The Year of the Wiki

Happy new year! It's Chinese New Year. The year of the Rat.

Rat. Hmm. I don't think I want to spend this whole year giving honor to the Rat. See, I live in America. I've spent the last 7 years under the Rat.

I'm actually very excited about this upcoming year, and the possibilities for doing good things and creating great things. I'm particularly excited about Wikis.

In 2003 I wrote some Wiki software called Kwiki. For a while it really started a wildfire, especially in the world of Perl. I set Kwiki up to make the software itself a collaborative experience, much in the way the Wiki is about collaborative content. In the following months and years, many Perl hackers hacked over 250 Kwiki Plugins!

Sadly, Kwiki fell to the sidelines for the last couple years. Last winter it started to surge again only to be stopped dead in its tracks by my accident in Taiwan in the Spring.

Now I am almost fully recovered and my enthusiasm for Wiki and Kwiki is back in full swing.

I spent this last week at Socialtext in Palo Alto. Socialtext is the original Wiki company and my employer of the last 5 years.

This last weekend I spent 48 hours in San Francisco, scheming and hacking with Eugene Eric Kim (eek) the father of the Purple Wiki. Eugene and I crafted some very ambitious Wiki plans for 2008.

Tonight I am at the Portland Wiki Wednesday, sitting across the table from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the Wiki itself.

It's definitely been a Wiki Week. I'm getting the feeling that maybe it should be a Wiki Year. With all due respect to the Chinese, I declare the next year, starting right now:

The Year of the Wiki!!!

If you'd like to join me, visit:

• http://www.kwiki.org
• #kwiki on irc.freenode.net