Today's Sunday Explorers was a really excellent overview of how many streams of work in information sharing, visual interaction, the browser as a platform, and collaborative work patterns have come together inside and outside Federated Wiki, with an "aha!" from Pete about why platforms and projects that are about ten years old start to look substantial, and digressions on folding bicycles, bicycle panniers, Burley bike trailers for dogs, the dangers of rocket bikes, and the challenges of online banking when paying a mortgage off. Also "what's new in open source from Erlang/Beam" and the technology and career arcs of Rob Mee and Erich Gamma. Bricolage and its two-way interaction with more formal design and production.
The heart of the discussion was that FedWiki has several current motivating use cases for technical development and for suitability to purpose.
Marc and Kerry's Systems Dynamics, OPM, SoFi, Causal Loop Diagrams (structured information representation to help community members / team members understand a common field of action and learning, whether a neighborhood or a town or a school system).
Thompson Morrison's collaborative learning and sense-making work, notably in educational systems, among learners. Partly this drives a need for easier deployment of template wikis and easier operational work related to collaborative FedWiki farms/neighborhoods of wikis.
Mobile view and edit as a way of bringing the collaborative environment with you in your pocket; an enabler for more use cases.
Site survey probes as a now-proven simple method of adding conversational, casual programming to wiki users.
The front-end library for event interaction and dependencies provided and developed as part of Observable [ObservableHQ.com site] which Eric is using to prototype a new FedWiki client, and described how Observable is well-articulated to allow FedWiki logic for rendering and interacting with wiki page story items to work. Also that Observable's "inspector" functionality allows the user/programmer to see what's working in a more direct way, by rendering a view of unhandled events like "paste" and "drag/drop", reminiscent of the Smalltalk interactive environment.