The workshop in a nutshell

ESEA4RCIS is is a community-based, participatory workshop! Instead of asking you to write a paper, submit it to us, get it accepted, and present it in the workshop, we will do research together and we will co-author a paper.

In the workshop, the members of the RCIS community can jointly assess the performance of RCIS 2022 on ethical, social and environmental topics. We refer to such assessments as ethical, social and environmental accounting (ESEA). Read more  about ESEA methods here.

These are the main motivations that, as members of the RCIS community, we could have for conducting such accounting process: (i) it will allow us to identify points of improvement within the RCIS community and our conference series, (ii) it will provide inputs to the Steering Committee and Chairs to perform a responsible strategic management of the conference series, (iii) it will help us build our identity as positive change-makers, bringing additional pride and purpose to the RCIS community. Read more about the motivations here.

These are our plans (read a longer description here):

• Before the workshop, we are working hard to define a method that will guide the accounting, and this includes a set of key performance indicators. We have also collected much information about earlier RCIS conference editions.
• During the workshop, all participants will jointly (i) reflect on the ethical, social and environmental topics that are relevant for our community, (ii) we will discuss preliminary results, (iii) collect additional data,  (iv) process the data to compute indicators, and (v) reflect on the outcomes.
• After the workshop, we will continue the collaboration and, eventually, we will co-author a paper with the results. All workshop participants will be co-authors of this paper.

We are organising this workshop with enthusiasm (read more about the ESEA4RCIS organisers), but stakeholder involvement is key. By making this accounting a participatory process, we intend to engage the RCIS community, trigger deep reflections on these topics and, more importantly, identify improvement spaces. Read more about the topics that we will cover in the workshop, here. Disclosing the results will also send a clear signal that the RCIS community cares about Information Science ethics (the main theme of RCIS 2022), and will contribute to building trust in our role as positive change-makers.

It is not the actual result of the accounting what is the most important, but the process of obtaining those results and the community-building effort of jointly tackling the subsequent improvement actions. Together, we contribute to a more ethical, more socially inclusive, and environmentally friendly world.

Do you want to participate? That is great! Read more here.

Credits of the header photograph: “Parc Güell, Barcelona” by unicoletti is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0