's leading edge and other sensemakers:
business analysts
analysts in government intelligence agencies.
scientists and other researchers
patent attorneys
information specialists in libraries
policy analysts
reporters and news analysts
students and educators
What sensemakers do
Besides developing an understanding of information relative to some task, sensemakers create tangible work products. These are used to communicate the "sense" they have made in forms such as presentations, documents, maps, timelines, simulations, or databases.
The "information diet" of a sensemaker has varied sources, such as email, the web, news feeds, scientific papers, patent databases, and other document collections. Information comes from a mixture of sources-public and private, authoritative and bogus, timely and dated, central and peripheral.
There are several key problems in sensemaking. For example, challenges arise in finding information, evaluating its quality, fusing information from many sources, and communicating findings effectively. Tools for sensemaking systems can provide leverage in several ways. They can extract information and create visualizations and maps of the information space. They can provide effective means for selective extracting, linking and reading of on-line information, and active annotation of the readings in ways that guide further analysis and data collection. They can provide a means for overlaying commentary and analysis on an extent corpus. The kinds of analysis and display depend on the information work being done. For example, information about people is a key element in many tasks. Such information is available as the authors and recipients of email, the authors of papers, the inventors of patents, and so on. Data about people can be analyzed and woven into maps of social connections, tracing such things as influence, authority, and shifts of interest over time.
