A Response to the AIS Bright ICT Initiative

In 2015, the President of the Associate for Information Systems introduced the Bright ICT Initiative (Lee 2015), which provides a framework for improving Internet security based on four principles: origin responsibility, deliverer responsibility, rule-based digital search warrants, and traceable anonymity. We review these principles and show that at least three of these principles are at odds with the United Nation\u27s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the founding principles of the Internet and may actually decrease individual security. We conclude giving suggestions for developing principles more in line with human rights

Identifying Issues for the Bright ICT Initiative: A Worldwide Delphi Study of IS Journal Editors and Scholars

Information and communication technology (ICT) continues to change business as we know it. As ICT further integrates into our daily lives, it creates more opportunities to both help and hinder fundamental social problems throughout the world. In response to these growing and urgent societal needs, the Association for Information Systems approved the Bright ICT Initiative to extend IS research beyond a focus on business to take on the broader challenges of an ICT-enabled bright society. We conducted a Delphi study to provide guidance on where bright ICT-minded researchers might focus to produce their greatest impact. In this paper, we report on our findings. The Delphi panel comprised 182 globally distributed IS journal editors who participated in a three-round consensus-building process via the Internet. Our results provide a framework of eleven research priority areas and specific research topics for those engaged in future-oriented, socially conscious IS research

Cyber Security Violation in I0T-Enabled Bright Society: A Proposed Framework

The undesirable consequences of ICT proliferation remains a big concern. The rise in Internet of Things (IoT) have further exacerbated security and information privacy challenges. One main reason is organizations and individuals constantly violate regulations and rules. While cybersecurity and privacy scholars accentuate on the likelihood of rule violations at the individual and organizational levels, the evidence for and discussion of this concept is still scant. This study proposes an empirical response to the Bright ICT initiative of the Association of Information System. This initiative aims to drastically eliminate adverse effect of Internet of Things (IoT). However, a robust privacy and cybersecurity model is needed. This study draws on the selective organizational information privacy and security violation model and delineate it at individual level. Specifically, attitude towards behaviour and subjective norms, contextual conditions, rule and regulatory conditions, perceived risk of violating a privacy or security rule, economic and non-economic strain constructs are hypothesized to determine the likelihood of a privacy and cybersecurity rule violation. In this context, pertinent cybersecurity literatures for IoT-enabled environment were examined to suggest solutions to reduce the dark side of IoT-enabled bright society. This paper presents the proposed model

Information Systems Solutions for Environmental Sustainability: How Can We Do More?

We contend that too few information systems (IS) academics engage in impactful research that offers solutions to global warming despite the fact that climate change is one of the most critical challenges facing this generation. Climate change is a major threat to global sustainability in the 21st century. Unfortunately, from submissions of our call for papers presenting IS solutions for environmental sustainability, we found only one paper worthy of publication. Given that IS have been the major force for productivity increases in the last half-century, we suggest that IS scholars should immerse themselves in creating solutions for environmental problems. Moreover, information is a perquisite for assessing the state of the environment and making appropriate decisions to ameliorate identified problems. Indeed, the IS scholarly community needs to help create a sustainable society. While there is an emerging body of IS scholarship under the banner of green IS, we strongly believe that we need to step up these efforts. Our experience indicates that the emergence of green IS as an academic discipline is still by far too slow relative to the needs of society. Too few people are working on green IS given its importance, and fewer still are publishing papers about IS solutions that could contribute to dealing with climate change. In this editorial, we speculate on some reasons for why and explore how the IS discipline can grasp the opportunity to contribute to one of the most important societal challenges of our time. We identify the major barriers that we assert curtail the involvement of IS scholars in green IS research; namely, incentives misalignment, the low status of practice science, data analysis poverty, identification of research scope, and research methods. We discuss each barrier and propose solutions for them

Politics and AIS: Where Do We Draw the Line?

The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is the preeminent global professional association for academics in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Throughout its more than 20-year history, AIS governance documents have included no guidance on matters related to national or international politics. However, recent events have challenged AIS to reconsider its responsibility as a political or moral advocate for its members and the discipline it serves. A panel at ECIS 2017 explored the ways in which AIS has inadvertently or intentionally entered the political fray and debated the benefits and drawbacks of taking on a more formal political position. This paper presents the positions that each panelist raised and summarizes the active discussion that followed. It concludes with a set of questions that constitute a “call to action” to the AIS council to enact a politically acceptable set of core values to benefit its members

Design and Validation of the Bright Internet

Bright Internet research was launched as a core project of the AIS Bright ICT Initiative, which aims to build an ICT-enabled Bright Society. To facilitate research on the Bright Internet, we explicitly define the goals and principles of the Bright Internet, and review the evolution of its principles. The three goals of the Bright Internet are: the realization of preventive security, the provision of the freedom of anonymous expression for innocent netizens, and protection from the risk of privacy infringement that may be caused by preventive security schemes. We respecify design principles to fulfill these seemingly conflicting goals: origin responsibility, deliverer responsibility, identifiable anonymity, global collaboration, and privacy protection. Research for the Bright Internet is characterized by two perspectives: first, the Bright Internet adopts a preventive security paradigm in contrast to the current self-centric defensive protective security paradigm. Second, the target of research is the development and deployment of the Bright Internet on a global scale, which requires the design of technologies and protocols, policies and legislation, and international collaboration and global governance. This research contrasts with behavioral research on individuals and organizations in terms of the protective security paradigm. This paper proposes validation research concerning the principles of the Bright Internet using prevention motivation theory and analogical social norm theory, and demonstrates the need for a holistic and prescriptive design for a global scale information infrastructure, encompassing the constructs of technologies, policies and global collaborations. An important design issue concerns the business model design, which is capable of promoting the propagation of the Bright Internet platform through applications such as Bright Cloud Extended Networks and Bright E-mail platforms. Our research creates opportunities for prescriptive experimental research, and the various design and behavioral studies of the Bright Internet open new horizons toward our common goal of a bright future

“Yin and Yang”: Integrating the Bright Side into Dark Side Research in IS

In this talk, a brief review of dark-side concepts in IS research is presented and future opportunities for identifying new matching positive concepts are offered

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Surrendering Privacy for Security’s Sake in an Identity Ecosystem

Despite individuals’ and organizations’ best efforts, many significant information security threats exist. To alleviate these threats, researchers and policy makers have proposed new digital environments called identity ecosystems. These ecosystems would provide protection against attackers in that a third party intermediary would need to authenticate users of the ecosystem. While the additional security may help alleviate security threats, significant concern exists regarding ecosystem users’ privacy. For example, the possibility of targeted attacks against the centralized identity repository, potential mismanagement of the verified credentials of millions of users, and the threat of activity monitoring and surveillance become serious privacy considerations. Thus, individuals must be willing to surrender personal privacy to a known intermediary to obtain the additional levels of protection that the proposed ecosystems suggest. We investigate the reasons why individuals would use a future identity ecosystem that exhibits such a privacy-security tradeoff. Specifically, we adopted a mixed-methods approach to elicit and assess the major factors associated with such decisions. We show that 1) intrapersonal characteristics, 2) perceptions of the controlling agent, and 3) perceptions of the system are key categories for driving intentions to use ecosystems. We found that trustworthiness of the controlling agent, perceived inconvenience, system efficacy, behavioral-based inertia, censorship attitude, and previous similar experience significantly explained variance in intentions. Interestingly, general privacy concerns failed to exhibit significant relationships with intentions in any of our use contexts. We discuss what these findings mean for research and practice and provide guidance for future research that investigates identity ecosystems and the AIS Bright ICT Initiative

The Role of Information and Communication Technology in Self-Management of Chronic Diseases: An Empirical Investigation through Value Sensitive Design

This paper primarily investigates sensitivity towards patients’ values in the designs of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) that are capable of empowering them. We focus on the role of ICTs in self-management (SM) of diabetes, a chronic disease. Chronic diseases, declared an invisible epidemic by the World Health Organization, cause and perpetuate poverty and impede the economic development of many countries. As a means of informing the design of ICTs that facilitate self-management, we draw on value sensitive design (VSD) to conduct an in-depth interpretive field study to reveal the values that are important to diabetic patients. Specifically, we reveal twelve values shared by these patients: accessibility, accountability, autonomy, compliance, dignity, empathy, feedback, hope, joy, privacy, sense-making, and trust. A conceptual model emerged from analyzing interviews with diabetic patients; this model explains how these values, which are integrated into ICT features, afford or constrain patients’ abilities to self-manage their activities. This study makes multiple theoretical contributions: By granting ICT artifacts a clear theoretical status, it advances the field of SM that has nominally covered ICTs; it extends design research by extending the VSD literature and by introducing a valuecentric design perspective to examine a complex sociotechnical system; and it broadens work system theory by applying it in the healthcare space. The study’s findings have implications for design science researchers, healthcare providers, and policymakers

Practicing what we preach? Reflecting on environmental sustainable research practices of the IS community

Over the past decade, research on IS solutions for environmental sustainability evolved and produced a modest but firm body of knowledge. Despite this progressive understanding about ICT’s solution potential for environmental sustainability, our research practices seem widely unaffected by these insights. Most of us travel by air for work several times a year, to conferences, research stays, or guest lectures. Our community meetings do not seem well aligned with ecological goals. We research and apply technologies, such as blockchain or artificial intelligence, without sufficiently acknowledging the enormous amounts of energy they consume. It raises the fundamental question: Do we practice what we preach? While recognizing the good intentions IS research pursues, should we no longer ignore the environmental ‘elephant in the room’? In this inclusive panel discussion, we openly debate these issues. Thereby, we intend to capture the status-quo of the sustainability of our research practices and develop recommendations on how to improve it and ways of measuring the carbon footprint of some key activities