Let me tell you about where I work, and why I knew from experience there,
that the reunion was destined for success from the time I saw a room
full of people at Sandy's.

OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center) was founded in 1971
(while were were at Wagar) as a joint online cataloging effort
of six Ohio university libraries. The idea was that if one
library had entered a catalog record, the others could just
add their library symbol to the record if they owned it.
If a library wanted an item they did not own, they would know
who owned it, and they could borrow it from a holding library.
Today, there are over 9000 cataloging libraries worldwide,
and WorldCat, the online union catalog, contains over 50,000,000
records with over 900,000,000 records of library ownership.
It is a resource that is used by 45,000 libaries in about 70 countries,
searched millions of times a month. OCLC is a non-profit library
cooperative that has the goal of improving library access to
information and reducing costs.

So you might be wondering, what is the relationship of what we did
with something as large as WorldCat.  There are a few parallels.
While the numbers are not on the same scale, we did have multipiers.
Each person on the committee contacted others, who contacted others.
Reluctant classmates were won over by several contacts.  There were
several types of contacts: e-mail, phone, the message board, the
memorabilia site.  The e-mails and phone calls started slowly,
but eventually, multiple people were contacting multiple people
and the number of contacts grew exponentially.  The same happened
on the message board, with 2500 messages in April. There were
different types of messages: something for everyone.  There were
different types of attractions.  As the different types of contact grew,
the list of interested registrants grew.  When registration
started, it started slowly, but eventually got into the rate
of a few a day. The number of registrants made the reunion an
event that could not be missed.

Not everything grew exponentially.  The number of classmates
was limited. The number of class pictures was limited.
But the number we got of each was due to a cumulative effect
of all of us providing more and more reasons to come.