Coming of Age: Special Interest Groups in AIS

Special interest groups (SIGs) provide substantial benefits to other academic and professional organizations, helping their members exchange ideas and keep up to date. To foster the development of SIGs with the unique perspective only available from our discipline, AIS funded the first group of six SIG proposals . The funding is designed to provide seed money for the development of electronic resources such as web sites, listserves, and on-line discussion groups. In the long run, SIGs are expected to enhance their offerings with conference minitracks, newsletters, and directories. Some SIGs will offer workshops, calls for papers in special issues of journals, working papers, electronic bibliographies, tutorials, conferences, refereed journals, and pointers to research tools and industry contacts. The six proposals described in detail in this article include Agent-Based Information Systems (Riyaz Sikora, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Christoph Schlueter-Langdon, University of Southern California; and Dan O'Leary, University of Southern California); Cognitive Research (Michael J. Davern, New York University; Dov Te'eni, Bar-Ilan University; and Teresa Shaft, University of Oklahoma); E-Business (Judith Gebauer and Michael J. Shaw, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Human-Computer Interaction (Ping Zhang, Syracuse University; Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, University of Nebraska-