Ward Cunningham
Software Engineer, Inventor of Wiki, Design Patterns
Eclipse Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
Current Work:
Q: Do you smoke?
A: Why do you ask?
Notes on a framework for the specification, collection, interpretation, aggregation and dissemination of semi-structured Information.
This is a project to develop a more interactive kind of interview form, more like a conversation, with particular applications to medical institutions but with evident parallels to the realm of designers and planners. (As just one example, there is an urgent need to provide a meaningful role for the diaspora of stakeholders in New Orleans, in the re-planning process. Current efforts are widely acknowledged to be cursory and tokenistic.)
Ward explains: "This is a work in progress that may never be completed. It has, however, already inspired some innovative mechanism in the portal system we're building to conduct Eclipse Foundation business. I suspect the latter, the reduction to practice, to be more convincing even if narrower in scope. Still, you are welcome to share this outline with other members of ESRG at the London event. Please, this is for review only, not for publication at this time. Thanks and best regards. -- Ward
From the prospectus notes:
Emergence
Slip is the growth of uninterpretable content in unstructured fields of databases. We imagine an evolutionary process where slip is monitored and analyzed to yield improved schema in a continuous and emergent process. We expect realm-aware parsing to provide an improvement path for in-place data. We see this evolution impacting application design with social/biological metaphors favored over traditional logical/mechanical predecessors.