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Carl,

I'm not an academic, but I do projects like this all of the time,
often using "monthly slices", looking at how clusters, leaders, and
boundary spanners emerge over time. Especially interesting would be
whether the roles early in the group are maintained throughout the
growth -- do early leaders remain leaders? -- do early connectors
remain connectors? do early mavens remain mavens? The monthly slices
should include all prior history.

An interesting side project would be to take monthly slices withOUT
prior history and see if how well the activity in any month reveals
the structure built up so far -- contrasting temporal snapshots[this
month's active ties] vs. historic ones [the historic snapshots would
not only reveal the current active ties, but also those established
before (and possibly dormant this month)].

Valdis


On Apr 27, 2007, at 4:46 AM, Carl Nordlund wrote:

> As we will primarily look at the role-structure, a third
> alternative would be to look at more "time-slices", shorter
> periods, for instance how the number of role-sets and their inter-
> and intra-positional ties looked for each month.
>
> How have others solved this problem, in theory and practice, with
> an expanding set of actors? All suggestions are much welcome!

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