Candidacy statement for Benjamin Mueller (University of Groningen) for Secretary of IFIP WG 8.2

Submitted by Kevin Crowston on Sun, 2018-09-23 12:34

Dear IFIP 8.2 community,

As an active member of IFIP 8.2, I enjoy the privilege of being part of a group whose ideas resonate strongly with my own interests. To continue and strengthen my involvement, I would like to step up and help shape our group’s future as Secretary of our working group.

Over the years, our group’s open and welcoming community has provided valuable support for the development of both my work and myself. To give back, I have been a member of three out of the last four working conference program committees. Outside 8.2, I served as an ECIS and ICIS track chair and am a member of the JAIS editorial review board. These experiences taught me the value of an open scientific discourse and the challenges of providing an institutional framework that invites, enables, and empowers a diverse set of academics to take part in that discourse.

If elected as Secretary, I will work to strengthen our group’s ability to contribute to IFIP’s overall goal of a worldwide professional and socially responsible development and application of information and communication technologies. Especially in times of increasingly global digitalization, I believe that our group’s work can be further improved in three areas:

  1. Generate new formats for interaction and collaboration at the workshops and working conferences; especially those that help us learn from each other’s work and stimulate forward-looking collaboration that extends beyond the days we meet face-to-face
  2. Innovate in terms of how to best support new scholars and their ideas; mentoring models and further leveraging the valuable work many of you are doing as reviewers for our events are promising starting points to generate ideas and build commitment
  3. Strengthen and invite diversity – across its many dimensions; help members overcome obstacles (e.g., political, economical, ...) in their efforts to share ideas and thoughts so that we further improve our ability to be inviting to novel facets that enrich our work

If you have any further questions or would like to discuss ideas, please do get in touch (b.mueller rug.nl). Best wishes

Benjamin