Hi friends,

I need some advice for a social network project that I want to develop here in Philadelphia. I cheekily call it "Deadster", because the goal is to map out the social networks of both live and dead people in my city.

My goal is to document the deaths of gay men from HIV in Philadelphia from 1981- the present. For each dead person, I would have a webpage that would include a picture and brief obituary. People from outside the system could come on to the page and add their own personal stories about the person, and link their own profile to the page. Finally, I (ideally) would want to be able to link dead people to other dead people, in order to show how the social networks operated over time.

So my basic picture is something like Friendster or Orkut, except I would want to be able to create lots of identities on the site, link them to other identities (alive and dead) and (a dream here) have some sort of mapping utility that would show how the networks interconnect.

My vision is sort of a Shoah project for HIV (the Shoah project, for those who don't know, was Steven Spielberg's effort to document the lives of those killed in the Holocaust). I also describe it as an AIDS quilt with multi-dimensions---- the opportunity to recapture the stories of many wonderful people who died.

So--- can anyone suggest a software for this effort? I would be most grateful. I have collected many stories and pictures, and I want to figure out a smart way to get them on the web.

Chris Bartlett