-CHIFOO, the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon, is the local chapter of SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. The ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, the national professional society for computing and information processing.  CHIFOO's purpose is to provide a mechanism for exchanging ideas, and organizing workshops & similar educational activities related to computer-human interaction. 

http://chifoo.org/images/chifoo.gif

http://chifoo.org

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''Ward extracted these sentences from wiki and wrote a couple of his own to make an abstract for his upcoming CHIFOO talk June 20th, 2001 ...''

"Wiki is a web site written by its users. People like you and me. Anyone can change any page or create new pages. Read the TextFormattingRules to find out how, and then go to the WikiWikiSandbox to try it yourself."

"The site and the software were created by WardCunningham for the PortlandPatternRepository. It is home to
an InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas, as well as a large volume of related discourse and collaboration
between its readers."

''''Wiki'''' exploits a small '''''handful''''' of clever ideas to engage the organic and self organizing properties of humans. The result has been dubbed WikiNature. Here is how some humans try to describe it:

"WikiNature is typing in a bunch of book titles and coming back a day later and finding them turned into birds in the Amazon!!"

"Writing on Wiki is like regular writing, except I get to write so much more than I write, and I get to think thoughts I never thought. "

"Its like being on a really good FreeSoftware project, where you wake up the next morning to find your bugs fixed and ideas improved."

"It reminds us of minimalist Japanese brushstroke drawings; you provide the few, elegant slashes of ink, and other minds fill in the rest."

"It befuddles and enlightens."

In this talk Ward will explain what makes WikiNature, why it worked for the pattern community, and why most attempts to do more will spoil it for everyone. 

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But what about the evil cancer of ThreadMode and the violent takeover by the ExtremeProgramming community?   -- JeffGrigg

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See WikiDesignPrinciples, WikiHistory.