So I want to sketch out what life looks like if Arthur Clarke had federated wiki in say 1950, which we’ll guess at as a time when this GPS idea came about. Incidentally, if I happen to be wrong and APL did know about Clarke’s idea, you can replace references here to GPS with communications relays, satellite phones, home computers, or any of the dozen major predictions Clarke envisioned years before they happened. In our scenario, Clarke keeps a journal, and one day he thinks: If three geosynchronous satellites were in orbit they could ping you the time. By measuring the different delays of the pings you could calculate how far you were from each satellite and triangulate your position. The following video shows how that might look.
**Important: The video contains the next two minutes of the presentation — the presentation won’t make sense without it.**
Capture and Linking
YOUTUBE 6GbGBUugz_w Federated Wiki Information Lifecycle One: Capture and Linking. Arthur C. Clarke writes down his idea for a GPS system, and links it to his thinking about geostationary satellites.
So that’s the capture and linking side of things. We jot down idea, write reactions to readings, organize our own thoughts. Over time, we connect them, like a personal Memex. The next stage is that routing we talked about — how do ideas spread? In this video we show you how Clarke’s idea spreads through copies in a decentralized way that requires no central service. **Important: The video contains the next two minutes of the presentation — the presentation won’t make sense without it.**
Routing and Spread
YOUTUBE pnE7arrlj0o Federated Wiki Information Lifecycle Two: Routing and Spread. Maria sees Clarke's idea and forks it to her site as an interesting discovery, which puts it out on her Recent Changes feed.
And then, finally, *really* neat things happen. Clarke has recorded his ideas and linked them. Readers like Maria have propagated those ideas by follow a fork-to-like convention. When they finally reach a physicist working on a similar issue we move to dialogue and eventually the extension of the resource. Again, the network here does not just route the pages; the pages are expanded and extended by the nodes they touch. **Important: The video contains the next three minutes of the presentation — the presentation won’t make sense without it.**
Extension and Adaptation
YOUTUBE _oDR0tH1JZM Federated Wiki Information Lifecycle Three: Extension and Adaptation. Expert finds Clarke's idea, corrects and expands it. Clarke forks back and extends.
And there we are. We’ve moved from the personal, to the dialogic, to the expository. We’re working on resources and ideas together rather than thumbs-up or thumbs-downing. Kind of lovely, right?