I wrote in my original wiki for about a year before it began to feel a sense of wholeness – some 450 pages that held the deeper learning of my experience of introducing the Agile Mindset to educators.
It was then that my colleague Ward Cunningham 
began to help me visualize the relationship of these pages, the patterns of meaning. This visualization was a breakthrough for me.
Writing in the wiki allowed me to reimagine what it meant to make meaning. I began to understand meaning-making as Holonic in nature, a Poetry of Patterns. Each word was a holon, a container of meaning. I would honor that, seeking a good that might delight.
Each paragraph, as a plugin, a moveable block, was a holon. A good that might delight, unfolding beauty.
Each page, a holon in an emerging holarchic structure.
But, in truth, this original wiki was more of a labyrinth than a garden. Valuable for me, but largely inaccessible for others.
The original drawing, texted to Ward after climbing down from the pear tree: a story arc with connected concepts in a garden of emergent meaning.
It was then, while pruning my old pear tree, that I was given the idea of a story arc, in the shape of the golden mean, attached to interlinking concept nodes. I came down, drew a sketch, and immediately texted it to Ward.
This image was based on a premise that we all make meaning on a plane of consciousness. Meaning starts from a place of our truth – a center point – the zero point – the wellspring of our spirit through which our Creative Genius flows.
We start our stories from this truth. From there, it arcs out. But this story is told through concepts that have a deeper meaning to us. The story, then, not only forms a path by which we can convey powerful meaning to others but also serves as a gateway to a garden of concepts – an ontological schema – in which that story is more fully understood – harkening, perhaps, to the emergent potential long ago sensed in Coleridge's Dream.
On Ward's recommendation, I created a new wiki where I told the story . As I did, I would reference concepts that I had developed in my original wiki. When these concepts were mentioned, I would fork that page over to the new site. I then forked over the pages linked on that page and the next level under it. In all, about 100 pages from my original garden were forked over.
Garden map of The Dayton Experiment with emergent concept clusters identified.
Once these pages were brought over, I graphed them again in their entirety, now as a walled garden - a Strange Loop – allowing me to appreciate the clusters that were forming.
As a final step, I then restructured that wiki into a print version that was finally published as The Dayton Experiment.
another experiment
It took over a year for me to create 450 wiki pages and another year to write the book.
We began to wonder, could this wiki process that we developed help guide others to form patterns of deeper meaning?
It happened and two years later another book gracefully unfolded with two other co-authors, The Joyful Sandbox
a footnote
The title of this page is a small homage to William Zinsser whose book, _On Writing Well_, was a landmark in the craft of non-fiction writing.
Bill, an unpresuming man, was the Master of Branford College, my residential college at Yale. Each month, he would host teas, where he would invite fascinating writers to read from their work and share their life stories.
Writers such as Alan Ginsberg who sat there reading _Howl_, a poem whose raw and profane cries helped awaken the consciousness of the Beat Generation, while his partner, Peter, sat quietly next to him, lost in an obscure old book about horticulture, seemingly oblivious to all others in the room.
I loved those gatherings, packed together in his living room, literally at the feet of these immensely gifted storytellers. I listened and learned. But most of all, just being in the same room with them was all that really mattered, knowing that greatness was only an arm's reach away.
Bill died a few years ago – a loss I felt deeply. I doubt he would have remember who I was, but I certainly remember him.
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