Creative Cottage and Courtyard

I would like to describe what it feels like to write and share in the federated wiki. I'll use a metaphor.

Think of a federated wiki site as an artist's retreat. Imagine a small cottage where you are comfortable as yourself and surrounded with your own work.

Imagine then that there is a courtyard out back surrounded by more cottages where more art happens and you feel it happening. The cottage is nice but the courtyard is even better.

Our neighborhood is filled with short and narrow pages that we lineup around the courtyard. We look left, then right, then back to the left again. These pages are the facades behind which the art happens. Short paragraphs are easily scanned. It is hypertext so we can step in or turn the corner to see more. The courtyard goes on and on.

Sometimes there is a party in the courtyard. We meet to chat with neighbors. Conversation might start with what could or should be done. But then soon someone is pulling out their work to show how it relates. We agree it fits. This is exciting. What could or should be done evolves. We promise more work to show next time we meet.

This is the tempo in the creative cottages. Work in progress, show some work, more work in progress.

I was telling a neighbor about the opportunity I have to speak to you here today. I started trying out ideas.

No no no I was told. You make this place sound like anybody's note-taking app. Say how it feels. Tell them what it feels like to be here.

How does it feel, I ask?

It feels like whitespace. Tell them that.

When a poet of a musician speaks of whitespace they are talking about the hard work of making a place to do something new.

Whitespace is not a blank page where you can do anything but nothing comes to mind. Nor is it like a check-list, or an outline, or a questionnaire where you can only do one thing, an already imagined thing.

When you have skills, and a body of work for context, and colleagues with practice, when you have practiced the practice, then sometimes you can push all that aside and make space for something new. Whitespace.

My word counter says I am half way through this talk so I'm going to have to come up with a good example.

Alan Kay talked about whitespace. He used the Japanese word "ma". It sounds like this. (silence)

I spent 15 years of my career studying Smalltalk. There was a lot to study but most interesting was the way Smalltalk made room for more. "ma" indeed.

Smalltalk made the assumption that you were there to program and that you would learn something important with every program you wrote. That has been my experience.

I wrote the first wiki to explain this aspect of Smalltalk. I didn't have words to explain it. I didn't know whitespace or "ma". But I thought I could create the experience if I found the right people and didn't make too many rules.

Many authors found their voice in that wiki. And many books were written about ideas that filled that space. Bo Leuf wrote the book that explained The Wiki Way. He was the larger of our partnership. But I pointed out that wiki hadn't run for more than a week before it was first cloned. If we were to write a book about wiki then it would have to tell how to make a clone.

Wikipedia was founded on a clone of that wiki and was soon cloned again to make it more fit for purpose. But that is another story. My word counter says I have 90 seconds to wind this talk up.

I've never written a talk word for word but with only five minutes today I thought I should try. I wrote a talk timer to help out. It reads the page, counts the words, then computes elapsed time from average speaking rate. The timer makes whitespace for me to fill.

The word counter is a tiny work of art. A few useful lines that now sits on the shelf in my creative cottage. I love that it runs while I type. You can bet that I will be showing it off in my creative courtyard soon. My neighbors will say, Ward, you are such a nerd, but we love you for it.

I recorded this reading in awkward fits and starts. Had I been a more capable reader I am sure I would have hit the five minute mark. I hated the result. I wrote a second draft, more of an outline, and recorded it in one go that was satisfactory. See Wikimania 2021

I preserved the notion of cottage and courtyard. I've posted about this in our group chat as follows.

New terminology for explaining our technology. A federated wiki site is called a "creative cottage" and the lineup of neighbors is called a "creative courtyard". The focus is on the feeling present in our work and less on the mechanism. matrix

The Santa Fe Institute has been similarly designed. The office buildings cascade down the hill maybe four or six internal steps at a time. As one steps into a creative courtyard one can gaze upon the surrounding private offices of visiting faculty, the creative cottages they occupy while on sabbatical, each decorated with system diagrams of one kind or another. The ambiance is that of a library except at tea time when the courtyards fill.