Mapping the “degrees of separation” of the people attending THATCamp W12
Session proposal by Nancy Marquez

My session proposal idea is to create a network map of the participants in attendance; I’d like to see how people with experience creating this sort of map would think through the planning of a visual representation that communicates information about relationships when there are probably a variety of approaches to the question of how we ‘know’ one another (or know someone who knows the other).

I’m thinking about the usefulness of making particularly well-connected people into nodes (or centres) for the sake of visual clarity over a more layered (and visually unintelligible) complexity, and how to define ‘knowing another person’ whether it takes more than sharing the same work space, one face-to-face conversation, an email reply, or simply ‘feeling that we know’ the other person from conversations with mutual friends/acquaintances.

I also wonder about whether it is possible to visually represent, to good effect, strong links (e.g. having known each other for a minimum amount of time) between the participants BEFORE attending THATCamp W12 versus DURING as we would presumably meet new people we have shared interests or training with and strengthen older ties throughout the day.