Special Issue Editors:

Over the past decade, “open ” phenomena enabled by information technology (IT) have received an increasing amount of interest from information systems (IS) researchers. Evidence of this interest can be seen in tracks (e.g., the underlying track of this special issue, the track on “Openness and IT ” at ECIS); conferences (e.g., the IFIP Working Group 2.13 OSS conferences); journal special issues (e.g., Whelan et al. 2014); and the formation of the AIS Special Interest Group on Open Research and Practice (SIGOPEN) and its related workshops (pre-ECIS and pre-ICIS). For this special issue, we broadly understand the term “openness ” to mean the accessibility of knowledge, the transparency of action and the permeability of organizational structures. This openness can be both a driver for and result of new IT, the area of interest to us in this special issue. Openness has significant implications for individuals, organizations and societies. For example, individual users actively participate in the creation of widely used common knowledge goods such as Wikipedia (Germonprez et al. 2011) or Linux (Benkler 2006). A new generation of entrepreneurs can now be seen to leverage the power of crowds in the design and delivery of products and services (Orlikowski and Scott 2015), and for the funding of their business venture