We move, change jobs, and redefine our tastes at an increasingly rapid rate. The possibilities offered by our dynamic lives are wonderful, but they make identity an ever more complex problem. Family persists as one of most fundamental components of our understanding of self, as well as our most important support system.

The Kinjunction project seeks to create a private platform to strengthen the existing bonds, and extend the effective horizons, of our families. We must help families share their lives and their stories from the Past and Present for the Future. In doing so kinjunction seeks to fortify the essential mooring which family lends to our perpetually changing lives.

Kinjunction is a private place which member families can use to EXPLORE their horizons, keep in closer CONTACT with each other, and collectively write their history for the present and future. It allows families to map their genealogical relationships across several cool dimensions and share updates with their relatives.

1. Public: There are plenty of sites on the internet where individuals can share their thoughts with the world at large. Kinj is not one of those places. It is designed for private communication within each member family. So, as far as any individual member family of kinjunction is concerned, theirs is the only family which Kinj serves. Whatever a user may post to the site, the information and identity which they build stays private to their family.

2. A social network: Social networks are really fun, but that is not what we have set out to build. Kinjunction is not a social network, nor does it in any way aspire to be one. Rather, kinjunction is a sort of “family network” (if you must use a term like that at all). The difference is simple – social networks allow you to build identities which you share with a group of people whom you define as associates or friends – A definition which means different things to different people. Kinjunction only allows you to invite and share with your family – a less subjective group of people. The idea is that by carving out a well defined and specific space you can concentrate the functionality and discourse of the group to interesting ends…

3. An ancestry site: Many sites exist on the internet are designed to help people do research on the history of their families. Using social security numbers and immigration documents these sites help people piece together lost information about their roots. Kinjunction is not a site for rebuilding lost history, rather kinj is about the relationships of the living family.

4. Massively “of the moment”: CNET recently published an article on a whole slew of family “web 2.0” sites which have recently been launched….some as major business ventures. This is not what Kinj is in the least. This site has been WIP since early 2005 with the simple goal of letting the founders keep up with their large families more easily. We have played with almost all of the Family 2.0 sites and are happy that we spent our time building our own. If you catch one of us in the street we could tell you why what we have been building is so different…but it is probably best to just apply and find out for yourself.

The complete answer is long and probably not very interesting…but in (relatively) short: In the late 1990s my father used our Dell 486 computer and a nifty piece of software to map out our family tree. He spent months on the phone calling relatives, asking for names and dates and their understanding of how a big group of people all fit together. He wasn’t able to construct a picture of our family more than a few generations back, but he was able to create a very interesting picture of how a big group of contemporary people were related to each other. I was fascinated by the framework he had started to fill in. A few years later I unknowingly reformatted the computer which had my fathers work. The information was gone, and I felt horrible.

In early 2005 I was trying to procrastinate while writing my thesis and thought back to my father’s project. The world of technology, as well as my perspective on how to use it had changed a lot. Instead of having isolated computers with isolated copies of programs, we were all wired… In fact, I argued to myself that only in the last year or two have we become a truly inter-generationally wired world (my grandparents were newly-minted members of the “ipod generation”)

What that meant is that the family could work as a group to map itself. Moreover, the view which we could create of the family would not have to be a single static element locked on a single computer, but could evolve naturally as contributed to by everyone on a real time basis.

From sketching out the idea for kinjunciton I turned to my good friend from freshman crew at college - EAR. Besides being a great guy, EAR was a really talented programmer and was able to build out the first draft of the site I had originally envisioned. Without him the idea would have stayed no more than a set of sketches and word documents.

EAR built an incredibly strong foundation for the site and a great first draft, but ultimately it took many many hours from CD to finish what we now, more than a year later, have as a tool for our families

CD took the look and feel of the site to a whole other level – as well as mopped up some relatively critical mistakes that we had made. We had (and continue to have) our disagreements on formatting, but without him this project would be massively less appealing

There are a bunch of other people who have played cameo roles in this endeavor, as well as a set of founding families/testers without whom this would not have been possible. Thank you all.

-SWL