This summer, the Scandinavian IS research community celebrated its 21st annual IRIS conference (Information systems Research In Scandinavia), and from that point of view it is probably the oldest active IS research community in the world. Many important contributions have come out of this tradition: for example, the work of Börje Langefors on theories of information systems (1966), which contributed to the establishment of our field, and the controversial contributions of Kristen Nygaard (1971), emphasizing the political aspects and the strengths of action research approaches as integral parts of information systems studies