Sunir Shah

Sunir Shah is an Ontarian website administrator who founded MeatballWiki in 2000. His strong concern for the social aspects of using the Internet have made him an influential actor in the field of online communities.

Early Life
Sunir Shah was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada in 1979. His father bought him a Vic20 when he was four, and a Tandy 1000 SX from Radio Shack when he was seven. He soon figured out how to use dial-up to access the mainframe of the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories (CRNL) near his family’s home in Deep River, Ontario. At 14 Sunir and his friends with modems were using IRC (particularly Undernet IRC), MUD, random telnets, ftp with Archie search engine, gopher protocol with veronica and jughead, and wais. He learned of local BBSes and tried to set one up on a 1200bps line with no dedicated phone line, but the result was disappointing. Pushing his father again, Sunir obtained a 486/25SX computer, a 14.4kbps/v42b CCITT compliant modem and his own phone line. He installed Maximus BBS software and built Open Fire BBS ("Open fire at night"), which was his main point of contact to the world for the next several years. He joined Fidonet and at 15 became moderator of YOUNG_ADULT. He began to read the International C Echo (C_ECHO). He recalls: “The folks on C_ECHO taught me not only how to program C, not only how to program well, but what online community was truly about.”

In 1995 the Internet came to Deep River in the form of Trumpet Winsock/SLIP and a Unix shell account. Sunir put up his first web page, and fell into Usenet. He read rec.games.design and comp.ai.games (artificial intelligence in games) and became absentee maintainer of the comp.ai.games FAQ. Game development discussions were choking the echo and traffic was dropping, so Sunir responded by creating the Game Development echo (GAMEDEV), which first taught him how to moderate a community. He also mused about creating a thing he called Warfare by Artificial Strategic and Tactical Engines (WASTE), for which he created a mailing list. The WASTE Mailing List became an outlet for discussion about artificial intelligence, the theory of computing and life. Through this experience Sunir solidified his policy of always combining a social atmosphere with the technical.

WikiWikiWeb and MeatballWiki
Sunir Shah began as a student at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he obtained a Bachelors of Computer Science with a Minor in Mathematics. At the University, while searching for information on Design Patterns, he stumbled onto WikiWikiWeb and rapidly became a member of that online community. He explains: “As usual, I found Wiki just before the downswing. As readership/contributors went up, quality went down. Flame wars ensued. Meta-wiki discussions about the nature of Wiki itself consumed the community. I did what I thought was natural: with the help of Clifford Adams, I precipitated the formation of a separate wiki, MeatballWiki, precisely to talk about meta issues of online community.”

Sunir Shah created MeatballWiki in April 2000. MeatballWiki has grown into a pre-eminent place to discuss wiki development and practice, noted in particular for its social view of wiki design and information technology in general.

Recent Activities
In addition to MeatballWiki, Shah created , a wiki for shared annotated bibliography of design.

Shah was on the team of Socialtext, where he ran the sales operations.

He is currently responsible for marketing and community development at , an online invoicing solution.

Shah has recently obtained a Masters degree in Information Studies and Knowledge Media Design from the University of Toronto

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