Recovering data and connections from prior Gatherings at subsequent events

[vrortvedt]

Can we consider building a feature that allows The Gathering to detect one's prior connections if they have also joined a new Gathering? This would be useful both to help deepen prior connections and to facilitate match recommendations earlier in a Gathering. Also, requiring users to reconnect at each subsequent Gathering could be annoying and lead to reduced interest in the tool.

As I understand the current code, users are assigned unique member IDs for each Gathering, so there is no way to recognize prior connections that have also joined a new Gathering. We can't assume users will keep prior Gathering data on their mobile devices, so we don't want to rely on local storage to recover prior data.

Could something like the following data structure solve these issues?

• At the conclusion of a Gathering, the entire Gathering data set is pinned to some external and persistent IPFS node, with some sort of notification (by email?) sent to each user containing a link to allow future recovery access to their own data subset [Maybe set up recovery via OTP like Google Authenticator?]

• The user's data subset would minimally include his or her member ID and each connection's member ID. It could also include each connection's contact info and affinities.

• On joining a new Gathering, the user can choose to import his or her prior Gathering data subset on the onboarding profile page, which will fetch the data from IPFS, and link the user's prior member ID to the new member ID

• If two users both import prior Gathering data where they had been connected, the new Gathering will see the linked member IDs and connect the two users in the new Gathering, displaying the new Gathering contact info entered by each user

• Perhaps we could also add a toggle to see a prior Gathering connection's earlier contact info and affinities as a useful memory refresher, though we couldn't retrieve any notes this way

• At the conclusion of the second Gathering, the pinning process repeats, but the notification link to the user's data subset will now pull member ID data from both prior Gatherings (do we want to allow users to choose which prior Gatherings to pull data from?)