Social informatics is an ill-defined field, characterised by problems rather than theories and tools. It addresses the problems and opportunities in supporting humans to interact with each other in social contexts through technologies based on engineered artefacts. Its importance and usefulness are increasingly being acknowledged through growing interests in more participatory applications. While this development creates more interesting problems in social informatics, it also increases the complexity. This paper puts forward a cognitive view as a way to capture the problem domain. Enabling participation is identified as a key aspect, and research directions in social informatics are described.
Comment on the Paper