New from me at Wired:
Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, is proud of his invention. “We changed the world together,” he says of those who contributed to his software development site C2, which spawned the online collaboration software that underpins Wikipedia and countless other services across the net.
But there is one thing about the wiki that he regrets. “I always felt bad that I owned all those pages,” he says. The central idea of a wiki — whether it’s driving Wikipedia or C2 — is that anyone can add or edit a page, but those pages all live on servers that someone else owns and controls. Cunningham now believes that no one should have that sort of central control, so he has built something called the federated wiki.
This new creation taps into the communal ethos fostered by GitHub, a place where software developers can not only collaborate on software projects but also instantly “fork” these projects, spawning entirely new collaborations.
Wired Enterprise: Wiki Inventor Sticks a Fork in His Baby
I’m thinking about getting this up and running and moving the dossiers to it.
See also:
Smallest Federated Wiki on Github (requires either Ruby and Sinatra or Node.js and Express)
One-click installer for Amazon Web Services (there are also instructions for getting it up and running quickly on Heroku)