This afternoon’s keynote is presented by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the WikiWikiWeb, and a major force in the object-oriented/agile/XP software development world; it’s recursively appropriate that the hyperlink I’ve provided at the beginning of this (long, run-on) sentence is the biographical page on the Wiki encyclopedia.

He began his presentation with a quick overview of his background and career, starting at Purdue University. He started with the notion that problems needed to be solved by computers, and that there were statements in programming languages that will solve those problems — and from there, went on to the notion of an unbounded world of things that can be created by combinations of statements. He says he went from “me” programming in the 60s, to “us” programming in the 70s, to “you” programming in the 80s, to “we” programming in the 90s, to the beginning of “all” programming in the current decade.

“We” programming is how Ward refers to the “agile” approach to software development. He summarizes the Agile Manifesto as “play to each other’s strengths, trust others to know our weaknesses.” His point is that for a really effective team programming environment to work properly, everyone has to know what they’re good at, and trust each other to be aware of what they’re not good at.

From there, Ward moves on to a discussion of his current role — as director of committer community development — at the Eclipse Foundation. “Committers” are the ones to carry decision rights for the codebase and community. And this leads to his definition of “‘all’ programming”: it involves pre-licensing other’s derivative work, and trust their creation to be valuable to you. He argues that the value of such an approach is that it enables innovation. He then quotes something from Gorvan Carstedt, a senior executive at Volvo: “… wealth and strategic assets are more about creation of ideas, knowledge, relationships and trust than about owning and controlling tangible things.”

The next part of his talk deals with “creative relation,” which moves beyond competition (which makes each of us individually work harder) and cooperation (where we share work and specialize) to collaboration, , which lets us do for others in ways they might not even know.

While attentively listening to Ward, I have to admit I’ve been indulging in “continuous partial attention” — which means I’m also surfing the Web. Interestingly, I’ve noticed a relevant blog-posting by Mitch Kapor about Ward’s subject matter; here’s a snippet from the posting:

“Yochai Benkler has written a very important new book, perhaps the best single volume explaining why phenomena like free and open source software and the Wikipedia work and why they are important and transformative instances of the networked information economy. The “Wealth of Networks” calls to mind Adam’s Smith’s seminal work “The Wealth of Nations”. Inviting the comparison risks a charge of arrogance, but I believe time will be kind in rendering a favorable verdict.”

The full title of the book is The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. It looks pretty fascinating; I’ve ordered a copy from Amazon…

Meanwhile, back to Ward, who has begun talking about “Trust a la Wiki.” He says that he created the Wiki because he wanted to support writing that is like programming, something that would provide hyperlinks to elaborations; something that would support refactoring for systematic abstractions; and something that would watch for other’s recent changes. He even argues that wikis are a form of public art:a wiki is a work sustained bya community, which contains a message to be experienced. The concept of “wiki” says: sometimes you have to trust people more than you expect, if you want to make something big together.
Ward’s current projects include Eclipse Monkey; Experience Guides; Wikitect; and Commit Explorer; he gave us a brief overview, but you’ll need to contact him to get more details.