Managing cognitive overload in the Flora of North America project

The Flora of North America (FNA) is a large-scale collaboration involving over 800 scientists working together to create a 30-volume compendium of all naturally-occurring plants in North America. The size and complexity of the project result in significant cognitive overload which comprises not just information or data but also work practices and activities. We view FNA as a distributed cognitive system where information, people, artifacts, processes and expertise are functionally distributed among members of the community. Our Web-based work environment, the FNA Internet Information Service (FNA IIS), implements role-based views derived from the socially constructed roles that exist within FNA. We propose that the concepts of role-based views and boundary object reification represent at least a partial answer to the problems of complexity management and information overload in large-scale collaborative systems such as FNA