Social Informatics: an Information Society for All? in Remembrance of Rob Kling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference 'human Choice and Computers' (Hcc7), Ifip Tc 9, Maribor, Slovenia, September 21-23, 2006

As we may remember.- As we may remember.- Social Informatics: An Information Society For All?.- On Rob Kling: The Theoretical, the Methodological, and the Critical.- Socio-Technical Interaction Networks: A Discussion of the Strengths, Weaknesses and Future of Kling's STIN Model.- Social Informatics: Principles, Theory, and Practice.- Teaching Social Informatics for Engineering Students.- Social Informatics: An Emerging Discipline?.- Social Informatics in the Future?.- Social Informatics: Ubiquity? An Information Society For All?.- The Ethics of e-Medicine.- Digital Child Pornography: Reflections on the Need for a Critical IS Research Agenda.- An Empirical Study on Implementing Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) in Schools.- Ubiquity and Pervasivity: On the Technological Mediation of (Mobile) Everyday Life.- Firm Information Transparency: Ethical Questions in the Information Age.- Databases, Biological Information and Collective Action.- Internet-Based Commons of Intellectual Resources: An Exploration of their Variety.- Virtual Censorship: Controlling the Public Sphere.- Communicating Information Society Related RTD and Deployment Results in Support of EU Public Policies.- Consumer Models in the Encounter between Supply and Demand of Electronic Administration.- Sustainability and the Information Society.- The Production of Service in the Digital City: A Social Informatics Inquiry.- The Social Informatics of the Internet: An Ecology of Games.- Enhancing Human Choice by Information Technologies.- User's Knights in Shining Armour?.- Models of Democracy and the Design of Slovenian Political Party Web Sites.- ICT in Medicine and Health Care: Assessing Social, Ethical and Legal Issues.- Internet in the Street Project: Helping the Extremely Poor to Enter the Information Society.- ICT and Free Open Source Software in Developing Countries.- Knowledge, Work and Subject in Informational Capitalism.- Designing the Accountability of Enterprise Architectures.- Creating a Framework to Recognize Context-Originated Factors in IS in Organizations.- Social Informatics - From Theory to Actions for the Good ICT Society.- On Similarities and Differences between Social Informatics and Information Systems.- Work Informatics - An Operationalisation of Social Informatics.- Philosophical Inquiry into Social Informatics - Methods and Uses of Language.- Strategies for the Effective Integration of ICT into Social Organization - Organization of Information Processing and the Necessity of Social Informatics.- A User Centred Access Model.- Computers and Internet Related Beliefs among Estonian Computer Users and Non-Users.- Understanding Socio-Technical Change: Towards a Multidisciplinary Approach.- Fair Globalization.- Priorities of Fair Globalization.

Through the years, the principal message of the ‘Human Choice and Computers’ (HCC) tradition and its associated conferences has been: there are choices and alternatives. The special theme of HCC7 is Social Informatics, which includes in itself a promise of a less technically biased approach to informatics, whilst An Information Society for All adds the ethical aspects to it. When developing the infrastructure and applications in an information society, we should strive to afford people equal opportunities to information technologies.

Professor Rob Kling introduced the name Social informatics in its widely known Computers and Controversy. He was director of the Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2003 at age 58, leaving a rich heritage in the field. This HCC7 conference honours his work and memory, and it develops further the cultivation of Kling’s legacy.

In this volume, Social Informatics takes in two directions. The first part supports the readers in creating their interpretation of the meaning of Social Informatics. The second, more extensive, part develops an overview of various applications of Social Informatics. Researchers inspired by Social Informatics touch unbelievably many areas of human and social life.

Ethics, culture, politics, and law are a few areas within the realm of Social Informatics. The conceptualisations of information societies and ICT policies expand the domain towards economic, organizational, and technical issues. Additionally, this volume further develops the successful applications that require valid concepts and methods. These aspects demonstrate the power of Rob Kling’s legacy. Scientific knowledge is the most durable form of that heritage because it does not decrease when used; on the contrary, diligent applications bear multiple fruits to continue that legacy.

Thank you,Rob!

 

Jacques Berleur is at the University of Namur, Belgium.

Markku I. Nurminen is at the University of Turku, Finland.

John Impagliazzo is at Hofstra University, USA.