Understanding the Social Web: Towards Defining an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda for Information Systems

This paper identifies issues that must be considered by Information Systems scholars interested in helping to build a rich, interdisciplinary community to support applied research into the impact of the social web. We describe challenges and opportunities presented by the social web for Information Systems research and argue that an interdisciplinary approach may address the challenges of pursuing research questions about ephemeral social web phenomena. Through the creation of communities of practice that bring together faculty, IT professionals, and students from across academic colleges and high performance computing groups that lay a foundation for collaboration, information systems scholars may realize new opportunities for behavioral, design science, business intelligence, and IS strategy research. More importantly, through an interdisciplinary community of practice, we may inform how to develop an information systems curriculum that equips our students to participate in the growing knowledge economy.