Six Degrees of Separation
“No man is an island” and all that. The Bob Graham Club’s API allows for access to the information about who helped who. That can be extended to find who those members helped and so on and so forth. Note that the starting point are those who the selected member has helped not who helped them.
The information is in two parts:
- A total of the linked members if the six degrees is followed all the way.
- A graph depicting the links between those been helped but only for the first three degrees..
The graph is limited to just three degrees of separation simply because after that things can get too crowded and you end up with a chart that looks like frog spawn, for those with a lot of connections just two degrees can be enough.
It’s commonly believed that there are just six degrees of separation between you and any other individual on the planet (all 8.3 Billion of them) so six degrees surely means that every member is linked to every other member? Not quite. There are some members who were reciprocal witnesses to one another and didn’t support anyone else or weren’t supported by anyone else. Many of the foreign members had their own support teams and so didn’t interact with existing members. Some did the Round supported by friends/non-members and haven’t supported any other contender, etc.
As such it’s hard to say exactly what the maximum might be but some of the early members in particular are close to 90% of the total membership as of 2026.
Enter a membership number and select the depth of connections. (Nothing will happen unless you enter a membership number.) Select whether you want the lines to be arrows then click the “Show Links” button.
Showing info for the selected member They are represented by the red diamond that is slightly larger than the remainder which are circles, those assisted are orange, the remainder are blue or green. The spots reduce in size according to the distance from the selected member. You may click on any of the spots to jump to that person’s assist chart. The lines between spots indicate who helped who: the arrow points to the person being helped. If the line has an arrow at both ends that indicates both individuals helped each other.
Each point has a tooltip when you hover over it showing the other members currently shown on this chart that they helped.