Track Description

Theme

Over the past decade, IT-enabled “openness” has received an increasing amount of attention from IS researchers, including multiple workshops, conferences and journal special issues devoted to a variety of open phenomenon such as open source software, open content and open innovation. In the IS context, openness typically refers to technological and legal accessibility of IT artefacts, transparent and permeable organizational structures, and distributed collaborative processes based on knowledge sharing between peers. Such technological, structural and procedural openness has significant social and business implications.

For example, individual users actively participate in the creation of global knowledge goods (e.g., Wikipedia or Linux). A new generation of “open” entrepreneurs can be seen to leverage the power of crowds in the design and delivery of products and services and in the funding of their business ventures. For established businesses, openness has changed approaches to business model architectures and innovation, both through “internal openness” (e.g., inner source software, internal co-creation platforms and enterprise social software) and “external openness” (e.g., open innovation markets, open sourcing, and crowdsourcing), and more often through combinations of internal and external strategies. Likewise, open technologies are central to new intra- and inter-organizational forms of value creation, supporting “ecosystems” of in(ter)dependent actors (e.g., the ecosystem around Google’s Android OS, or Facebook’s app platform). What is more, openness shifts power structures by relatively devaluing physical production facilities (which can now often been booked as on-demand services) and emphasizing the value of information, and IT-enabled business models. As a consequence, openness is a disruptive force not only in digital content industries such as music and news, but also in sectors such as manufacturing and financial services. Increasingly, the academic sector and the research community itself face new challenges (and opportunities) emerging from the combination of openness and IT.

We believe that IS, as a discipline, is particularly well positioned to study open phenomena that involve technology, individuals, organizations and societies. The aim of the third consecutive ECIS track on Openness and IT is to provide a forum for the most recent work in this growing and important IS research domain. We invite theoretical, empirical and applied research papers that will significantly contribute to our theoretical and practical understanding of openness; its manifestations, antecedents and, most critically, its impacts on individuals, organizations and society.

Best papers of this track will be fast-tracked to a special issue on Openness and IT (TBC).

Types of Contributions

The track welcomes theoretical, empirical and applied contributions and encourages submission from researches using a wide range of methodological and epistemological approaches. All though all aspects of IT-enabled openness (or the impact of openness on IT) are of interest, we particularly encourage submissions explore (a) the manifestations, dynamics and characteristics of different open phenomena and (b) the impact of technological openness in organizational, personal and professional behaviour both on- and offline. The interplay and relationship between technology and openness should be central to the submissions (rather than providing only the background for studies of general business strategy or social behaviour).

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• APIs and SOAs as an Open Collaboration/Creation Platform
• Collective Action and Collective Resources
• Collective Intelligence and Collective Creativity
• Crowdsourcing and Microwork
  Crowdfunding and P2P (Crypto) Currencies
• MOOCs and Open Education
• Open Access
• Open Business Models and Open Strategies
• Open Data
• Open Design
• Open Government
• Open Hardware
• Open Innovation
• Open Science and Citizen Science
• Open Source and Inner Source Software Development
• Open Standards
• Peer-Production and Distributed Collaboration
• Product/Service Co-creation
• Social Software as an Open Collaboration/Creation Platform
• Theories of Openness
• User-Led/Lead User Innovation

Track Chairs

Daniel Schlagwein <primary contact>

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Daniel Schlagwein is Lecturer at the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His research interest is on crowdsourcing, open innovation, and enterprise social media. His research has been accepted at academic conferences (e.g., Academy of Management, ICIS, ECIS), journals (e.g., JOCEC) and has been picked up by the media (e.g., Sky News). His editorial experience co-editor of for a special issue on inter-organizational systems 2.0 at Electronic Markets, co-organizer for the IFIP 8.2 OASIS conference, and co-chair for the track on Openness and IT (this track) at ECIS 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Joseph Feller

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Joseph Feller is Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at University College Cork, Ireland. His work includes five books, over 85 academic publications in ISR, EJIS, JSIS, ISJ and other peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and over 125 industry articles. He was program chair of the ICSE Workshop Series on Open Source Software Engineering (2001-2005), program co-chair for the 2007 Conference on Open Source Software (IFIP 2.13), track co-chair for the Innovation and Open Source Software at ECIS 2008 and the Openness and IT track (this track) at ECIS 2013 and 2015, and has guest edited five special issues of international journals on the topic of open source software.

Lorraine Morgan

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Lorraine Morgan is Senior Research Fellow at LERO, National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research on open innovation, open source and related topics has been accepted at EJIS, Database, IEEE Computer, and other outlets. Her editorial experience includes co-editor for a special issue on open innovation at JAIS and co-chair for the track on Openness and IT (this track) at ECIS 2014 and 2015.