[AISWorld] cfp: Special Issue of Information Systems Journal on: Critical Perspectives on Information Systems and Openness: Emerging Discourses, Meanings, Models and Implications

[Petter Nielsen]

**INFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL**

Special Issue Call for Papers:
Critical Perspectives on Information Systems and Openness: Emerging Discourses, Meanings, Models and Implications

Special Issue Guest Editors:
- Petter Nielsen, University of Oslo, Norway (pnielsen at ifi.uio.no)
- Sundeep Sahay, University of Oslo, Norway (sundeeps at ifi.uio.no)

This special issue of the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) is dedicated to openness: the associated meanings around openness, the implications of openness for design, systems development, organization and society and what this means for charting new directions in IS research. We expect these new understandings to be based either on empirical based and critical analysis of projects in which aspects of openness are explicitly in focus, or on contexts where openness has emerged as an important theme. Our goal is to advance a critical debate in Information Systems research on the theme of openness. We welcome submissions on a range of different topics, involving different theories and methods which lead to strengthening of critical perspectives on contemporary debates around openness in Information Systems.

A variety of discourses and practices exist in contemporary society around openness emphasizing aspects of freedom, transparency, access, publishing, participation and democratic and collaborative efforts. These discourses relate to numerous domains, including the economy, healthcare, trade, innovation, business models, architecture, software, government data, social development, governance, knowledge, education and academic publishing.

An early Information Systems discourse in this area related to open source software and open standards. In recent times, we read about "open data", which involves governments placing relevant data in the public domain, and which may or may not be supported by open software. Open development is a more overarching theme which is positioned as a theory of development, focusing on understanding how information-networked activities are carried out, in what circumstances and with what benefit for whom. These openness discourses continue to unfold in a political-cultural-technical environment simultaneously with contrary implications (of openness) which emphasize increasingly centralized (cloud) computing, cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism and rising levels of comprehensive surveillance. There are inherent and fundamental contradictions and tensions around openness, which lend to the development of critical perspectives.

The promises of openness are many, including its economic potential to generate new innovations and industries, transparency, accountability and democratic processes like citizen participation in governance and rising accountability of the State. While there are a variety of practices related to openness (such as open source software development communities and practices), paradigms of openness are in flux, constantly being negotiated and contested, influencing the very meaning of communities and participation. Openness gives rise to many paradoxes. For example, innovation may require openness for collaboration among industrial actors, while the commercialization of the product of the collaboration may require protection. Open international production may weaken local economies and domestic jobs, but at the same time potentially improve the export performance of a country. While open education may significantly empower students at the fringes, it may also reconfigure the playing field of competing educational institutions by introducing significant changes to the educational system. Furthermore, while open government data is critical for transparency and accountability, it may strike back on a failing regime.

Openness has received significant attention from IS researchers, in workshops, conferences and journals, making the Information Systems discipline well positioned to a critical study of openness given its multi-disciplinary perspectives. Further, there are definitely technical implications underlying openness discourses - software, cloud computing, databases etc. - which means that Information Systems researchers are well-placed to critically study a variety of these issues and their implications.

Research on openness in Information Systems is commonly based on assumptions about the nature of technology and the way openness contributes to the development of new opportunities even as it introduces various limitations. More often than not, the potential of openness is taken for granted. This positivistic and often market-driven focus tends to take precedence over the development of interpretive, critical and contextualized social theoretical positions. The aim of this special issue is to move beyond positivist and functionalist approaches, and those which promote rhetoric and hype, to explore, explain and critique the way in which openness in its pursuit for innovations, participation and public goods also may come with negative consequences. The aim of this special issue is thus to offer a venue for the critical study of this domain and its impact on people, organizations and societies.

In this special issue, we will seek to critically discuss different facets of open and openness, whether they represent hype or reality or both, what promises they hold for creating a better world, and what are the challenges and approaches we face in achieving the promised potential. To do this we welcome contributions from a wide range of perspectives, critical in nature, discussing for example potential tensions between open source and open data, the role of actors like the open society initiative in promoting openness as a value, and positive and negative freedoms, the role of intermediaries in the process, and the tensions they bring from the perspective of the State. This requires debating and contesting the very nature of openness in itself, through bringing out both positive and negative facets and their underlying reasons.

We expect submissions of empirically based papers drawing on social theoretical ideas that explicitly adopt a critical and conceptual focus on openness. Papers must clearly position themselves within the critical stream of Information Systems research, by for example relating to the principles outlined by Myers and Klein (2011). We will strongly encourage papers from both developed and developing country contexts, so as to provide more balanced analysis of notions of openness.

**Examples of potential contributions (not exclusive list):
- Key characteristics of openness in informational public goods (for example maps and data on public health and education) and the role of policy guidelines in enabling access and use of public goods, issues of data ownership and identifying data custodians
- Openness allows for participation of private sector, global actors, and civil society; how does it question the role of the state and established business models in domains which were previously controlled by them, such as health, education, agriculture?
- What new forms of accountability are created as a result of openness in both public and private settings?
- The facets of openness in software, data and information and how these are interrelated. For example, does openness in data imply reduced emphasis on openness in software?
- How are traditional market forces redefined through openness and what are new kind of opportunities, innovation and entrepreneurship, such as information intermediaries that come into play?
- Models of collaboration such as open source software projects, crowdsourcing and standardization of architectures and the processes of defining these standards
- Implications for developing countries: what kind of new opportunities comes with open data, big data, open source software etc., including their socio-economic development to address existing and emerging development challenges.
- How openness brings about new structures of power and control in the hands of those who hold the knowledge, expertise and infrastructure.
- What are the roles of emerging technologies, such as social media, cloud infrastructure, Internet of things, mobile devices in enabling different forms of openness for different contexts and domains?
- What are new models of open architecture and approaches and models for their development?
- Who become important advocates in promoting openness and what are mechanisms and forums in which advocacy is enabled?
- What are emerging models of participation in design and development of open systems and architecture, and how can appropriate blends be created between bottom-up grassroots movements and top-down nationally and globally defined agendas?
- How can existing theoretical models of Information Systems be evolved into new paradigms which creates openness as a core object of study?
- How can concepts and theoretical insights of scholars such as Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu and Nussbaum, Freire or Escobar, or more radical perspectives such as those of Gramsci or Chomsky, support a critical perspective on openness in Information Systems research?
- Does Internet governance have a role to play in defining how openness is constituted and how it will be defined in future?
- Openness in its current form is seemingly an affordance of digital networks, however, open sharing of ideas, and communication of knowledge have existed throughout history. When viewed in conjunction with the historical aspects of openness in different societies, what is the difference in the modern notion of openness; how does the modern notion differ substantively in terms of participation of different actors, the role of the state, the inclusion/exclusion of certain groups, the instruments of openness and the necessary conditions for openness to thrive?

***Deadlines:
Submission due date: September 30th 2016 1st round reviews: March 1st 2017
1st round revisions: June 1st 2017 2nd round reviews: November 1st 2017 Final revisions: February 1st 2018 Expected publication: 2018

***Special Issue Associated Editors:
Christanthi Avgerou, London School of Economics, UK 
Bendik Bygstad, University of Oslo, Norway 
Rahul Dé, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India 
Ben Eaton, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark 
Niall Hayes, University of Lancaster, UK 
Eric Monteiro, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway 
Brian Nicholson, University of Manchester, UK 
Eivor Oborn, Warwick Business School, Warwick, UK 
Leiser Silva, University of Huston, USA 
Edgar Whitley, London School of Economics, UK 
Yingqin Zheng, Royall Holloway, London, UK



--
Petter Nielsen
Associate Professor
Information Systems  Group
University of  Oslo
Department of Informatics
Ole-Johan Dahls Hus
Gaustadalleèn 23B
N-0373 Norway

+47 41506058
pnielsen at ifi.uio.no