Information Technology & People, Volume 29, Number 1

Social Information Systems (SIS) are the basis of an emerging phenomena of significant interest to researchers in the discipline of Information System (IS). Historically, IS began at a time when business systems were being developed and implemented on mainframe computers to support organisational processes. While the social aspects of these business information systems have always been recognised, there is reason to believe that there are now information systems that are essentially social and fundamentally different from those of business. If this is the case, there are implications for the IS discipline as a whole for the research direction of IS scholars.In this e-book we explore the following questions: (a) what are 'social information systems', (b) how do they fit within the IS discipline and (c) why is the phenomenon of SIS an important topic for discussion among IS scholars.In order to investigate these questions, and the underlying issues they represent, a workshop on SIS was held at the European Conference on Information Systems in 2014 . The intention was that the workshop would guide the development of papers for the e-book. Two conceptual papers presented at the workshop (Schlagwein et al 2014; Hasan 2014) provided direct input into discussion among the participants that is reflected in the understanding of SIS presented in this e-book.