(2011-07-29) Cunningham Smallest Federated Wiki

Just discovered Ward Cunningham's [new](https://github.com/Ward Cunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki) Spike Solution of Smallest Federated Wiki (P2P). The Smallest Federated Wiki project wants to be small in the "easy to learn powerful ideas" version of small. It wants to be a WikiEngine so that strangers can meet and create works of value together. And it wants to be federated so that the burden of maintaining long-lasting content is shared among those who care... This project should be judged by the degree that it can: Demonstrate that wiki would have been better had it been effectively federated from the beginning. Explore federation policies necessary to sustain an open creative community. Ruby Personal Server (not Ruby On Rails). A step beyond WikiWeb, more oriented toward Creative Network Group Forming?

Big emphasis on Client Side rendering, which reminds me of Tiddly Wiki.

Does this assume that each node doesn't have to deal with NAT/FireWall issues? Not to mention that this assumes you have a machine that's Always On. Can this be run on Cheap Hosting?

Ward presented this at IndieWeb Camp (attendees). Rather than posting content on many third-party silos of content, we should all begin owning the content we're creating. Publish short status updates on your own domain, and syndicate to Twitter. Publish photos on your own domain, syndicate to Flickr, etc, etc. See 2009-06-03-DentPersonalContentRoot.

• the demo notes: Ed describes the brainstorming behind figuring out the Smallest Federated Wiki he worked with Ward Cunningham on. He's built an appliance on Amazon EC2 that will run the server. They started in NodeJs but switched to Sinatra: it may not stay in Sinatra. They're going to run two read-only instances of the wiki and see if they can get them to federate with each other.
  • Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort
    • Python equivalents?

Everything is [in](https://github.com/Ward Cunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki) GitHub.

Update: Ward posted some short videos.

• GUI editor - drag paragraphs around (Node Web), even across pages - each node is a JSON element
• people's pages don't get merged together, they just get replicated.
• "an internal link could be internal to the federation (WikiWeb), not just your own server"

Jan'2012: still working on it.

• You can browse the pages that are publicly accessible, including a Persona list for the project.