What is PairPair?

PairPair would use perishable, public, geo-temporal neighborhoods (airport boarding lounges, buses, trains, sporting events, concerts) to build offline risk networks with minimal online facilitation.

Instead of encouraging vigilante 'profiling and hunting of the bad guys', it would facilitate distributed discovery of 'good guys with whom I share geo-temporal risk'. It's a formalization of the kindergarten buddy system, for a network of adults.

The atomic relationship unit is a pair. The atomic risk unit is a pair of independent pairs for reciprocal due diligence. For the same reasons some high-security locks must be opened by two keyholders with strong incentives for non-collusion.

PairPair algorithm: take a subset S of people from a public crowd and group them randomly into N pairs. From S, join the N pairs into a circle by creating N-1 new pairs. At this point, every person is a node that intersects a pair of people pairs.

With this structure in place, people are free to engage in reciprocal disclosure according to their personal risk tolerances. There are two goals:

1. to provide a minimal randomized structure for temporary cooperation in a large group
2. to ensure that anyone in an uncomfortable pair association has a designated path for recourse (the path of pairs on the other side of their pair).

In case of emergency, crime, disaster, or attack, the formerly random crowd is no longer random. They have a greater capacity for organized defense, assistance and evacuation.

Where online or wireless is available, the robustness and speed of randomization can be improved and a high-level subset of reciprocal disclosure could possibly be automated, subject to local policy topologies.

PairPair is a simple process for creating minimal non-colluding structure in an offline group.


posted by Rich Persaud on 8/11/02