Smallest Federated Wiki (SFW) was Ward Cunningham's reimagination of the wiki concept, and Caulfield became one of its most active evangelists, experimenters, and theorists. The core innovation was putting a "fork" button on every wiki page: when you see a page on someone else's wiki that you want to build on, you fork it to your own server, edit it there, and the system tracks the lineage. This created what Cunningham called a "chorus of voices" rather than the "relentless consensus engine" of traditional wikis like Wikipedia.
Caulfield explored federated wiki extensively in educational contexts, writing dozens of blog posts about its design philosophy, classroom applications, and potential. He organized the influential #FedWikiHappening in late 2014, bringing together educators and technologists to collaboratively explore the platform. He described federated wiki using the metaphor of a researcher's notebook (as opposed to the personal journal metaphor of student blogs), and argued that its parallel columns, draggable elements, JSON-based architecture, and revision features made reorganization "cheap and attractive," resisting the calcification that plagues traditional wikis.
This deep work with federated wiki directly led to "The Garden and the Stream" keynote and, by extension, to the broader digital gardens movement. The collaborative, topological model of knowledge-building Caulfield experienced in federated wiki profoundly shaped his subsequent thinking about information literacy, fact-checking pedagogy, and how people should interact with knowledge online.