Mark 🤖🌱 @cyberneticpond@social.coop

The paper talks about how these ideas might be used in pandemic modelling (prescient). It’d be cool to see if viable orgs had similar dynamics, where they start as an amorphous group of explorers, cross some threshold, and start to see more and more returners rocking up.

I’m wondering if you'd see the same patterns in emerging social groups.

Say you’re trying to seed a new community via a weekly meetup, or some other real-world regular gathering. By definition, the people first attracted to that group are more likely to be explorers - people who enjoy “wandering” into novel locations, but conversely, aren’t likely to return to them.

Then after a while, something shifts, participants are more likely to be “returners’.

TL;DR:

Researchers use GPS and phone call data to argue the existence of two distinct “types” of mobility patterns, and that people can be consistently separated into either one or the other.

“Returners” seem to travel between a select few preferred locations and “Explorers” will wander between a larger number of different locations.

Interestingly, studies of each group’s phone logs indicate their closest contacts shared the same mobility type.