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I'm looking for some useful principles and theory
here, and any references anyone happens to
have that would be good.

There's a schoolteacher from New Orleans who
has relocated to Ann Arbor who I met for coffee
today.  She'd like to get reunited with her students
and fellow teachers, who have scattered to the four
winds.  At the moment she knows where about 40
folks are out of a school of 1400.

In the small world of Ann Arbor, Mark Newman
happened to stop by as we were having this
conversation, and he suggested that an approach
focusing on the "strength of weak ties" would be
the best way to approach this - if you work narrowly
on connecting back up with all your close friends,
you'll miss most people, because they won't have
the diversity of contacts you'll need.

We'll start with some obvious things, like clipping
services to look for news articles and an easy to
find web site with comments turned on.  There
will need to be a lot of phone calls and other
legwork because it's by no means universal that
the people who scattered have always-on network
access, let alone laptops, let alone phones that
reliably work.

What other studies of network-connected diaspora
would be useful to look at, or if this hasn't happened
in the real world before, I'd even be content with
getting some good fiction insights into what people
would do.
--
Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, MI 48104
+1 734 276 5910
http://beta.plazes.com/whereis/edwardvielmetti

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http://vielmetti.typepad.com

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