When Ward Cunningham set out to create the wiki – which originally was just as a weekend project – he sought to create the means in which software developers might be able to quickly and easily share Collective Wisdom of emergent new practices, practices that ultimately became and important foundation for Agile.
It was a place for streams of thought, shaped by the theme of the page – a messy place, but rich with potential, as new ideas could quickly emerge and be shared.
But as the concept of collective authorship of web pages became more widely adopted, the real potential of this first wiki model became realized for knowledge repositories, the largest one being Wikipedia.
In this role as knowledge repositories, pages would be co-edited by a community in ways that felt acceptable to the greatest number. In this sense, pages represented thinking that converged to a sense of a shared truth – collective _convergent thinking_.
About fifteen years later, Ward set about to reimagine the wiki, this time seeking to create an environment that allowed individual authors to collect and share their own learning. He called this new wiki environment the 'federated wiki', one that enabled collective _divergent thinking_.
We are now embarking a new journey, one that integrates practices of both the original platform and the new platform to intentionally walk into questions together, where Emergent Whitespace is held in which new ideas might meld in a process of collective _emergent thinking_ experienced in Markovian Moments.
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