Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems 2 VOL.SET

The focus of this book is not how to make technology more efficient, nor even how technology harms or helps society, but rather how to successfully combine society and technology into socio-technical performance. The Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems provides a state-of-the-art summary of knowledge in this evolving, multi-disciplinary field distinctive in its variety of international authors' perspectives, depth and breadth of scholarship, and combination of practical and theoretical views. This noteworthy Handbook of Research extends a useful collection for anyone interested in modern socio-technical systems where knowledge of social principles can mean the difference between success and failure.

Brian Whitworth is a senior lecturer at Massey University (Albany) (Auckland, New Zealand). He holds a BSc in mathematics, a BA in psychology, an MA (1st Class) in neuro-psychology, and a PhD in information systems. He has published in journals like Small Group Research, Group Decision & Negotiation, The Database for Advances in Information Systems, Communications of the AIS, IEEE Computer, Behavior and Information Technology (BIT), Communications of the ACM and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Topics include generating online agreement, voting before discussing, online communication processes, legitimate by design, spam and the social-technical gap, polite computing and the web of system performance. His hobbies include motorcycle riding, quantum theory, and philosophical songs.

Aldo de Moor is owner of CommunitySense, a research consultancy firm on community informatics. In 1999, he got his PhD in information management from Tilburg University (Netherlands). From 1999-2004, he was an assistant professor at Infolab, Department of Information Systems and Management, Tilburg University. In 2005-2006, he was a senior researcher at the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Aldos research interests include the evolution of virtual communities, communicative workflow modeling, argumentation support technologies, language/action theory, conceptual graph theory, and socio-technical systems design. Aldo has been a visiting researcher at the University of Guelph (Canada) and the University of Technology (Sydney, Australia). Aldo has been Program Co-Chair of the International Conference on Conceptual Structures, the Language/Action Perspective Working Conference on Communication Modeling, and the Pragmatic Web Conference. Key publications have appeared in journals like Communications of the ACM, Data and Knowledge Engineering, Group Decision and Negotiation, Information Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, and Information Systems Journal.