A way to track relationships in the group

[ruiwen]

An interesting question that was brought up at Jun 2019 hackerdrinks at ReferralCandy was if we could map the social graph of hackerdrinks attendees.

Could we understand which member introduced whom? eg. Person:A -introduced -> Person:B

With that data we could understand our community a little better.

A secondary layer to this would mapping additional relationships between members, eg.

Person:C -works_with:Company:X-> Person:D
Person:C -is_attending-> Event:HackerdrinksJul2019

One potential avenue to map these relationships is via a Telegram bot introduced to the hackerdrinks group, where members could declare their relationships with other members, eg. acting as PersonB, we could say tell the bot

/relate introduced_by @PersonA

which could then record the relationship that PersonB was introduced to the group by PersonA

[ruiwen]

One question is if, say, PersonB wishes to indicate a relationship to PersonC, eg.

Person:B -introduced_by-> Person:C

Should we require Person:C to first register themself with the bot to indicate that they're open to being tracked in this manner?

[davidchua]

I think we shouldn't especially when creating a social group. If someone opts out, and others start to follow, then we would have lost all our data.

Is the concern about privacy or something else?