Finish Each Other's Work

I want to describe the secret sauce that made Agile and Wiki work. I drifted into a paragraph that was better at starting a new page than closing the last: Fetish of Wiki. That paragraph will rest here until it finds some friends.

I worked briefly for Microsoft. While there I was asked if there was some way to have the "community" translate their manuals to the language in use where they sold their products. I suggested that there might be, but it would be far easier to just pay translators. I went on to suggest that the best use of community is to accomplish goals that can't be achieved any other way.

Kate Bowles: I'm still thinking about the creative value of unfinishability. Here is a story to go with this thought. There was an art installation in Sydney that consisted of a white room in which a long and wide table was piled high with thousand pieces of white lego. No one seemed to expect it. But people came in from the street, sat down, and started to put pieces together, without a goal or purpose except that it was there and possible. Opposite me, two adult men were sitting in silence, cracking tiny bricks together. After a while they started to talk. It turned out they were father and son. They reminisced about the son's childhood, and their shared relationship with his mother, all the while each making something. When they got up and left, their two small constructions were left on the table. I was the only person who heard the story that went with them. Someone else would have come along later that day or that week and picked up those constructions and reworked them. Now I think maybe this is the nature of the unfinishable work: being a person in a community that knows nothing of each other except that history will look back at us and see that we were all here at this time.

Some writers describe writing as their own personal discovery of what their characters will do. If they are good writers then there is surely more to it than that. But still, that is what it feels like to them.

Alan Kay founded the Learning Research Group and set out to tame programming much the way Seymour Papert had at MIT with Logo. Both saw the computer as a medium of expression rather than a solution to a problem. I got that. But neither explained how to work together.

Papert would instruct his graduate students to not "steal the ah ha" of the kids learning Logo. Give the kids time to discover on their own.

Papert's Logo was simplified to a picture drawing system. Kay's was not so limited. Kay's Smalltalk was innovative in a dozen new dimensions and still had room for ah ha.

Kent Beck and I discovered Agile when we chose to explore Smalltalk together. We groped for ah ha. We found plenty. We also found we could help each other along the way.

I set out to explain this by writing Fetish of Wiki. I hoped to illustrate how wiki could be different than what we see in Fetish of Technology. I got stuck. I left my story undone. Maha and Kate carried it forward illustrating my point by example. I have only to write this epilog. My part of this story is complete.