November 9 - 11, 1997
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| PROJECT DESCRIPTION |  |
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| Background | Process | Report and dissemination | Budget |
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Peter Denning characterized Organizational Informatics as one of the emerging subdisciplines of Computer Science (Denning, 1991). In contrast social informatics is a relatively new term to refer to the bodies of knowledge that are referred by labels such as "social impacts of computing," "social design," and "implementation studies." The term social informatics that emerged from a series of lively conversations in early 1996 among scholars with an interest in advancing scholarship about the social aspects of computerization. They were concerned that the diversity of field labels impeded disciplinary and cross-disciplinary communication about important research results and theories.
All areas have boundary disputes about which studies are properly part of the area. But progress in areas such as CSCW has been enabled, in part, by stable and generally accepted nomenclature for the area. These scholars found that labels that could energize researchers in one sub-community could readily turn off participants in other communities. However, a consensus emerged around the label "social informatics" (see http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI).
Organizational and social informatics can have a descriptive role. But these studies can also be normative, and influence the requirements for new computerized systems. According to Agre (1996):
SI studies aim to ensure that technical research agendas and system designs are relevant to people's lives. The key word is relevance, ensuring that technical work is socially-driven rather than technology-driven. Relevance has two dimensions: process and substance. Design and implementation processes need to be relevant to the actual social dynamics of a given site of social practice, and the substance of design and implementation (the actual designs, the actual systems) need to be relevant to the lives of the people they affect...Unfortunately, many technical professionals have viewed social concerns as peripheral. One key role of SI is to stand things back on their feet, so that social concerns are central and define the ground that technical work stands on.
Social Informatics studies are often cognizant of the ways that people and organizations act in support of differing social values and beliefs, and have different positions of power in their various relationships. Organizational informatics is a subarea of social informatics. Findings and theories belong to organizational informatics when they can be characterized in terms of the participants of organizations. Using this criterion, our understandings of the adoption, use, and impacts of groupware fall well within organizational informatics. In contrast, the Internet is used by millions of people outside of their worklives, and the character and consequences of the public's use of the Internet is a topic outside of organizational informatics, but within social informatics (Kraut, et. al, 1996). Some studies, such as the use of digital libraries, bridge between social and organizational informatics (Bishop and Star, 1996).
Some of the key organizational and social informatics research areas include:
There is a notable body of systematic research about each of these topics, but it is scattered across the journals and conferences of several disciplines including computer science, information science, information systems, and various social sciences. The subarea of organizational informatics is much more mature than is the rest of social informatics. For example, organizational informatics is a topic in the 1995 edition of The Encyclopedia of Computer Science (Kling, 1995).
There are two major social practices that help explain the relative maturity of organizational informatics. First, computer systems have been used within organizations since the 1950s, while public uses of computing gained momentum in the 1980s. (The main exception are the privacy studies that focus on personal record systems which were already substantial systems by the late 1960s). Second, the study of information systems in organizations has become a recognized specialty area of teaching and research in business schools. Many business schools have departments of information systems, and organizational informatics is a recognized specialty within them. In contrast, the remaining topics of social informatics do not, as yet, have a clear academic home.
These two social practices are changing. The North American public is increasing using computer systems in their private lives. The rapid rise of Internet use generally and the WWW for commerce is moving computer use well beyond traditional organizational boundaries. The NSF also is playing a role in this shift, for example, by funding the early development of the Internet and of prototype digital libraries. Second, studies of social informatics seem to be developing in two identifiable academic areas: departments of communications and in Schools of Library and Information Science. This is a dynamic period in the expansion of the uses and users of computerized systems. It is timely to organize a workshop to help strengthen our understanding of these emerging phenomena.
The main purposes of this workshop are to:
This will be done by gathering together a multi-disciplinary group of experienced scholars and researchers who study topics of organizational and social informatics. Unfortunately, there is no existing forum that can serve these purposes. While each of the invited scholars knows (or knows of) some of the other workshop participants, none of the participants will have previously spoken with more than half of the other participants.
The NSF has funded some of the key research in both organizational informatics (King and Kraemer, 1981; Kling and Scacchi, 1982; Rule and Attewell, 1989; Star and Ruhleder, 1994) and social informatics (Danziger, et. al. 1982; Hesse, et. al., 1991; Kling, 1980; Kling 1978; Rule, 1991). We suspect that about 25%-30% of the participants have had some NSF funding (primarily from CISE-IRIS) to support some of their research.
By focusing on the range of concepts and theories that are being brought to the study of the roles of information technologies in organizational and social change, -- as well as key findings -- participants in this workshop will assess the field, define its research frontiers, and identify its place in the academic landscape.
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The two-day workshop will be organized by the Center for Social Informatics < http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI> and held at Indiana University in Bloomington, in November 1997. We anticipate inviting about 20 participants. (In addition, we expect to hire graduate students to take notes during workshop meetings and breakout sessions.)
There will be a set of activities in advance of the workshop to help ensure a productive and successful meeting. An advisory committee will be organized to develop a set of workshop activities and a list of potential participants. The advisory committee will be made up of the Principal Investigators, Robert Kraut (Social Psychology), Ken Kraemer (Management Information Systems), Stephen Barley (Sociology), and Rick Weingarten (Computer Science, Library and Information Science). They will communicate by email and through a conference telephone call.
Workshop participants will be invited on the basis of two criteria. First, their research interests and publications should overlap with the concerns of social informatics. Their work will include research on the social contexts of information technology design, implementation, and use in a variety of social and organizational settings. Second, they will have interdisciplinary experience and a willingness to engage in dialog with researchers working in different but cognate disciplines.
Second, a workshop LISTSERV will be established. Participants will meet and interact with each other through this LISTSERV, providing introductions and statements of their research interests, view of these fields, and suggestions to refine the workshop. The online discussion will be seeded by the workshop organizers, who will use the conference to discuss the workshop agenda and a list of discussion questions; one such question will concern the ideas/themes of social informatics and the state of knowledge about them.
Third, participants will be asked to circulate some key research papers with other participants prior to the workshop and to create a larger corpus that will be available for reference during the workshop. In recent multidisciplinary workshops, participants have been hampered by knowing different research literatures that they could not share at the time of their meetings.
At the workshop, participants will be asked to frame a report that explains:
Participants will work in teams, preparing short position papers on these issues. Participants may also discuss strategies for incorporating the theories and findings of social informatics into graduate and undergraduate curricula. (One graduate student will help us to coordinate the flow of materials before and after the workshop).
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REPORT and DISSEMINATION
A report that synthesizes key ideas from the workshop will be prepared and disseminated. A copy will be placed on the Center for Social Informatics' WWW site (http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI) and advertised on LISTSERVs that support the relevant research communities (ie., ASIS-L, ISWORLD, CMC, comp.groupware).
However, WWW publishing is not a sufficiently robust way to disseminate a report. In addition, we anticipate printing professionally 500 copies of the report and to send them to a number of constituencies, that include: NSF program managers whose programs overlap organizational and social informatics; members of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences; members of the Executive Board of the Computing Research Association; several specific section leaders in the American Anthropological Association, American Sociological Association, American Society for Information Science, and the International Communications Association; and to the University Libraries of 150 major research universities.
The analyses and conclusions of the workshop will also be described in articles to be published placed in appropriate academic literatures.
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The major budget items are the travel costs of bringing over 20 people to Bloomington IN for a two day workshop. Bloomington is 50 miles south of Indianapolis, a regional travel center. Indiana University will not charge overhead for conferences. However, we must use a campus conference services office in planing the event.
In order to effectively produce the workshop report, we will several graduate students to serve as note-takers and transcribers. They will work primarily during the workshop, but will require some orientation and time to refine their notes afterwards. The budget also makes allowances for the costs of printing and disseminating the workshop report.
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| This page prepared by V. Weiley Last update: 10.29.97 |
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