This memo describes an adaptive architecture for federating peer object servers. Both the architecture and its implementations are called Folk Memory. This term alludes to the social process by which folk tales or folk songs are remembered and propagated within a culture. pdf 
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A Minimalist Architecture for Adaptive Federation of Object Servers (original work reformatted for wiki.)
The original wiki page announcing the document to my software patterns and design methods community.
I recall my 2005 keynote at Wikimaina where I discussed in public the foundational ideas behind first wiki and then Folk Memory which begot Federated Wiki.
See Folk Concepts from the orignal paper reconsidered in the light of 2-1/2 years developing and using the new wiki.
The paper was acknowledges as an early, but not the first, distributed content system in User:HaeB's Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals. post