Shaping the Future of ICT Research: Methods and Approaches Working Conference

A working conference was held at University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA. Papers are due 1 July 2012. The call can be found at http://www.ifip82-2012.usf.edu/. Read the proceedings online at Springer here.

Since the founding of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) in 1960 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing information processing throughout the world, the research and practice of information and communication technologies (ICT) has experienced seismic changes. Organizational computing architectures have shifted from mainframe computing to client-server to distributed to cloud computing, information technology has spawned new business models based on electronic commerce and service-oriented architecture, communities and nations are relying on ICT to leapfrog into the future, and as the recent events in the Middle-East demonstrate, online social media has provided a new voice to a worldwide movement toward democracy. Researchers are continuously challenged to find innovative approaches to perform relevant and rigorous ICT studies.

In the context of this changing world of ICT, what are the key research problems that we, as ICT researchers, should be studying, and how should we be studying such problems? This international conference issues a call to present research designs and programs that have the potential to shape the future of ICT research. We welcome research papers that explore new directions in the design, use, and impacts of ICT in our organizational and social lives, papers that explore new or integrated methods for studying issues relevant to ICT research, and papers that can provoke a healthy debate on the conduct of future ICT research. In particular, we welcome ICT research proposals that transcend boundaries between theories, methods, approaches, and disciplines.

This conference continues the tradition of spirited ICT research inquiry that characterized previous IFIP 8.2 conferences in Manchester (1984), Copenhagen (1990), Philadelphia (1997), and Manchester (2004). Thought leaders in the ICT community are encouraged to participate and help in forming a vision and agenda for the future of relevant and rigorous ICT research methods and approaches for the next decade. Our goal is to broaden this discussion beyond the Information Systems community to include researchers from the many ICT-related disciplines.