This document outlines a proposed approach to use distributed data mining techniques to help users make sense of large amounts of content in online collaborative spaces. It discusses how "big data" is affecting users' ability to understand discussions. The approach involves preprocessing content, clustering it using Hadoop and Mahout, and generating topic clouds. A case study clusters content from technical forums and finds topic-specific discussions not obvious from category names. The conclusion is that distributed data mining can help summarize huge online discussions and uncover buried topics to support user sensemaking.