If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no logical reason, writes Bokonon, that person may be a member of your karass.

If you're familiar with those words from “Cat's Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut, you may have a sense of what's ahead in this issue. If not, perhaps it would help to go to Bokonon's Fifty-third Calypso where he invites you to sing:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard…Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter…In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist…And a British queen —
All fit together in the same machine.

The point is, the collection of articles in this issue illustrate the inter-connectedness not just of networks, but of people, competitive circumstances and chance encounters that make a karass a karass. A karass, in the fictitious Book of Bokonon, is a group of people who, unbeknownst to them, are collectively carrying out a specific, common task. A karass is driven forward by tension within the karass.

There is a karass in Montana made up of 3 Rivers Communications (page 20), Chinook Wireless (page 4) and the companies contained in the video-related stories written by Ed Gubbins (page 28) and Carol Wilson (page 30). Some of them are nowhere near Montana, yet they belong to the same karass. The tension within the karass is competition. But in their own separate ways, these players in mostly positive ways affect the common purpose.

If you're wondering how Chinook Wireless could possibly be involved in such a group, understand that in a karass, your purpose is not always your own. Chinook helped 3 Rivers by taking the company's wireless play off its hands so that it could invest elsewhere. The NRTC would like to curtail 3 Rivers' success in video even as it drives the success of 3 Rivers' Internet play through WildBlue (see Sarah Reedy's story on page 8).

Diane Smith, CEO of 3 Rivers partner Auroras, was a telecom lawyer and exec from Washington before she retired on a whim to Montana, where she was subsequently talked out of retirement by the founder of Auroras after he heard of her from a friend of a friend. Will the first friend ever know he or she may have had a hand in launching a successful TV distribution service and was part of the karass? Fat chance. But those in the independent market, who often have a common purpose, just might recognize someone in here from their own karass.