***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ ***** [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 _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.