The word wiki stands for openness. In this tradition federated wiki's development has always been open and in public. We welcome the kind contributions of many thought leaders and developers. Thank you all.
The project launched as a github repo at Indie Web Camp in 2011. I called it "smallest" thinking that framing would help us write it in a weekend.
That fall I was showing the earliest versions at the Agile conference in Salt Lake. Martin Fowler suggested I make screencasts. See Federated Wiki Videos
I was new to browser programming at this scale. I learned much from advisors and contributors, especially Allen Wirfs-Brock, Max Ogden, Stephen Judkins, Sven Dowideit, Adam Solove, Nick Niemeir, Nick Hallahan, Pete Hodgson and Paul Rodwell. github 
I was able to devote much of my working day to wiki thanks to a year of support from the Sustainable Business and Innovation Group at Nike. See Federated Wiki at One
Michael Mehaffy helped me visualize the role wiki could play in guiding us to a livable sustainable future. With strong ties to pattern language, an inspiration for the original wiki, Michael brought that vision together with quantitative mechanisms we worked out together. See Hacking Wiki's Methods
We dropped the prefix "smallest" when we moved the project to a family of repos under the organization named FedWiki. Paul Rodwell did the bulk of this work and carries it forward today. See SFW History Animated
Mike Caulfield brought his blended learning and community management expertise to the project as well as a deep appreciation for the history of hypertext. See Fedwiki: The Big Picture
One may wonder where to see this federation. This is, strangely, a hard question to answer for we are a movement that aspires to have no center. I do maintain a site that lists other sites as I become aware of them. This then is a good place to search. website