2011/Smallest Federated Wiki
Smallest Federated Wiki was a session at the first IndieWebCamp led by Ward Cunningham to produce a wiki that federates using fork history, and was created & launched as an open source project during that weekend.
For details about the project itself, see:
Session Notes
These are notes from the 2011 session about the Smallest Federated Wiki.
Notes from Amber Case
Small session held in the main room led by Ward Cunningham about a naturally emergent text posting system similar to Git, but for text. He wants to work on this tomorrow. https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki
Notes from Ward
User:znmeb and I spent Sunday working on this. We spent the morning thinking in terms of Node.js but ended up coding in Sinatra after lunch.
Work continues on GitHub. The current vision is to create a network of owner operated sites by having individuals or small groups do the following:
- Create an instance. We recommend an EC2 Micro instance. You can expect to pay 50 cents a day. Or try DIY. This is where you will own your content.
- Install Federated Wiki. Create accounts for your colleagues. Start writing together as you would in any private wiki.
- Publish content. Register a domain name. You can expect to pay 75 cents a month. This is where you own your identity. Open your site for read. Pull content from other wikis and return your improvements through automatic pull-requests.
Your content is stored in plain text files that can be zipped up and moved wherever you like. Just enough JSON encoded metadata is kept to attribute sources and report recent changes. Exotic formats might emerge but you won't be polluted by them (or spam) unless you pull it your way.
More Notes
- 2011 Project members: Ward Cunningham, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
- 2011 Goals: produce the smallest possible federated wiki
Inspiration
2011-06-23 at OSBridge2011 having lunch with Ward, Tantek exclaimed:
The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb