One of the great challenges and opportunities of the fedwikihappening has been learning a new workflow, one that lets go of the notion of a single canonical version of a document and relaxes the usual focus on who wrote what. Collectively thinking through how to do that, and what tools could support it, was a fascinating experience.

That said, there were at least a couple of ways in which the journaling model that Mike presented wasn’t fully realized. First, my daily wiki surfing was defined by the happening participant list. Second, the shared conversation had a particular focus, a good bit of it meta-wiki-ing. I found myself not creating some pages because of concerns about how they might not gel with the audience that was my fellow happening participants. Otherwise, my site would have had more pages about folk music and Internet privacy than it did.

Because of the happening, there was a certain sense that we, like the pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, were on a journey together. I have note how the federated wiki journaling model may be more like side-by-side play, where there’s occasional interaction and sharing, but the key process is individual.

I’ll be very interested to see how things evolve once the formal happening ends and interactions between participants become more occasional and haphazard.