I’ve been struggling to explain to people why federation is necessary. In practice, federation doesn’t get you much until there are people around to federate with.

Worse, it doesn’t get you anywhere until there is valuable material in your federation. Valuable material takes time to produce, and people aren’t going to spend that time making federated content until they see the value. So we have a bit of a Catch-22 here.

Luckily, I’ve come up with an example of solving a simple, pressing problem using federation that does not take much time investment. It’s about family movie night.

This video explains the problem and why a non-federated solution will not work. The next video will show how federation can solve it.

With Federated Wiki you can benefit from the work people are doing on completely unrelated sites, and use their work to pull together a site of your own very quickly.

Watching Alan Kay talk today about early Xerox PARC days was enjoyable, but also reminded me how much good ideas need advocating. As Kay pointed out repeatedly, explaining truly new ways of doing things is hard.

People looked at the PARC stuff, and many saw a solution to this problem or that problem. But that wasn’t the point. If you walked away from PARC saying — wow, fonts! or if you walked out of the Mother of All Demos saying “I’ve been *looking* for a way to organize my grocery list” you didn’t really get it.

These technologies were not solutions to problems as much as a whole new way to think about solving problems.

Anyway, the reason that I keep hammering on about federated wiki is that I think it is one of those rarer meta-technologies. In the way it upends certain ways of thinking about the web it offers us the ability to get beyond our assumptions about how people and computers co-operate.

And yet I find myself cornered into explaining it as a new way to organize a shopping list. (And doing it).

However, I’m lucky to have a good co-analyst in this endeavor. Jon Udell recently looked at Smallest Federated Wiki and, I think, saw something like what I see. SFW borrows ideas from GitHub and re-blogging platforms (like Tumblr, for instance). But it does so NOT in the context of a specialized use, but as a universal canvas. What’s a universal canvas? The Jon Udell of today points to the Jon Udell of 2006  to explain:

The most common workflows, by far, are mundane collaborations involving chunks of semi-structured data. Despite its warts, we continue to rely on e-mail with attachments as the standard enabler of these collaborations because it is a universal solvent. Our HR folks, for example, work for a different organizational unit than I do. Implementing a common collaboration system would require effort. Exploiting the e-mail common denominator requires none.

But while e-mail dissolves barriers to the exchange of data, we need another solvent to dissolve the barriers to collaborative use of that data. Applied in the right ways, that solvent creates what I like to call the “universal canvas” — an environment in which data and applications flow freely on the Web.

Jon, you’ll remember, literally wrote the book on Internet groupware. And he highlights a piece of this I don’t highlight nearly enough. SFW is a platform that allows you to apply a federated, mashup-friendly workflow to ANYTHING. Right now it’sthe *Smallest* Federated Wiki, and it only has a few plugins. But the plugin architecture is JSON-based and extensible.

A quick example. When I worked at Keene State we looked at using a Customer Relationship Management system to help us make sure we weren’t stepping on each other’s toes in dealing with faculty, and also to keep detailed notes on projects we were doing so that if someone had to step in when someone else was away on vacation they could.

But like so many collaborations, it fell apart. I did quite a bit of committee work and wanted my documents on faculty to keep track of nearly every email regarding decisions made, because having those emails at the ready is poitically important. Jenny, in Academic IT, on the other hand, wanted to track IT time more centrally and keep the “customer” record clean of intermittent communication. Becca, who worked in service learning, had about two hundred people off-campus she was working with that no one else wanted to see in the directory.

You’ll recognize this by now as a problem that a federated approach might be able to solve. But if SFW was just a wiki (and not a JSON canvas) you’d have to give up your structured data to use it, and that would hardly be worth the trade.

Here we don’t have to trade. You create a couple JSON plugins:

• An email plugin that allows you to drag an email onto the Factory drop-area, and store the email in the page
• An “customer card” plugin that allows you to enter structured data about your contacts, again as an item in the page’s story
• A “meeting record” plugin that allows you to log future appointments and past meetings as structured, dated data. Maybe it can even accept a drag and drop from Outlook Calendar.
• A “tickle-file” plugin that allows you to drop a “call next week” reminder on a customers page.

You build these, construct the proper view permissions and set it free. Everyone has their own site, but the records are connected across sites through naming conventions. Everyone has the power to organize their site the way they find most effective.

Better yet, since it’s a universal canvas, if we set up another federated wiki as a site for a project we are doing, we can just fork the pages on the people who are involved with that project over to our project wiki. And if we make notes on those pages in out project wiki, those notes can flow back to the CRM. Because it’s universal, see?

And all this flowing back and forth does not result in one bit of data loss. A page with that “customer card” plugin can get forked a dozen times through half a dozen projects and at the end of the line the JSON data is just as parseable as it was on day one.

“So now it’s a CRM?”

No, I know none of you are thinking that. You all realize the point is that this gives us a new way of thinking about how to think about problems. Not *just* CRM issues. *Even* CRM issues.

SFW isn’t really even a wiki to some extent. It’s more like a networked document.

I’m happy Jon sees this. I absolutely love my edtech friends and colleagues who, as Alan Levine put it, are committed to understanding SFW if only because of my excitement about it. But at some point you begin to doubt your own judgment… 😉

(Incidentally, Alan Kay also used to talk about a universal canvas, and claimed the most idiotic thing about the Internet was that your page of mixed-mode data didn’t arrive with the code you needed to interpret it. So the web became text with some hope-you-have-this-extension content. I’ll try and find that video.)

Link resolution in Smallest Federated Wiki can be confusing — depending on the page you are linked from links can go different places.

This video shows simple link resolution from journal history. A second video showing slightly more complex scenarios where pages not in the journal are suggested as alternatives is forthcoming.

In general I describe myself as a blogger, partially because my work title (Director of Blended and Networked Learning) just leads to too many questions, and partially because it ties together some experiences I’ve had over the past decade or so. Blogger is not quite accurate even there — the work I did with Blue Hampshire was technically more about running a pretty volatile online community than blogging, but it’s good enough description most days, even if blogging consumes only 20 or so minutes a day.

The other reason I describe myself as a blogger, though, is that after you blog for a while, you start “thinking in blog”. Your mind is writing blog posts everywhere, constantly trying to synthesize new experience into a meaningful blend of narrative and exposition. It changes you, mostly for the better.

I can’t find the reference now, but I read something recently that argued that the difference between the way a botanist looks at a flower and the way a layperson does is that the botanist looks at the flower with a question. And the point the person was making is when you write every day you start to look at everything with a question. In a way, daily writing defamiliarizes the world to you and makes it more difficult, because thoughts must be reconstructed for others who do not have reference to your experience or share your dispositions.

That said, however, different forms accomplish this in different ways, and are suited to different sorts of things. Blogging is a great tool in that it pushes you to see posts as steps in a journey to a current (and future) understanding. You link to past posts. You watch your thinking evolve. It also places you into a conversation with other bloggers, so that you understand how your conceptions map on to a larger communal consensus or disagreement. I could go on, but you get the point: the reverse-chronology structure of blogging combined with trackbacks, comments, blogrolls, and RSS pushes us to see knowledge in a certain way.

It’s been interesting playing with wiki the past few months, because what I’ve realized is that while I’ve used wikis (and taught with wikis) I’ve seldom *thought* in wikis.

As a simple example, I’ve done stuff with TV Tropes before. In TV Tropes you give certain tropes (repeated conventions) names, for instance Incredibly Obvious Bomb. Over time this library builds up to where many scenes in movies can be quickly analyzed with these ideas. You remember, for instance, the scene in Casablanca where the Jerk With a Heart of Gold makes an Iconic Song Request of his Black Best Friend?

If that seems silly, it’s not. Not in the least. By “chunking” large, complex observations and histories into terms and pages you make it possible for people to see patterns that would otherwise be invisible. The fact is, you’ll find that Jerks With a Heart of Gold tend to make a *lot* of Iconic Song Requests. That’s kind of interesting, right? It may be even more interesting that Jerks With a Heart of Gold often have Black Best Friends in a bizarre (and racist) form of Pet the Dog.

What’s Pet the Dog? Pet the Dog is another nexus of ideas. Here’s a snippet of that page:

This term was coined by cynical screenwriters, basically meaning: show the nasty old crank petting a dog, and you show the audience, aw shucks, he’s all right after all. Often used to demonstrate that a Jerkass is really a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, or, if more limited, that the character is goal oriented rather than sadistic and/or thoroughly evil. If used as an Establishing Character Moment then you skip right past the jerkass phase. Of course, this doesn’t mean specifically petting a cute animal, but any sign of nobility within a morally ambiguous character.

Sub Tropes include Photo Op With The Dog, Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas, Morality Pet (a character’s entire relationship with a villain is one long Pet the Dog moment), andAndrocles Lion (where the dog would later reward the one who petted him/her).

Now you can ask a meaningful question — to what extent is having a Black Best Friend in a film an instance (or non-instance) of Pet the Dog. Does that change over time? That’s a question in a simple sentence that as complex as any cultural studies article abstract, but rather than being established through a specialized jargon that implicitly references certain touchstone works it accomplishes the same density of meaning through simple parts well connected.

So here’s the thing — I’ve known this is the point of much wiki when reading things like TV Tropes. But I’ve never made use of it when running a class wiki (or co-designing a wiki with an instructor for a class). We’ve sat down and written encyclopedias, collaborative class notes, community resource mapping sites — all of which are excellent uses of wiki.

But we’ve never asked the class to develop a new language in the study of a subject, or to extend an old one. Instead, we gravitate to more traditional modes of academic production, but wikified.

Does anyone have examples of a class producing their *own* analytical language through wiki, TV Tropes style? If you do, can you share links in the comments?