[PLUG-TALK] College student temporary homes

[Keith Lofstrom]

A McMinnville friend's daughter attends Mount Holyoke,
which was just shut down for the crisis.  Rather than
travel across the country to home, she will stay with
a shared friend of ours in Boston.

A PLUG member, now in Central America, has a daughter at
an Indiana college.  My wife and I ponder taking her in,
but that means a flight halfway across the country. 
Inspired by the Holyoke/Boston story, perhaps it would
be better if she stayed with a friend of mine in Dayton.

I have friends and acquaintances around the world; perhaps
one of them has a son or daughter at UO or OSU or UW that
I don't know about (I'd know about progeny at PSU).  Given
a connection, and  some remote control parental oversight,
we could offer a spare bedroom to that student.

Now ... expand the graph, of trusted friends and their 
well-behaved trustable student children, across the
country, around the world. 

Might it be possible to build software tools that find
COMPATIBLE temporary homes for students far from their
parent's homes?  

The emphasis is on COMPATIBLE; some kids don't get along
with their parents, and might NEVER get along with a
friend of those parents.  A software tool must find more
than a place to stay.  It should help design relationships
between hosts and students that will be as friction-free
as possible, perhaps offering additional help and guidance
with the inevitable problems that will arise. 

Perhaps each student-host pair is assigned a small group
of volunteer online arbitrators to settle conflicts.

I'm a hardware nerd; I have no idea how design such a 
system, both software and social-ware.  But the software
nerds on this list might know some social-nerds who can
help design tools that sorta-kinda work.  Open source tools
can rapidly mutate and improve, so perhaps we can outrun 
social pathologies, even if we can't outrun the pathogens.

Any positive ideas to improve my vague brainfart?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com