As we approach our third year of development we reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of federated wiki as we have come to know it. There have been surprises.
People
A few people have guided our open-source project where many more have made small but critical contributions.
Who?
Weekly hangouts have been an unexpected surprise where a sense of continuous project movement is maintained for core developers and visitors give us the feel of an academic colloquium series.
Highlights?
We do not yet have anything close to the community operating within the federation that we intended to support.
Why?
Technology
The client-side turned out to be much more important than the server. The client evolved well beyond its jQuery roots.
Events?
Node?
Calculation?
Repositories?
Rendezvous?
Writing
I've written a thousand pages by hand or by importing favorite documents. I've found the refactoring support useful but want much more. I see increased evidence that this will be the recognized contribution of our work.
Incomplete?
Curation?
Uncreative?
Working
I've suggested that pages and the plugins on them will replace the command line as the ad-hoc program composition machinery.
Formats?
Discovery?
Lifecycle?
Convergence?