This is our world

Missions - is what we call the different assignments.

Missionaries - is what we call the stuffed animals. Each mission is staffed by five stuffed missionaries. All five of them are of the same species, either tigers, cows, elephants, giraffes or lions. Each animal wears a T-shirt which states the missionary's name and mission. Mission instructions are printed on the back of the T-shirt.
Handovers - is what we call when a missionary is one "step" further away from its origin, i.e. when an animal changes "owner".
Mission Headquarters - is what we call the location from where the mission is released. The first Headquarters is located in Malmo, Sweden - subsidiaries will be opening up all over the globe in a not too distant future.
Missing in Action - is what we call when we've lost contact with a missionary, due to lack of handover picture or when other vital documentation is missing.

History

Have you ever heard of the Small World Phenomena or maybe the phrase Six Degrees of Separation? These expressions refer to the idea that, if a person is one "step" away from each person he or she knows and two "steps" away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six "steps" away from each person on Earth (from wikipedia.org). For example you might know somebody, that knows somebody, that knows somebody in Africa, that knows somebody in the South African government, that knows Nelson Mandela.

When you think about it, it’s really a comforting thought that everybody knows everybody – we are all connected and we are all in this together. It also means that we all have the power to make a difference in the world.

We are going to put the theory to the test, and have some fun while we’re at it.

Six degrees of separation

The Theory behind it all

In 1967, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a seminal experiment to test the hypothesis that members of any large social network (in his case, the population of the United States) would be connected to each other through short chains of intermediate acquaintances.

His famous result, now enshrined in popular culture, and sociology dogma, was that the average lengths of the resulting acquaintance chains was roughly six, where the final member of the chain was the target itself. This result led to the phrase "six degrees of separation''.

Excerpts from the website of the now closed Small World Project. You can however still read the text here>>>

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