Chris Dent

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This is a Work-In-Progress. Feel free to edit!

Chris is a hacker-philosopher, who prizes good tools designed to support good practices. In addition to co-founding Blue Oxen Associates with me in 2002, Chris worked at Socialtext (the first enterprise wiki company) and osmosoft (the creators of TiddlyWiki and TiddlyWeb, which Chris created).

He was the ideal partner for me as I first ventured into the collaboration business. Chris has a very clear point-of-view, which he is good at articulating, but he is also devoted to testing and modeling those ideas, not just espousing them. Our conversations and work together were particularly generative at a time when I was taking a lot of ideas and trying to put them into focused practice.

How I Met Chris

In 2000, Doug Engelbart taught a 10-week colloquium at Stanford called, "Unfinished Revolutions." I had the good fortune of taking that class (which led to me working with him), and the mailing list — unrev-ii — attracted followers from around the world. One of those people was Chris, who at the time was getting his masters degree at Indiana University's School of Library Information Sciences (SLIS).

Chris's posts tended to resonate with me. I was also extremely interested in the tools he was experimenting with for himself, especially Warp, a wiki-like tool that automatically created links to concepts. He and I shared a sensibility for architectures that supported knowledge work as well as incremental changes that could actually move us toward our shared vision.

In addition to his research and projects like Warp, Chris worked as a system administrator and programmer at IU, focused on a open source knowledge base project called Arts. Arts itself was interesting, but what was particularly fascinating were the team practices that accompanied these tools, practices that ended up influencing me in our work together. Chris also attracted, worked with, and mentored a bunch of awesome hackers from the midwest, who became part of my tribe, and who have all gone on to do really cool things.

In spring of 2002, Chris reached out to me on a whim about doing an "internship" with me for SLIS credit. As it turns out, I was in the process of starting up what would become Blue Oxen Associates with another person, and I thought Chris would make an amazing addition, even if it were only temporary. My original partner and I were going through a rigorous planning process, which worked so well, we decided not to start a company together. Our values were too different. Chris and I, on the other hand, immediately clicked, and we worked very well together. I asked if he would join me as a co-founder instead, and to my delight, he agreed.

We framed our business as a "do-tank." We wanted to create a paid infrastructure to support high-performance communities. Those communities would act as (willing) test subjects for our research, and we would integrate what we learned back into our infrastructure. The core technical component of our infrastructure consisted of a tool we developed together called PurpleWiki, which combined Ward Cunningham's wiki with Doug Engelbart's purple numbers.

Our year and a half working together was incredibly generative, but we weren't making any money, and Chris decided to leave Blue Oxen Associates. We continued our generative relationship, and he acted as a virus for our ideas, injecting them into other communities and bringing other great people into our world.

My time with Chris was incredibly rich. It took me seven years before I found another conceptual partnership as generative as the one I had with Chris. That was with Kristin Cobble, with whom I not coincidentally co-founded my second try at a company — Groupaya — focused on helping groups collaborate more effectively.

Lessons Learned

I'm not sure I learned anything new conceptually from Chris — we found each other largely because we were already largely aligned philosophically — but Chris had a way of distilling ideas clearly, and his unique perspectives helped shape mine. More importantly, Chris was very good at certain practices, and his discipline and insistence around those practices not only helped me improve my craft, but also helped ground and further refine our shared philosophy. I tried to boil down our shared philosophy (AKA the Blue Oxen Way) in this blog post, but I'll try to go deeper here.

Be less dumb.

It's all about shared understanding and shared language. This is obviously a common takeaway from my time with both Doug Engelbart and Jeff Conklin, but Chris and I talked about this and practiced it obsessively. Our work with wikis emphasized the fact that wikis help surface shared language. This was one of Ward's intentional design principles (the first wiki was meant to support a pattern language repository, after all), but it's not well understood — less so today — and the vast majority of developers have ignored this important capability.

Stigmergy. Chris introduced me to this term, which describes collaboration via leaving and following trails, which is what ants do. It's what enables networks to behave collectively intelligent, and it is central to how we believe high-performance collaboration is practiced. Most of the practices we espoused were in service of stigmergic collaboration. These included things like...

Think out loud.

If it's not captured, it didn't happen. Tremendous discipline plus similar orientation around digital infrastructure needed to do this well. E.g. fine-grained addressability.

Synthesis is part of the work.

Develop a rhythm. Work rhythms. Asynchronous back-and-forth.

Practice good information hygiene. Information hygiene.

"We clearly shared the idea that good tools combined with good use of those tools was an important aspect of being good collaborators." Supporting augmentation — reuse, sourcing.

Just do it. Transclusions.

Convinced me to start blogging. Blogged a lot in those early days. Lots are in response to stuff that Chris said. It was a conversation out-loud. So generative.