Assignment One

Ward Cunningham and David Winer are important contributors to the

development of online communities whose key attribute is the potential to

share and grow initially small ideas into big things through collaborative

contributions between people who don’t necessarily know each other in the

traditional face-to-face sense.

Ward Cunningham contribution takes the development of the first wiki

software enginei called WikiWikiWeb (also known as WardsWikiii) in 1994 to

facilitate the exchange of ideas between programmersiii. The idea for the wiki

grew out Cunningham’s use of, Bill Atkinson’s Hypercard hypermedia

program.iv

In creating the original wiki, Cunningham’s purpose was, in his own words:

to create an environment where we might link together each other's

experience … I also had more general goals for wiki. First, I think
there's a compelling nature about talking. People like to talk. In
creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us.
Second, and perhaps most important (sic), I wanted people who
wouldn't normally author to find it comfortable authoring, so that
there stood a chance of us discovering the structure of what they had
to say. v
Highlights of Cunningham’s career include co-authoring, with
Bo Leuf, the 2001 book “The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on
the Web”. Cunningham has also presented talks or been a
keynote speaker in the 2005, 2006 and 2007 WikiSym conferences.

In Cunningham’s own words, his “career has followed a progression, from

objects, to patterns, to agile (an iterative software development model), to

vi
wiki.” His most recent WikiSym presentation has considered the question of
online / digital trust and the emerging of wiki technologies in enterprise

based, less informal communities.

A key ‘light bulb moment’ was Ward Cunningham’s conceptualization of

creating wiki’s to stroke the story-telling nature in people whilst providing a

framework to encourage authorship and find voice in people who might not

necessarily be ‘author candidates’. That his conception of the Wiki framework

– with ideas fundamental to Web 2.0 activities - as far back as 1994 when

the Internet still only had 25 million usersvii is an indication of how far
reaching his influence has been with regard to the development (with other

people) of online communities. Ward Cunningham’s wikis also connect with

the democratization of knowledge and the movement of content / opinion

away from traditional media powers into the hands of online communities.

The development of online communities demonstrates Cunningham’s

influence as a change manager for groups such as ‘blue chip’ corporations

like IBM, SUN, SAP, and Sony Ericsson; who all use wikis as part of their

developer networks and who, as in the case of SUN, place content into wikis

because the wiki allows for dynamic volatility, extendibility and/or

collaboration of knowledge.viii This example use of wikis by Major

Corporations provides an example of companies changing from reliance on

traditional printed documentation with its implications of top down

information dissemination towards a model of knowledge building that more

powerfully captures the full range of knowledge / community (corporate)

history that exists across all levels and at all points of the company

community. Outside in the public Internet, this example is most obviously

paralleled in the body of knowledge that has been accumulated by Wikipedia

– one of the single most visited sites on the web.

David Winer has been referred to by the BBC as “the father of blogging and

a pioneer of RSS feeds,”ixand by Business Week as one “the 25 most

influential people on the web.”x In his own words David Winer sums up the

power of online communities to capture small, but when shared, important

ideas and thoughts. As he notes:

I'm a blogger, therefore I like to write short two or three

paragraph essays on things I care about. The BBC asked me to
write an 800-word column on new technology I want, but being
a blogger, instead I want to write about five or six things in 200
words each. That's what bloggers do.xi

Consistent with this Winer’s major published works over the last ten years

are almost all online and in the form of blog entries – which is appropriate

enough for someone that refers to themself as the person who pioneered the

development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web

content management software.xii

Winer’s major (self-published) output can be summarized across the

following blogs:

1994 - 2004: DaveNet, a personally published column. The first of its kind –
a series of email essays that Winer credits to leading him to blogging in
1996, RSS in 1997, XML-RPC and SOAP in 1998, and podcasting in 2000.xiii

1997: Winer commenced blogging on his site Scripting News, the longest
currently running weblog on the Internet.xiv

The evolution of Winer’s thought is difficult to discern through countless blog

entri1es, but his involvement in the creation of so many modern web
standards / features (SOAP, blogging, posting & RSS) demonstrates the

1
evolution of his ideas towards two-way conversations (blog/podcat and
response) between content distributors and consumers. And in effect he has
lowered entry barriers to anyone interested in becoming a content producer.

Based on the nature of blogs and podcasts, Winer’s 'light bulb' moment has
been his pursuit of technology as a means of telling his own story. We see in
Winer’s earliest work, his use of email to publish and share his proto-blog
DaveNet based on requests for access through to the development of more
elegant and practical means of publishing and holding conversations on the
web through the use of first blog tools and podcasts and then through the
use of RSS as a means of using web feeds to publish frequently updated
works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a
standardized format.xv

As a manager of change for other work groups, Winer is important because

his influence in the areas discussed (blogs, podcasts, RSS) has supported
the development of online communities by making it incredibly easy for
anyone to go online and begin to share their ideas and opinions. The upshot
of this is that online communities support a world where:

• People aren’t as trusting of corporate or marketing speak

• We actively pull in the content that interests us
• We create our own content – original and mashed up
• Word of mouth is important to us

• We bring our behaviors to our workplacexvi

Winer has contributed to the development of this world by actively fuelling

the development of the sort of tools (blogs, Podcasts, RSS) that are widely
used with other technologies such as MASHUPS to enable people to be their
own authors and to share their ideas with audiences that can directly
respond in what can quickly become an online community.
Examples of shared experiences, synergy or context that I have with
Cunningham and Winer include the reality that I use tools that they’ve
effectively created (wikis and blogs and podcasts in particular) in my role as
a teacher and in my personal life. Perhaps the defining quality of our lives at
this point in history is that we are using fresh technologies and ideas for
creating and sharing our knowledge – technologies that we ourselves
couldn’t use when we were at school because they hadn’t yet been invented.
Personally I find a great deal of synergy with the ideas of both Cunningham
and Winer because they have supported the creation of online communities
that I rely on both in my personal and professional life to get the ideas and
information that I’m looking for in a timely manner. The more I use these
communities the more I see in them in terms of implications for how both I
and my students will continue to develop in how we think and conceptualize
about ‘community’ and about the centrality of face-to-face interactions in our
lives.

Footnotes
i

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham (Accessed online 9/9/09)

ii
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb (Accessed online 9/9/09)

iii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb (Accessed online 9/9/09)

iv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard (Accessed online 9/9/09)

v
Bill Venners (2003). Exploring with Wiki: A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part 1.
http://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html (Accessed online 9/9/09)

vi
Cunningham, Ward (2009) http://andyitc510.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/assignment-1-
essay/#comment-6 (Accessed online 9/9/09)

vii
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981132,00.html (Accessed online 9/9/09)

viii
Mader, Stewart (2008) 7 effective wiki uses and the companies that benefit from them.
http://www.ikiw.org/2008/01/08/7-effective-wiki-uses-and-the-companies-that-benefit-from-
them/ (Accessed online 9/9/09)
ix
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6748103.stm
x
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/09/0924_25webinfluencers/source/24.htm (Accessed
online 9/9/09)

xi
Winer, Dave (2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6748103.stm (Accessed online
9/9/09)

xii
Winer, Dave (2009) http://www.scripting.com/ (Accessed online 9/9/09)

xiii
Winer, David (2007) About Davenet. http://davenet.scripting.com/about.html (Accessed
online 9/9/09)

xiv
Winer, David (1997-2009) Scripting News. http://www.scripting.com/
xv
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS (Accessed online 9/9/09)

xvi
Hobson, Neville (2009) http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/08/30/social-media-and-a-
fundamental-shift/ (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Bibliography

Authors:

Cunningham, Ward (2009)

http://andyitc510.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/assignment-1-essay/#comment-6
(Accessed online 9/9/09)

Hobson, Neville (2009) Social Media and a fundamental shift.

http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/08/30/social-media-and-a-fundamental-
shift/ (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Mader, Stewart (2008) 7 effective wiki uses and the companies that benefit
from them. http://www.ikiw.org/2008/01/08/7-effective-wiki-uses-and-the-
companies-that-benefit-from-them/ (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Venners, Bill (2003) Exploring with Wiki: A Conversation with Ward

Cunningham, Part 1. http://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html (Accessed online
9/9/09)

Winer, Dave (2007) The Tech Lab: Dave Winer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6748103.stm (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Winer, Dave (2009) http://www.scripting.com/ (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Winer, David (2007) http://davenet.scripting.com/about.html (Accessed online

9/9/09)

Websites without author details

BBC News (2009) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6748103.stm

Wikipedia (2009)
http://en.wikipedia.org (Accessed online 9/9/09)

WikiWikiWeb (2009)
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Business Week (2009)

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/09/0924_25webinfluencers/source/24.ht
m (Accessed online 9/9/09)

Time Magazine (2005)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981132,00.html (Accessed
online 9/9/09)