On The Research Approaches Employed at Recent European Conferences on Information Systems (ECIS 2002 - ECIS 2004)

European Information Systems research is reflected in the papers presented at the European Conference for Information Systems (ECIS). It seems that we employ a number of different approaches for research in the IS community. There has been a debate on methodological appropriateness and choice of research approach over the years. This paper adds to that debate by presenting a snapshot of what research approaches have been employed at recent ECIS. This paper presents a classification scheme for discussing research approaches and applies that scheme to analyse the papers presented at the three most recent ECIS. The results show that the proportion of studies employing qualitative interviews in combination with document studies has increased. The proportion of studies employing prolonged organisational engagement is relatively stable, while experimental studies where artefacts are constructed and/or tested are decreasing

Designing Community Atmosphere Barometers

The World of learning is undergoing radical changes. Increasingly Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) support new temporal and spatial learning configurations. Traditional face-toface learning situations offer a variety of ways for people to provide informal feedback contributing to the establishment and maintenance of a community atmosphere. ICT supported distance education presents a challenge for the establishment of community. This paper explores the design criteria for mechanisms compensating for the loss of informal feedback in a real-life distance educational setting by codifying and visualising the community atmosphere. This is accomplished by two case studies each designing, implementing and evaluating a web-based community atmosphere barometer. The results indicate the importance of providing ICT support with sufficient flexibility allowing the community to engage in collective processes of sensemaking when jointly expressing the atmosphere. 1