(in the Digital and Social Media Track)

Internet technologies now make it possible to produce new ideas, products, and services by catalyzing largescale social networks and crowds. What do such social networks and crowds produce? What should they  produce? What ideas, products, and services? 

While social networks assume organic growth and an embedding that takes place over time, crowds can be  assembled rapidly. Between the two extremes are a host of different organizational structures, in which already committed members of a community are deployed to create or improve ideas. And the traces of these  new organizations are also varied, ranging from ephemeral short messages to curated collaborative databases. The output often takes the form of digital media, and the organization often relies on social media. 

We are interested in empirical papers that observe or visualize the innovations produced by networks and  crowds; theoretical papers that simulate this production through software; conceptual papers, which analyse the phenomena of the humanized web; and design research that creates and evaluates new tools and processes. We are particularly open to papers that explore unusual ways of modelling emergent organizations: models  that demonstrate or reflect the influence of social systems on user behaviours, models that consider the  multiple connections between people, technology, and institutions, models that break personal identity into sub-relations, and models that examine the emergence of roles, identity, and institutions. We are interested in 

applying the ideas of James March, Mark Granovetter, Harrison White, Charles Tilly and related scholars to information systems. 

With respect to content, the track is open to analysis of collective intelligence, new knowledge creation, persuasive technology, crowdsourcing, as well as ad hoc social networks formed in response to pressing  social needs. Thus the track is open to a wide range of content areas that lend themselves to the analysis of relations – and their products. 

We are aiming to attract an audience from four groups: 

1) those interested in social networks, crowdsourcing and more generally the social web who find 

a home in information systems departments, 

2) computer scientists who are interested in the analysis of network and crowd processes, 

3) those who use social networks to describe social structure and 

4) industry practitioners. 

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Jeffrey Nickerson (Primary contact)

Donald Steiny 

Harri Oinas-Kukkonen