"Ward Cunningham on the Crucible of Creativity" at Corante"

“One’s words are a gift to the community. For the wiki nature to take whole, you have to let go of your words. You have to be okay with that. This goes into the name, called refactoring. To collaborate on a work, one must trust. The reason the cooperation happens is we are people and it is deep in our nature to do things together.”

“A wiki is a work sustained by a community.”

“Discussion groups tend to keep covering the same ground over and over again, because people forget what was said before. I think the invention of the Frequently Asked Questions, the FAQ, was a response to that. A lot of times just reading the FAQ is more valuable than joining the discussion group.”

“I think there's a compelling nature about talking. People like to talk. In creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us. Second, and perhaps most important, I wanted people who wouldn't normally author to find it comfortable authoring, so that there stood a chance of us discovering the structure of what they had to say.”

“Top down hierarchies make communication work when it is expensive, I hope that wiki can be a flagship in this move in the industry to produce computer support for this kind of work and evolve organizational forms.”

“I could say, "Wait! Wait! I know what's going to happen down here!" Well you knew what was going to happen down here. How does it help us get our job done for me to tell you what's going to happen down here? You could say, "Stop! I want to draw on the white board what we're going to do tomorrow, because I can see it coming." Well maybe I can see it coming too, but why make a commitment? It will come soon enough. So, we're certainly here and now, but I think we can become excellent predictors. It's just that we're careful not to depend upon prediction anymore than we have to.”