[AISWorld] CAIS Debate Section – What is the Future of AIS Conferences in Our Community? – Call For Contributions

[Cathy Urquhart]

Dear All,

I’m happy to announce this intriguing CAIS Debate Section on the future of conferences in our community. See below for details. We’re looking forward to hearing from you – this should be a very lively debate. Submission deadline is 3 April, for a contribution of 3000-to 5000 words. If you have any queries about the call or how it will work, please contact me as Managing Editor on c.urquhart at mmu.ac.uk<mailto:c.urquhart at mmu.ac.uk>

This call for contributions comes from debates and discussions about the role of AIS conferences over the years, and this debate has been thrown in sharp relief by the recent pandemic. Our conferences are the major vehicle for building our academic community, leading to questions about how as a community we organize ourselves, and serve the world. When we talk about building communities, this begs the question of who is in that community, and how to include them. This call comes at a moment when it still might be possible to take advantage of a post peak Covid world during the window where people may be more open to change or at least a reconsideration of traditional conference models.
This leads us to considerations such as how to balance continuing meaningful tradition with time and location opportunities. How much leeway should local hosts have to tweak formats to, for instance, involve academics unable to travel, as opposed to keeping what is known to be a successful conference format that has endured over time and has many efficiency advantages.
In this call for debate contributions, we ask you to take the conversation away from the conference coffee station or hotel bar, and contribute 3000 to 5000 words on the future of our AIS conferences. As is customary with CAIS Debate sections, we’ll be asking contributors to respond to a primary paper, in this case, written by Traci Carte (with others).
Ideally, contributions could cover at least one of the following discussion points, but we are open to others. The discussion points offered below are jumping off points for your contribution, and we certainly don’t expect all points to be covered in your rejoinder.


  *   What is/should be the contribution of conference to the financial viability of AIS and toward providing meaningful value and sense of inclusion for participants?
  *   How might conferences be organized and conducted to maximize access and diverse participation? This includes issues of physical access, financial ability to participate, visas and travel restrictions, inclusion regardless of gender, ethnicity, physical location and religion.
  *   What conference structures will best suit those who prefer face to face, distance/online, and various types of hybrid organization?
  *   How can conferences be organized and conducted to minimize impacts on climate and resource utilization?
  *   What are the key policies relative to hybrid conferences and how might best practices be instituted?
  *   What are the possible mixtures of international, regional, and local conference activities and what would constitute an ideal mix?

  *   How do we maintain high quality standards for adding to the body of knowledge while encouraging broad participation? Are there changes to the review system that are warranted (or worth experimenting with)?
  *   How do we interact with intellectual content during the conference particularly in light of multiple communication modes including real time face to face, recorded presentations, real time distance communication, development of recorded material as part of presentations and discussions? How can this be reconciled with intellectual property rights and proper attribution of credit for innovation?
  *   What are appropriate ways of publishing and archiving traditional and non-traditional materials including papers, TREO presentations, video material, and perhaps others?
  *   How do we resolve possible tensions between AIS organisational objectives, eg ensuring financial viability and social inclusion?
  *   How can we make a good hybrid offering (i.e., part in-person, part online, and/or elements that include F2F and virtual participants in same sessions) for AIS Conferences, and support program chairs to do so?
  *   How can we support less visible cohorts of conference attendees, such as those with hidden disabilities, those from teaching universities and non PhD granting schools, those with childcare issues – is our conference provision broad enough for those people who attend, and can we move our social inclusion model beyond obvious characteristics such as race, sex, and geographical location?
  *   How can we make paper contents (and potentially video presentations) broadly available, so that the in-person part of our conferences evolve to focus on those things that create a sense of community? Should we do this or not?
Submission Requirements

  *   All manuscripts submitted to CAIS should be submitted in Microsoft Word format. Authors are encouraged to follow CAIS style guide (available on the CAIS website https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/format.html) and use the CAIS author template for submissions of their manuscripts. Submissions must be made to the CAIS ScholarOne site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cais). If you do not have an account already, you will need to create one. Please select ‘Editorial Board Reviewed’ for Type, and ‘Debate’ for Department.


Important Dates
Submission deadline: April 3, 2023
First round notification: May 15, 2022
Invited revisions deadline: June 12, 2023
Second/final editorial decision: July 31, 2023
Projected Publication: September/October 2023

Editorial Review Board
Arlene Bailey, University of West Indies, Jamaica
Michelle Carter, Washington State University, USA
Alan Dennis, Indiana University, USA
Ming-Hui Huang, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Jan Marco Leimeister, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Tobias Mettler, Lausanne University, Switzerland
Alanah Mitchell, Drake University, USA
Jan Recker, University of Hamburg, Germany


Professor Emerita Cathy Urquhart
Department of Operations, Technology, Events and Hospitality Management (OTEHM)
MMU Business School
Faculty of Business and Law
All Saints Campus
Oxford Road Manchester, M15 6BH United Kingdom
T : 0161 247 3798  E: c.urquhart at mmu.ac.uk<mailto:c.urquhart at mmu.ac.uk>
Web: https://www.mmu.ac.uk/business-school/about-us/staff/otehm/staff/profile/professor-cathy-urquhart
Visiting Professor, Department of Informatics, Lund University, Sweden
https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/lucat/group/v1000028

Published October 2022: The Second Edition of Grounded Theory for Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide

[cid:image001.jpg at 01D94149.1E8AA100]

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/grounded-theory-for-qualitative-research/book266149#contents

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