Telephone Trees

A telephone tree is a scheme for notifying a large number of people about something with a small number of phone calls. If you call ten people, and each of those ten calls another ten people, then you can reach upto a hundred people. If they each call ten people you have effectively called a thousand people!

Each person in a particular branch of the tree has a list with the names and numbers of all the other people in that branch, and at least one name and number from another branch. That person on the other branch also has the name and number of the person who has their name and number. As soon as anyone gets a call from someone on their list, they can pass it on to everybody else on their list. Soon everybody will know.

Maybe an example will help .....

Anna's List	Bob's List	Charlie's List	Dave's List	Eddie's List	Fi's List
Bob	Anna	Anna	Anna	Fi	Eddie
Charlie	Charlie	Bob	Bob	George	George
Dave	Dave	Dave	Charlie	Harry	Harry
Eddie	Ian	Maria	Terry	Anna	Sean

Notice ANNA, BOB, CHARLIE and DAVE are all on each other's lists. Any one of them can notify the other three. But Eddie is not linked directly to anybody else on her list, so he is "special" as far as her list is concerned, and Anna is "special" on Eddie's list. If Bob, Charlie or Dave pass news to Anna, she knows that all of them must know and therefore she need only pass it to Eddie. Ian, Maria and Terry will also receive the news and pass it on to their own branches.

If Dave was careless and got busted by the authorities, they would only get leads to Anna, Bob, Charlie and Terry. And if "Brainy" Bob is relying on memory alone, and has no written records lying around to incriminate him, then Ian and everyone on his list are protected.

We want to encourage the creation of a telephone tree to enable people who can get to the camp at short notice to pass on information to one another. The non-hierarchical system described above is more flexible than the old style telephone tree, because a weak link (eg. message left on answerphone and not picked up for a few hours) only delays the propagation of information in a small area - there are links in both directions, up and down the tree. It is vulnerable to duplication of traffic, if special links are not correctly identified; on the other hand, this might be a good thing if it makes sure messages really do get through.

Exactly how you organise your telephone tree groups will depend on how many of you there are. But please, please do try to set something up, even one scratty list is better than nothing.

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