Networking Imagination: Ward Cunningham

ward cunningham

Ward Cunningham is often referred to as an intellectual godfather of the modern web. His most recognized contributions are the wiki (he invented the concept and the term) and the practice of extreme programming, which demands that two software developers sit side-by-side (often uncomfortably) as they write code. But perhaps more important than those well-known inventions are the constant, small innovations and cultural contributions Cunningham has made.

Cunningham, who lives in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., is a perpetual tinkerer. Nearly every weekend, he follows a question or thought until it develops into an electronics project, something he refers to as art "because it certainly isn’t practical." His projects range from digitizing time-lapse photos of weekend crowds at a mall to inventing instruments to monitor the water quality of a stream running through his backyard. Collaboration is essential to Cunningham’s intellectual processes: To recharge his creative batteries, every other week he shares his projects with Dorkbot, a community of "people doing strange things with electricity." Cunningham’s creativity is so famous that his family rolls their eyes whenever someone asks what it’s like to being related to the father of the wiki. And yet his stints in the corporate world – notably Microsoft – have been less than successful. Cunningham is currently working at AboutUs – "a wiki for and about businesses, organizations, blogs, forums, and really anything or anyone that has a website."

I traveled to Portland to spend time with Cunningham at home, in his basement workshop, at the AboutUs offices and at a Dorkbot meeting.

The basement workshop

Cunningham – inventor of the wiki, modern software godfather – and I stared at a white foam rectangle. Green spring-clips secure to it wires, circuit boards, and electronic sensors.

“It’s about to change,” Cunningham said.

The moment stretched. Nothing happened.

“A watched clock never ticks…Oh!” His face lit up. “There we go” (Personal interview).

To me, a tiny blinking LED was the only indication that this moment was any different from the one before or the one to come. But for Cunningham, something fantastic just happened: New data just flowed into his computer from the network of light, temperature, pressure, and moisture sensors installed in and around his house.

“It’s kind of exciting,” he said. “Every five minutes I get a treat of new information.”

He had thermometers behind his favorite armchair in the living room, next to his bed, in his furnace, in a crawl space, in his basement workshop, and suspended from a window. He measured the voltage coming in through the energy grid and the electronic resistance in the soil in his backyard. If Cunningham were collecting the data for a purpose, the enterprise might seem fanatical. But it’s not the readings themselves that fuel Cunningham’s interest in what he calls his “SensorServer” – it’s the fact that through the electronic feelers placed into his surrounding environment, he extended his senses. “I call it seeing,” he said. “Being aware of my electrical environment.”
Cunningham explores the world using sensors, signals and electronics. The same way a painter uses canvas and oils to interpret his surroundings or a poet uses verbal images, Cunningham uses circuit boards and microprocessors to probe a world that isn’t visible to the naked eye. He’s equal parts cyborg and artist.

AboutUs

When I biked to work with Cunningham on a sunny Monday morning, I struggled to keep up on the rusty mountain bike I’ve borrowed. Cunningham refers to himself as “bike oriented.” His goal, even though he doesn’t always succeed, is to use one tank of gas per season. When I visited, Cunningham rode a Kona fixed-gear. He has a garage full of bikes (including a racing bike, a mountain bike, and an electric bike he calculated costs four cents to charge). Each one, he said, gives him a different experience, so he rarely takes the same bike to work two days in a row.

During his eight-mile commute, Cunningham said, he rarely thinks about work. The process of biking takes over. This break from thinking about code and signals refreshes his mind and helps him focus. If he bikes during lunchtime, he said, “I get two full days of programming.”
When we arrived at the converted warehouse on Portland’s east side that is home to AboutUs, a company that serves as a wiki-based directory and index of all the content and websites on the Internet, we were both dripping with sweat and late for the Monday morning stand-up management meeting.

Stand-up meetings are part of a series of management practices that are popular in tech companies. They are an outgrowth of the philosophies behind Agile, a collection of software practices – with names like Scrum, Extreme Programming or XP, Crystal, and Adaptive Software Development – designed to foster iterations of rapid coding and rapid testing. In 2001, Cunningham joined a group of software developers in Snowbird, Utah to pen something every movement needs: a manifesto. It contains 12 principles and is summarized:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan (Beck et al.)

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

For Cunningham, these principles extend beyond software design. “Everything in the world is trying to be more like software,” said Cunningham. Wikis are exemplars of this: “Wikis are agile in the same way I want everything to be agile.” Everything in the AboutUs office – including the furniture, which all has wheels – is designed in an agile fashion for maximum adaptability.

In the stand-up meeting, everyone stood in a circle in the office kitchenette overlooking the I-5/I-84 interchange and the Willamette River – Ray King, Martin Laetsch, Cunningham, Brandon Sanders, and me. The meeting had a script: good news, numbers, and the planning game. Because I was present, I became part of the script. They discussed weekend page views and contracts. At the end of the meeting, everyone put their fists in, like a sports team rallying for a cheer before hitting the field.

At his rollable desk, Cunningham switched his bike shoes for a pair of Crocs, checked the latest data from his SensorServer, and explained how AboutUs is in a state of tension. Their business recently experienced a major set-back: For a week, AboutUs inexplicably dropped from Google’s radar and didn’t show up on web searches. Their traffic was reduced from 90 million visitors per month to 3 million. “We just got screwed by Google, and now we’re telling people how not to get screwed by Google,” Cunningham said. It took them a month to recover from the traffic and advertising losses. “Google giveth, and Google taketh away,” Cunningham said. “It’s just what Google decides – it’s not natural law.”

Cunningham treated the dominance of Google nonchalantly, as something that’s irrelevant to his own interactions on the web. Soon, he speculated, it will be someone else, maybe Facebook, dictating who wins and loses on the web.

Cunningham’s work ethic hasn’t always aligned well with the corporate definition of success, so he said he didn’t have the most successful stints at some of his corporate jobs, like Microsoft. His goal was always to bring something to a meeting that would delight people. If he could do that, they’d forget about the work he was supposed to do but didn’t finish. “The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn’t necessarily go through meeting expectations,” Cunningham said. He’s found that a creative idea often makes up for missed deadlines and procrastination. Productivity and creativity were often at odds for Cunningham, who said, “I just didn’t do the hard work. I just waited until [the work] became easy.” Meaning, he often did things that inspired him instead of things that he was supposed to do. He found he was, “most creative when I’m close to the work, but not doing the work.”

DorkboxPDX

[Note: I re-wrote this section as an essay for my creative non-fiction class.]

Dorkbot, a network of “people doing strange things with electricity” has nearly one hundred chapters around the world in cities such as Bogota, Budapest, Bangalore and Boston. The Portland, Oregon meetings are held in a dimly lit, hipster bar with graphic art on the walls called Backspace. It’s like a salon for nerds and tinkerers. Ward Cunningham, software guru and inventor of the wiki, arrives at these twice monthly meetings nearly an hour early so that, in a forest of are cardboard boxes filled with circuit boards and brushed metal parts and cables spread next to pint glasses on the tables, in the company of battle-bots the size of cockroaches and an animatronic talking robot named Maxwell whose head moves when you jiggle a joystick, surrounded by open laptops (one with a sticker on the back: “Open source fuck yeah”), among men – and they are all men, though a few sport ponytails – carrying Ziploc bags with microchips and silicon wafers, he can recharge his figurative batteries.

One member of the group, Brett Nelson, introduces himself simply: “I’m a dork.”
“It’s a pretty amazing brain trust.”
“Even people as nerdy as us need social interaction.”
“It’s about gaining control over your environment.”
“It’s like playing a video game, say, pinball. If you win one level, you get to play another.”
“Even if it’s spending three hours just to get an LED to blink. It’s an emotional rush.”
“As many LEDs as we’ve seen blink, someone will come in, and they’ve got one blinking a different way that we haven’t seen.”
“When it comes to theater, why is Storm Large,” local reality TV star, singer, playwright of a one-woman show, “great,” Cunningham asks, “and Wernher von Braun,” a former member of the Nazi party who fled to the United States to pioneer modern rocketry at NASA, “boring?”
“Because she’s a celebrity.”
“I’m ok with celebrity,” Cunningham says.
“That’s just because you’re a geek celebrity.”
The conversation turns to the rival nerds at the Portland Amateur Radio club whose conversations, whether about their antennae, or about operating HAM radios, or about the amateur radio emergency service, or about the subtle differences between the 146.840 MHz and 146.940 MHz frequencies, are beyond small talk and beyond micro talk: they are nano talk.

Soon, Cunningham is negotiating to buy a micro-controller that runs the Arduino operating system – a must-have tool for electronic artists, I’m told – from a man named Paul who has a dainty face, the natural look of wearing eyeliner, and waist-long hair. The transaction unfolds like a drug deal: “Do you have any inventory?” Cunningham asks. The two-inch circuit boards Paul makes, named Teensy++, are the best, Cunningham assures me. But they are in high demand because someone recently published instructions for a Playstation 2 hack using them. Paul’s been inundated and says he can’t take any more orders. But Cunningham is relentless. It’s not until after Cunningham negotiates the sale, relentlessly pressing Paul, scoring one of the last circuit-boards left (an older model, a Teensy, no ++), shoving the tiny pink opaque plastic bag and a business card into my had with instructions (“This website will tell you everything you need to know, you do have a soldering iron at home, right?) that I realize I’ve just been pushed.

Cunninghamisms

I spent hours talking with Cunningham, and our conversations yielded a lot of interesting ideas and quotes that contributed to the shaping of this project:

Observations of the workplace: “People who really like to create would get themselves in situations where they couldn’t create.”

Describing a pre-Agile world: “People would draw pictures of the code they’d to write, draw circles and arrows and talk about it. Everyone is dredging up old ideas, little bits of code they had written, problems they had solved before – because we all understand things through our own personal historical context. You thought you said it clearly, but you didn’t. Because you lived through it -- it was six hard weeks of programming -- but you can’t cover that at the white board. There’s just not enough symbols to come to an agreement. But the real solution isn’t to draw a picture of the program at all, it is to just write the program.

On Agile: “It’s a process of slowly zipping it together (my past experiences and your past experiences, my knowledge and your knowledge). And it ends up completely different, and it relies on the sum of our experiences, but you never had to explain it to each other”

On measurement, and his self-described “haphazard” sensors: “I like dirty measurements, because then I can use my computer tools to tease it apart…Maybe the interference is more interesting than what I measure” He says that a non-calibrated sensor that gives him noise to explore is more exciting than a perfectly calibrated sensor that gives him an accurate measurement.

“Humans experience something in relation to the self” (said in contrast to computers; a rare comment for an engineer)

“Wiki is agile in the same way I want everything to be agile.” (His choice of building materials – foam, paper – reflects his agile philosophy)

There is value in losing everything you had and forcing yourself to start over – “Maybe we ought to engineer systems to throw work away” to reproduce these serendipitous accidents.

“Everything in the world is trying to be more like software.”

Describing his SensorServer: “I think of this as browsing the Internet, but I’m browsing my circuit – and it’s almost as complex.”