[AISWorld] Call for Minitrack Proposals, AMCIS 2017 (SIGOPEN)

[Matt Levy]

Dear Colleagues,

If you are doing research in the area of Openness and are interested in
helping others foster their research than maybe, just maybe, you might be
interested in developing or co-chairing a minitrack at AMCIS.

You can find the minitrack proposal template here: https://goo.gl/ZCF4Gs

Below is the information for the track and examples of prospective
minitracks.

Track Title: Openness in Research and Practice (SIGOPEN)

Sponsoring SIG (or Chapter, College): SIGOPEN

Track Co-Chairs
1. Joe Feller
2. Matt Germonprez
3. Matt Levy
4. Lorraine Morgan

Description:

The track seeks research papers in all things related to “openness” and the
sharing of information in organizations and society. Papers in this track
will be those that share new ideas about theoretical and empirical research
on the wide range of phenomena emerging at the intersection of Information
Systems on the one hand, and various forms of legal, technological,
organizational, and societal openness, on the other.  Relevant topics for
papers include: New modes of knowledge creation embedded in open source and
open content licensing, radical inclusivity of the crowd to share
knowledge, effort and value, the tearing down of traditional organizational
boundaries to enable new forms of innovation, or the reinvention of commons
or open spaces to share information related to education, science, and
democratic participation. Openness continues to be a disruptive and
transformative force that demands the rigorous and considered investigation
of the Information Systems community. This track provides a forum to
further our understanding of these disruptive ideas

Relevance to Recent Advances in Leading Journals:

There have been several recent special issues directly related to openness
that exemplify its continued prominence in the IS discipline:

* Journal of Information Technology – Special Issue on “Openness and IT”
(forthcoming).
* Information Systems Journal – Special issue on “Critical Perspectives on
Information Systems and Openness: Emerging Discourses, Meanings, Models and
Implications” (forthcoming).
* Journal of the Association for Information Systems – Special issue on
“The Role of Information Systems in Enabling Open Innovation” (2014).
* Journal of Internet Services and Applications – “Thematic Series on Free
and Open Source Software Development” (forthcoming).
* Journal of the Association for Information Systems – Special Issue on
“Empirical Research on Free/Libre Open Source Software” (2010).

Examples of Potential Minitracks:

Breakthroughs in Openness in Organizations and Society: Contemporary
discourse has fostered new forms of openness spanning the technological,
legal, socio-cultural, and economic systems in modern organizations and
across society. This includes advances in open source software, open source
hardware, open content, open data, and open design, and even the
‘industrialization’ of the maker’s movement and how openness has shaped the
funding of new innovation. These phenomena have crossed the boundaries of
the specialist communities from which they emerged and have expanded into a
wide number of communities and sub-cultures (makers, gamers, virtual world
builders, social media prosumers, etc.). This mini-track invites conceptual
and empirical research that will contribute to our understanding of
openness in these contexts as it relates to the systems and technology that
the individual, collaborative, and collective production and sharing of
complex knowledge goods and creative works.

Breakthroughs in Openness in Science, Research, and Pedagogy: Openness has
the potential to disrupt and transform academic work in many known and
unknown ways. Open approaches to scholarship have taken many new forms,
including open data sets, open academic publishing, open peer review, and
the all-encompassing idea of Open Science. However, what we do not know are
the effects, positive or negative, of such proselytizations. Have these
concepts of openness in these environments lived up to their expectations?
What can we learn from failure? How have these ideas changed the nature of
academic work (or not)? How does this change the types of research
questions we can ask? How can academic research be made more effective,
innovative, and have a greater impact on the world through open approaches
and technologies?

Other possibilities:

* Opportunities to improve education in Information Systems, Management,
and other fields through increased openness.
* The current status of educational resources, open courseware, and
Massively Online Open Courses (MOOC).
* New approaches to openness that  enable transformation in science,
research, and pedagogy that will make a positive difference in the world.

We intend for the mini-tracks to invite research papers,
research-in-progress, and panel proposals on all topics related to openness
in scientific discovery, the practice of research, and pedagogical
practice. We are interested in the production, use, and impacts of openness
in scholarship in its many forms – quantitative, qualitative, theoretical,
literature review, case study, and other research approaches are welcome.

Important Dates:

17-October-2016: Deadline for Mini track proposals
27-October-2016: Mini track decisions are issued
09-January-2017: ScholarOne opens for Completed and ERF paper submissions
01-March-2017: ScholarOne closes for Completed and ERF paper submissions
17-April-2017: Notification of initial decisions on Completed and ERF paper
submissions


Matthew Levy
Assistant Professor of Information Systems
Dept. of Fin Econ & Information Systems
Office: (808) 544-9378
Email: mlevy at hpu.edu