To understand why one would want another wiki and a quirky one at that we step back from web technology and consider what we expect of computers and the people who use them.
Digital computers and communication reached an inflection point in the '80s when integrated circuits and fiber optics allowed every desk to be connected.
# Internet
Christopher Alexander and Alan Kay both brought into focus the utility of things, their network nature, their inherited behavior, and their necessary relationship to biology.
Although Kay emphasized a personal computer providing undivided attention to its user, Alexander sought collaborative construction by communities of resident users. Myself with Kent Beck immersed ourselves in both visions and constructed from Kay's, a collaborative programming method aligned with Alexander.
The surprise votes of Trump and Brexit mark a new inflection in how we use computers in our civil decision making. Orchestrated abuse of algorithms and big data leaves us wondering who is really in charge and what are their motivations.
# Ownership
The modern datacenter hosts thousands of computers where some are devoted to the algorithms in the application tier while the others hold big data in the storage tier. The business models that make this possible are based on standardization of the product and surveillance to pay the bills.
Wikipedia has confounded educators, journalists and economists by building and enforcing community norms within international communities hosted on grant-funded infrastructure. It maintains a serviceable notion of truth in an internet now known for its falsehoods.
While Agile emerged from Wiki, no next-generation of thought is likely to emerge from Wikipedia because its rules disallow original contributions. This is how it keeps the peace: reference required. With federation we have created a new space where individual owners of modest infrastructure can do their own thing and assemble as their mutual interests align.
Founded in 2011 as an open-source project, the federated version of wiki is maintained by a small community of programmers who tracks the rapidly changing landscape of web technologies.
# Community
Our work on federated wiki is free to be taken. There is no center to which one must ask permission to use or make change. It is enough that we learn from each community that makes use of our work.
We help the communities that need us given the purpose for which they have assembled and the unique nature of their work. We've added calculation for material sustainability, graphs for knowledge management, maps for geography, rosters for classroom administration, and star-rating for voting. In each case we aspire to capture the language of the domain in the markup we use. Where we have missed the mark, others are free to reinvent our work and distribute it as their own.
We're happy to acknowledge other parallel efforts that either inform or may become part of our work.