Editorial for the Special Issue on Social Information Systems

Social Information Systems (SIS) are the basis of an emerging phenomena of significant interest to researchers in the discipline of information system (IS). Historically, IS began at a time when business systems were being developed and implemented on mainframe computers to support organisational processes. While the social aspects of these business IS have always been recognised, there is reason to believe that there are now IS that are essentially social and fundamentally different from those of business. If this is the case, there are implications for the IS discipline as a whole for the research direction of IS scholars. In this special issue we explore the following questions: first, what are SIS , second, how do they fit within the IS discipline and third, why is the phenomenon of SIS an important topic for discussion among IS scholars