Smalltalk-80 had the exceptional property that you could learn how things worked by just typing ctrl-c. This suspended the work in progress and displayed it's implementation as source. You could learn the native programming language this way and learn lots of technique that would apply in all kinds of environments. Wiki duplicated this property by adding an Edit button to the bottom of every web page. Wikipedians have shown that this can induce ordinary folk to craft consistently beautiful pages while evolving their own style rules and operating procedures. We don't know to what degree wiki markup contributes to this success, but we can be sure that immediate access to the markup is essential to wiki's success. The MyFoundation portal, once again, respects the curiosity and intellect of its users by exposing all aspects of the processes it supports. Who asked for this? No one. No one thought to. That doesn't mean it isn't needed.
Visible Workings. Adequate Understanding of System Internals by Brian Marick. See also Archive for the 'visible workings' Category. blog 
, archive
Brian Marick calls this Visible Workings. He identifies a middle ground, between the traditional GUI presentation and the raw source code that produces it. This middle ground makes the application both explanatory and tinkerable. The portal's swim diagram is our middle ground. We know it makes our work explanatory and look forward to investigating the tinkerable aspects too.
posted by Ward Cunningham. c2
See Swim
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As staff members of the Eclipse Foundation, we faced the challenge of automating many of our manual workflows while minimizing the cost of doing so.