Software tools for collaborative construction of knowledge representations have existed for several decades. Despite their potential, use of such tools has yet to grow beyond a small universe of academics and practitioners. My research is aimed at expanding this universe by attempting to understand and characterize skilled practice in the facilitation of such representations. Most of the limited work in this area looks at either novices (e.g., learning how to construct such representations), on outcome measures such as participant satisfaction, or on the characteristics of the knowledge artifacts and technologies themselves. I am focusing instead on the "high end" of skilled or expert practice. To do this, I am closely analyzing Camtasia recordings of Compendium sessions and attempting to build a grounded theory analysis of practitioner (facilitator) "moves" in the context of the sessions. This talk reports on the first of these analyses, of a 137-minute Webex and teleconference Compendium session held with a team of scientists participating in the NASA Mobile Agents field trial in May 2004. I analyze 761 facilitator statements and Compendium moves, which were categorized in such terms as degree and kind of engagement, areas of focus, type of move, and other criteria.

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