Coming from the experience of the Patterns of Commoning seminar with Silke Helfrich end of September in Transition House Witzenhausen, which led to an introduction of her to Ward Cunningham for choosing a tool to create a pattern collection, Federated Wiki and its close relation to Christopher Alexander's pattern theory returned more into the current focus.
excerpts from #fedwiki:matrix.org
Then during year-fall Ethan Marcotte, inventor of Responsive Design, in digestion of his latest Responsive Design Patterns book, wrote a pattern patter 
which opened up fields of discussion. The author expressed his communities are not using pattern forms which also bring context or actual problematic. Thus the collections fail, as they fail to formulate a pattern language.
Federated wiki could probably help solving their collection's issues. A positive example from visual design methods could even be simple style guides, which focus on regular page elements (patterns). Yet their scope is, following the article's argumentation, perceived as unconnected to real-world contexts.
A way to chip in would be to formulate a visual design pattern language within federated wikis and extract upcoming diagrammatic issues from there. As a recursive example, the design patterns in use in federated wiki itself may be worth to explore and iterate upon.
Silke would in return always be keen on highlighting the liveliness of a given pattern, that it doesn't exist outside of human context, which to a fair amount is expressable.
We aspire to a federation that is alive in the way a thriving neighborhood could be said to be so. We sometimes use technical terms like autopoiesis to describe this only to find that German has a better word, leben, that has all of the right connotations, at least to a German. wikipedia
We recognize patterns in our work and patterns in the work of others we aspire to employ. We'll start with a list but expect this to grow into a system called a pattern language.
"Who -- People, What -- Projects, and How -- Patterns"
Show a large scale pattern project as an example.
<font color=red> Add a few lines about the project. When you open a site via this template, the name of the tool/project/initiative will convert into the title of the site. A short description - which will be showed to all those connecting to the site as a teaser - helps to "get it". So, these few lines can be seen when sbd links to this site. Be consice and communicate the essentials. Add videos, maps and fotos if available.
The background of this project is an alternative thread that has existed parallel to the mainstream history of 'modern' architecture, a thread that understands that meeting human need is an important property of buildings. site
This is a message originally sent by Ward Cunningham to the Patterns List in January 1994. I can't find it archived online anywhere. Steve Berczuk sent me an OCR'ed version he had, which I just cut and pasted in. -- Doug Lea
conclusio
Now we are equipped with three pattern methodologies, which actively reference the origin work. We may call them the federated, the commons and the visual contex. Bringing these three auxiliary vectors closer together may be of mutual benefit to each.
* *The commons vector* provides focus on liveliness (Lebendigkeit) of a pattern, but even more importantly its collective creation (Gestalten) process. * *The visual vector* provides focus on a quick to implement tool set, which creates sets of common solutions to similar visual design questions, especially for user interaction. * *The federated vector* provides focus on the knowledge representation layer, that we come to struggle with in a world of ever increasing complexity.