Chris Dent
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Co-founder of Blue Oxen Associates. Hacker-philosopher. Socialtext, TiddlyWeb.
Put practice to ideas. That, in turn, helped refine the ideas.
How I Met Chris
unrev-ii mailing list. Created a tool called Warp.
Shared architectural principles and aesthetic. System administrator and programmer at IU focused on a knowledge base project. Arts. Worked with a lot of hackers who became part of my tribe.
Was at the School of Library Information Sciences at Indiana University. Wanted to do an internship for one of his classes and reached out to me. Was starting up Blue Oxen Associates at that point, so he joined as an intern.
Chris's manifesto.
Purple numbers. PurpleWiki.
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.
= Lessons Learned
blog post on the Blue Oxen Way.
1. Shared understanding / shared language. Squirm Test. Wikis all about shared language.
2. Be less dumb.
3. Bootstrapping. (Name, Blue Oxen Associates, an homage to Doug Engelbart). Architectures that supported this.
"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.
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.
Work rhythms. Asynchronous back-and-forth.
Think out loud.
Synthesis is part of the work.
"stigmergy"
Just do it. Transclusions.
