Federation
whereas the wiki you know creates one shared page and invites anyone to edit it, this wiki does something rather opposite.
Each author owns and edits and shares their own wiki.
Content is shared with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Authors copy each other's work to their own wikis (a process called "forking") where they can edit and revise and extend the document with their own experience and voice.
The wiki software captures attribution information automatically when pages are forked from one wiki site to another.
Federation, with clever software and content licensing, empower a conversation among authors where shared ideas grow and develop nuance, enriched by the conversation; growing community without loosing the identity of the individual authors; enjoying the richness of diverse option instead of king-of-the-hill contests that emerge in the shared, single-page wiki with which you are familiar.
Local
the tools described here will run on your own laptop.
They provide a private place to experiment and sketch and practice.
Free from fear of the audience, we can express our ideas as badly as needed to allow them to take shape into something we feel comfortable to share.
For now, we are our only audience.
Wiki
the federation is a community.
Sharing is how it works.
This path leads in the direction of sharing and publishing and discussing.
We can move our favorite ideas into a public sphere where they can bump into other ideas and grow and change.
Farm
this is a metaphor specific to federated wiki.
We make clever use of domain names to create an expansive, and unlimited landscape for cultivating ideas.
"localtest.me" names the base of this local landscape.
Every subdomain is its own plot, its own own small or large collection of related ideas.
In this local expression of the wiki farm, we ourselves own every plot in the localtest.me landscape,
even the ones which we will name in the future.
TLS
this encryption technology started its life to protect commerce on The Internet.
Recent revelations about widespread government and corporate surveillance motivate the use of TLS to reclaim some privacy in the digital world.
This specific item riffs off of and reinforces other elements:
- autonomy of owning one's own space for ideas;
- local and private places to let ideas germinate and grow;
and here,
an application of encryption technology to empower each author to choose how publicly to share their ideas.