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 | The Company: Ward Cunningham |
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A Letter From Ward Cunningham
We humans are communicators. When in each other's presence we pick up the vibe. We can tell what's going on without listening to words, should words even be spoken. We humans look for clues everywhere: body posture, tone of voice, eye contact. And we humans integrate all of these clues into a coherent picture. We make sense of the way people around us behave. Happy or mad, alert or tired, engaged or drifting, well intentioned or not, we can tell.
The computer seems to be a rather cold and sterile thing until you find another human at the far end of some connection. Should you strike up an email correspondence with an old friend, you will soon know how that friend has changed over the years, or remained the same for that matter. Has the wit sharpened or dulled? Has experience lead to wisdom or curmudgeonliness? The computer will never know, but the humans using it can tell. It is what we do.
I created the first wiki thirteen years ago. I was working with engineers, a dozen or so intently, and another 500 following our work. Engineers are known for finding, organizing and analyzing facts, not the soft signals I describe above. These engineers were in fact software engineers, folks skilled at teaching the computer to understand just about anything. We assembled to tackle the toughest problem, to understand how we did what we did. We were sure that it wasn't just numbers, just formulas, but we couldn't quite nail down what it was that we did.
I created the wiki to find something uniquely human that none of us alone could quite put into words. Before wiki, computer communications were long strings of point and counter-point. I could reply to your email that replied to my email, but I couldn't revise that first email to make it better. With wiki I let each contributor revise his contributions, when ever it seemed appropriate, and I let each contributor revise the contributions of others so as to make the whole make sense.
You are probably thinking "that can't be right." Why would I let someone else modify your words? Well, It was an experiment. I didn't think of anyone's words as their own. I thought of my first wiki as something that we all owned and cared for collectively. It was a leap of faith for anyone who contributed. I asked each contributor to trust the others to do well by the words they added to the whole. The big surprise: it worked.
Wiki was ground breaking not in what I added to the program, but what I left out. By not presuming to know how people would write and edit and organize, I left room for them to write and edit and organize in original ways. This certainly was not the norm for computer programing, where one tries to control everything. I let people be people. We found that order ensued, not chaos as one would expect. We found that we worked well together in an environment filled with trust.
My wiki was an outlier thirteen years ago. I'm proud to say that ideas that emerged in that simple environment have been replicated many times over. These days we generally get the idea that well-meaning people can make more together than they can alone. Now it is back to the programmers to apply these principles to ever grander areas of construction.
ZoomAtlas is a perfect example. We can make an atlas of our world that shows what we know and love, not just what a satellite can see. We can weave our memories and impressions together using the computer's ever improving graphics to make a collaborative picture from our eyes and minds and hearts in equal proportion.
This feels to me like one more launch of a voyage of discovery. I hope you will hop on board to help us find out how good this can be. I caution you now, do not be concerned if you do not yet see where this is all going. Such is the nature of mass collaboration. The good news is that we are all humans and if human nature is what I think it is, it is going to be great.
Ward Cunningham
Portland, Oregon
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