I’m actually interested to see the culture around SFW at scale. The thing is that SFW is actually different than Word revisions. In Word track changes the assumption is that everybody will end up with the same document eventually. In SFW there is no such assumption.

That changes a lot. Ward Cunningham, for example, took a piece of mine, forked it to his own site, and monkeyed with it a bit to make it fit his site’s style better. The headings were changed to one word headings. The text was edited down, and a major portion was cut out. Video links were inserted. Paragraphs were broken to make them shorter.

And I LOVED it.

It’s like music. I write songs and record them in a specific style that is shooting for a certain texture — a lo-fi texture that most people don’t get. If someone came to me and said — hey, you should clean up those drums, and jeez, stop close singing on the microphone, also I fixed your solo to sound more professional — well, I’d probably tell them to get lost. Some changes might be useful, but a lot of them are just trying to make “me not me”.

On the other hand, songs of mine have been covered by people who have decided to handle so much of the song differently that it is barely recognizable. And *that* is flattering as hell.

The difference here is that they are not telling me to be like them, they are expressing themselves through my work. That’s neither track changes or Google docs.

In SFW I get to look later and if the stuff they have done with my stuff has helpful revisions, then great. If not, hey — it’s how they want to roll. This is why Ward calls the approach “A Chorus of Voices”, with the idea that our different approaches to things are not meant to bludgeoned out, but synchronized. I don’t write enough about the affective side of things, but it’s the humanity of the SFW approach that I actually find most compelling.