[Sigtis-l] Greetings from SIG-SI Co-Chairs

[Eric Meyer]

Dear members of SIG-SI,

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the SIG-SI members for voting us to be co-chairs of the SIG for this year. We are delighted to be taking up this shared role, and look forward to working with you to make the SIG-SI active and to have a strong presence at the ASIS&T 2017 Annual Meeting in Washington DC in late October.

Even though this year's annual meeting is back in the United States, we hope to build on the success of last year's meeting in Copenhagen to engage with more European colleagues in addition to those around the world. As American immigrants to Europe (Kalpana moved to UC Dublin in 2011 and Eric to Oxford in 2007), we look forward to engaging with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and also across the globe.

Social Informatics as a term has waxed and waned over the years as it has been applied, re-defined, and re-purposed by a variety of audiences. Nevertheless, it is clear that the central questions of how people relate to the technologies they use is more important today than it has ever been. Debates over the balance between freedom and control on the Internet and via our devices are in the news regularly. There is heightened interest in automation and what it will mean for the future of work. Again and again, technology is being offered up as both a source and a solution of a myriad of societal problems.

We look forward to working with SIG-SI to encourage research, publication, and engagement on these issues that ask us to understand social processes and the technologies that are shaping and being shaped by them.

Warm regards,

Kalpana Shankar
Professor of Information and Communication Studies
Head of School
School of Information and Communication Studies
University College Dublin
kalpana.shankar at ucd.ie<mailto:kalpana.shankar at ucd.ie>

Eric T Meyer
Professor of Social Informatics
Director of Graduate Studies
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
eric.meyer at oii.ox.ac.uk<mailto:eric.meyer at oii.ox.ac.uk>


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