*** 9615111 Huberman The need to understand organizing and community formation phenomena in the National and Global Information Infrastructures is high---for example, to understand virtual organizations. This is research empirically investigates fundamental principles of how organizations and communities emerge in large-scale networked computing environments. The dynamic structure of communities through time will be revealed by capturing empirical data about growth and change in links among nodes in regions of the Internet. These data will be analyzed for structural and temporal patterns, linked to explanatory phenomena, and used to develop new theoretical models. In order to gather data and perform measurements on community topology and dynamics, new probes and instrumentation will be developed and deployed on the Net. This research is especially innovative, first, in that it will develop new tools for gathering and analyzing data on organizational activity and network dynamics directly from the Internet at large. This begins to provide a new kind of research infrastructure that opens up the Internet as a research tool, as a rich source of empirical data on large-scale organizing phenomena, and as a source of data on very-large-scale network dynamics in general. Second, it will provide exciting empirically-derived models and theories of dynamic phenomena such as communities and organizations in very large scale electronic environments. The phenomena uncovered in the data alone can serve as valuable tests of and challenges to existing models derived from analysis, simulation, or extrapolation from smaller- scale models. The models built to explain that data promise to drive empirical theories of network dynamics to new areas and to inform other fields. ***
