Social Life Networks for the Middle of the Pyramid

Summary form only given. Social Networks provide numerous channels for digital expression and sharing with people almost instantaneously in any part of the world. By bringing different media as well as modes of distribution - focused, narrowcast, and broadcast; synchronous as well as asynchronous - social networks have revolutionized communication and connectivity among people. By using the enormous reach of mobile phones equipped with myriads of sensors, the next generation of social networks can be designed to further connect people with essential life resources. This could be accomplished by Real Time Collective Information and Knowledge based approaches to identify where the needs and the resources are and then connecting them. Real time collective information can now be collected by developing frameworks and infrastructure for harnessing information in micro-blogs (e.g. from Twitter and Facebook), from micro-events generated by chirping sensors that are becoming commonplace, and from more than 5 Billion mobile phones for even the remote parts of the planet. We call these networks Social Life Networks (SLN). We believe that SLN have potential to transform how computing, in general, and social networks, in particular, can be used to transform connectivity among people and essential life resources for the people who are in the Middle of the Pyramid. In this presentation we will discuss concepts and motivations related to Social Life Networks and present our approach to building such networks using specific applications.