Vision for expansion

How quickly access is expanded will depend on the willingness of current Members and Partners to extend invites.

Overview

1. Group Hosts can flexibly create groups, inviting anyone.

2. The group invitees can initially interact only within their group, but as they gain experience and connections, they may gradually expand their networks.

3. When group invitees become full Members (of the core network), they can also invite their "close connections," who then have a fast track to becoming full Members themselves.

4. Once a full Member becomes a Partner, they can invite a wider range of people as a Group Host, starting a new cycle of expansion, returning to 1.

Example

Users need not know the ins and outs of how access works. In practice, they will just see the users they are allowed to chat with--and that list will grow longer as they participate and make more connections.

But for those interested in better understanding how expansion of access works, here's a hypothetical story of a user we'll call Nancy (or N, for short). Nancy was invited to an empathy.chat group by Alice (A), her local NVC practice group organizer. Initially she was able to chat with Alice and the other members of the group:

After Nancy completed two "15 & 15" (15 min. each) chats with Alice, they connected as "repeat buddies." This made Nancy a Member of the core empathy.chat network and enabled her to pair-chat with Alice's close connections, Bob, Cindy, and Dan (and also chat in triads with anyone in Alice's extended network, E through K, not shown). As a Member, Nancy was also now able to invite her own close connections, and her friend Zoe joined empathy.chat. At that point, Nancy's network of users with whom she can pair-chat looked like this:

After also completing two "15 & 15" empathy chats with fellow group-member Vera, Nancy connected to her as "repeat buddies," granting full Member status to Vera. Vera then qualified as a Partner by providing a link to her LinkedIn profile and contributing to empathy.chat (say, by suggesting improved wording for a certain form to make it easier for new users to understand). Vera could then start a new group for the participants in an NVC workshop she attended (the "+"s depicted below). Shifting to Vera's perspective of the network diagram, this was her resulting network for pair-chats:

Now suppose Alice became inactive on empathy.chat for two months, causing her group to be suspended (because group moderation requires a responsive host). Any of her group members (L through Y) who had not yet connected directly to other users would no longer have anyone to chat with. But Vera would still have her own group and her connections to the wider network (via Nancy). Beyond her group (the "+"s), she could only pair-chat with Nancy and Zoe, but she could triad-chat with Alice and Alice's 1st and 2nd degree connections, B through H.