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[Sorry, my last draft of this message bounced.]
To add a few more datapoints:
* Shelly Farnham, from Microsoft (may be on this list?) has done some
related work, investigating the social networks of development teams
based on, in two different studies,
- email interaction in the first
- mutual participation on group mailing lists in the second
Apparently, at Microsoft, this latter is a startlingly strong
indicator of participation and interest. She interviewed her users to
find out what they *expected* to see, and then compared that to the
networks that actually came out of their inboxes. She found a fairly
high correlation and connection between users' expectations and the
results they showed--plus lots of subjective comments from users who
were startled at how good an indicator the mailing lists actually
were.
Some of these are written up in
Farnham, S., Turski, A., Portnoy, W., & Davis, J. (2002). MSR
Connections: Exploring Who Knows Whom through Social Networks . Paper
submitted to CSCW 2002. [ http://research.microsoft.com/~shellyf/ ]
* I have done some not-dissimilar work, measuring social networks as
extracted from email "carbon-copy" lists for *outgoing* email records.
I presented participants with both a network extracted from their last
year of email, and "top ten" list of alters per month. Throughout the
interviews, my dozen participants were able to come up with coherent
explanations for most, but not all, network configurations. Some did
express disappointment at missing people (in particualr, my graphs
never showed isolates--"but where's my wife?"). Since I did not
pre-test my lists against expectations, I cant' tell you how many my
networks missed.
Danyel
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