Date: June 20, 2001
Speaker: Ward Cunningham, software developer and business consultant —
The Talk
Wiki is a web site written by its users. The site and the software were created by Ward Cunningham for the Portland Pattern Repository. It is home to an Informal History of Programming Ideas, as well as a large volume of related discourse and collaboration between its readers. Wiki exploits a small handful of clever ideas to engage the organic and self organizing properties of humans. The result has been dubbed WikiNature. Here is how some humans try to describe it: “WikiNature is typing in a bunch of book titles and coming back a day later and finding them turned into birds in the Amazon.” “Its like being on a really good FreeSoftware project, where you? find your bugs fixed and ideas improved.” In this talk Ward will explain what makes WikiNature, why it worked for the pattern community, and why most attempts to do more will spoil it for everyone. Feel free to visit WikiWikiWeb at URL.
About the Speaker
Ward Cunningham is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has also served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory before that. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming. He is active with the Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programs conference which it sponsors. Ward created the CRC design method which helps teams find core objects for their programs. Ward has written for PLoP, JOOP and OOPSLA on Patterns, Objects, CRC and related topics.