**Federated authoring** is a term we use to refer to the unique approach pioneered by the federated wiki community with regard to content creation for a Collective Intelligence.
Federated wiki is essentially a research project. It explores deep aspects of collaborative authoring through the development of small agile experiments. There are many aspects of these innovations, but probably the central one that concerns us here, is the approach to federated authoring that is inspired by git.
# More than git
Several projects have been pioneering git based approaches to document authoring. Federated wiki takes a distinctive yet simple approach that focusses on the experience of collaborative writing that preserves the authors individuality.
While git focusses on how multiple collaborators can manage the collaboration process robustly, federated wiki (while inspired by these concepts), is focussed on the experience of sharing that is implicit in the technology. We have tried to describe this experience as the power of fork.
# Bottled messaging
The aspect of writing in federated wiki that is unique, we can best communicate through metaphor. The expereince of writing down something we feel to be important, then sending it out in the hope that it is picked up and read by someone else - is the story of the Message in a Bottle. Federated authoring that captures this experience uses what we might call Bottled Messaging.
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