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Here is the final map of "social bridges" between ITPers; that is, non-ITPers who two or more ITPers knew personally before meeting each other. The ITPers are represented by black dots; non-ITPers, with white dots.

This project exceeded my expectations in that I was flooded by people itching to share these sorts of connections. In fact, by the time I presented this project in class, some fellow students were getting quite competitive about who could dig up the greater number of connections. Luckily for me, this resulted in a giant blob of nearly sixty interconnected students where I had only expected a few disparate blobs of ten people at most.

The numbers of connections follow a power-law distribution. Nearly half of the students have only one connection. Only one (Josh Nimoy) has six.

It's also interesting to note that there are most sub-groups are centered around physical spaces; for the most part, colleges, but also work spaces. For example, I am at the heart of the Vassar axis in the lower right that spans from Alicia Cervini to Will Lee. Both of our social bridges are fellow Vassar alums. Similar loci can be found in the upper middle part of the map (Berkeley) and from Alex Polanco to Kathryn Moll in the middle (Syracuse).

The most exciting next step of this project would be to get all of the social bridges in a room to see if they could discover similar connections between themselves. Time allowing, I'd also like to post this somewhere on the ITP floor to solicit new connections.

This is all very well and good, but the dirty little secret of this project -- at least with regards to this class -- is that, in my opinion, this is not a network. Rather, it is like the highway system without the cars. There is little or no information flowing through it, as we all know each other personally and are far more accessible to each other through ITP than through our social bridges. However, it might prove a useful tool to stay in touch in our lives beyond the fourth floor. As we move further and further away from ITP passing messages through mutual friends could be a convenient way to stay in touch.