We reflect on this happening using the metaphorical model of soup as in primordial soup or even stone soup.
Aside: I wrote this page as a thank you to the participants of our first international "happening" conducted in federated wiki. Most agreed that the experience was special. I hoped to explain why.
Imagine paragraphs here as selfish memes struggling to survive in a harsh world of limited attention. Paragraphs replicate by infecting the minds of visitors that might carry them with only limited fidelity to another page.
Imagine thought as a kind of solar energy washing down on the once sterile pond where raw material like words and punctuation jitter about and find combinations that absorb more attention.
This is the primordial thought soup that has assembled in this place for this time. The thermodynamics of the cyber earth make ponds plentiful but transient. Memes flourish. Some move on.
Imagine a structure emerging in the pond that can carry memes from place to place when the water evaporates. Imagine a cell wall that holds a bundle of water and ideas that continue to evolve without interruption. Imagine that this just happens in the presence of all the other geologic turmoil of an information space that connects every computer on earth.
This soup contains a handful of exactly these kinds of cells. Each contains a smattering of content, some original, some forked through the walls, and some blown in on the wind.
We can't yet say whether this wiki offers its cells the necessary selective permeability to compound the imagination made possible by our collective energy and still protect fragile ideas unfinished. We can hope.
We can at least say we've made a meal.