I liked dopplr – in 2007/08, I mostly liked the idea of dopplr, it let me fantasise that I was able to travel the world, dropping in on friends, while in their town to speak at one of those shiny conferences they had then, being able to help out people in my network wherever I happened to be. By the time I’d actually built my network a bit (only a year later…) and was able to do that kind of thing, the service had been swallowed whole by Nokia, as part of the smartphone wars. It went quiet and died.

I also gradually had less of a desire to show off at big conferences and more of a yen to connect with people directly in smaller groups. My focus went more local and hyperlocal. But since working on Black Elephant, the pendulum has swung back suddenly to give me a global perspective again. It’s not that I’m going to be suddenly hopping on planes and living that fantasy life, but I heard a colleague say the other day that he thought that “being generous in supporting local community can cut you off from how the rest of the world is changing” and that rang true for me. Doing this work is opening me up to people I’ve neglected because they were far away, as well as introducing me to new folk in places I’ve never heard of before.

We’re working on two versions of the Black Elephant product (“parades”) at the moment. You can sign up for a virtual parade that happens on Zoom, but we’re also introducing more in-person events that are a bit longer and over dinner. Obviously those give you more of an opportunity to get to know other participants and they’re the best way to introduce people to the concept, but they’re relatively expensive to organise. Also, diversity can suffer. For all parades, the level of diversity at them is some function of the diversity of the host’s own network, but my gut feel is that it’s still easier to gather a group of widely diverse people online than it is in-person simply because of the logistics of getting people together in meatspace and the bigger pool of folk who are available in a range of timezones, as opposed to who’s in, say, Barcelona right now.

So that’s why I’m thinking about dopplr again. I need a tool to tell me where I know people or rather, who’s currently in a particular place or easy travelling distance – I see Mike Butcher using his FB to ask this sort of question occasionally, but I’d rather have a more geographically-aware network so that if someone’s trying to set up a dinner, I can honestly say “No I don’t know anyone in Tblisi right now” or “Yes, you should speak to my friend X, they know everyone in Bogotá, let me introduce you.

Which raises the other important point – this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.

I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends. So for now, it will all have to be “manual” and slow, and rooted in conversation, and talking to people directly, making introductions the way we always have done, even if that doesn’t scale as quickly as we’d like. The model I work with is generally this:

Friend1: “Oh, do you know Friend2? I’d really like to speak with them.”

Me: “Sure, I’ll let them have your details, if that’s OK, and they can decide whether they want to be in touch, let me know how it goes”

Maybe it will always have to be like that, in order to maintain the trust, or maybe, by paying close attention to what we’re doing we might find a way of doing it in partnership and for mutual benefit.