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From
the Editor’s Desktop
When
I recently sent a plea to the Bulletin Advisory Board for
possible topics, the one they most enthusiastically endorsed was
social informatics. The excellent attendance at social informatics
sessions at the 2004 Annual Meeting in
Providence
also indicates widespread interest.
But what is it? This plaintive cry came from a number of
sources, so we are attempting to provide enlightenment.
Dave
Penniman of the University at
Buffalo
agreed to put this issue together. He solicited excellent papers
that range from general discussions of the field to examples of what
social informaticians study, how they do it and what it all means to
those of us involved in systems design, change management and other
fields where we have the power to inflict technology on the unwary,
albeit with the best of intentions.
Dave
Penniman, Steve Sawyer and Alex Halavais tackle the field in general
– the who, why and how of social informatics. Elisabeth Davenport
looks
at its application in the workplace, while Kristin Eschenfelder
describes the findings of a case study that exemplifies the social
aspects of the use of information and communications technologies.
Specifically she and her colleagues explore why people continue to
post DeCSS, a largely superceded program that broke the
software-based protection system on commercial DVDs, on their
websites.
An
emerging subspecialty of social informatics is community
informatics, in which researchers and practitioners single out
the "community" as its unit of analysis. In the next
issue of the Bulletin, Ann Bishop and Chip Bruce will
conclude our two-issue look at social informatics with an in-depth
look at community informatics.
In
other articles in this issue of the Bulletin, Andrew Dillon
reports his impressions from the 6th IA Summit in
Montreal, while our frequent contributor Lee Strickland – formerly
the chief privacy officer for the CIA among other government posts
and now a faculty member at University of Maryland College of
Information Studies – contributes his perspective on the
controversies surrounding the USA Patriot Act. While he focuses
particularly on those authorizations that will expire at the end of
2005 unless they are renewed and on sections that affect libraries
and other information providers, he also reviews key provisions that
are not expiring and strategies that might provide better guarantees
of protection against possible abuses of the act.
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