New paper on Web 2.0, wikipedia, and social informatics
A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.
While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.
When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.
The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.
It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 6:49 pm and is filed under IT & Society, Social Informatics, Web 2.0, Wiki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 
on April 4, 2008 at 6:39 pm How to get published in Romania: The global reach of blogs | The J.P. Allen Blog wrote:
[...] paper on Web 2.0 and Social Informatics has now been published in issue #8 of the Journal of Social Informatics (JSI). JSI happens to be an [...]