The original thought was that people would find each other by browsing. This would form a neighborhood of convenience. (Imagine roaming the halls during a conference break.)
We recognized in the first happening that we needed to add a second more structured way to find each other. We set out to find interesting conversations by writing a script that read everybody's work. Here everybody means everyone registered for a class. We were thinking of "trending" in twitter. Hence the name. We used this script for the rest of happening #1 and leave it running today.
We rewrote this for happening #2 making three important changes: * pages of conversations would be shown with the newest on the right. * the class roster would be read from a private google doc. * additional happenings can be added to the same roster.
I keep a link to the happening #2 conversations on my happening #2 welcome page.
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Index of articles written and edited for the Teaching Machine Happening, March 2015. Includes both ones where I was the initial author and ones to which I've contributed.
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The script that does all this is available online and doesn't use any special access to the class wikis. I run this script for Mike and publish the results to fed.wiki.org simply because I have direct access to that site - GitHub 
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My intention is to generalize the notion of a roster and support it from within federated wiki using some kind of plugin. I have a prototype intended to work with an enhanced version of Recent Changes. More on this later.
# See also