Paper title (Paper Title style)


Australasian Journal of Information Systems Goode 
2020, Vol 24, Selected Papers from the IS Foundations Conference ISF Preface 

 1 

Preface to the Special Section on the 9th Information 
Systems Foundations Workshop 
Sigi Goode 
Associate Professor (Information Systems) 
Australian National University 
sigi.goode@anu.edu.au 

It's difficult to believe that it's been 20 years since the first Information Systems Foundations 
Workshop. The workshop series was begun by Kit Dampney in 1999 at Macquarie University. 
Thereafter, the workshop has been held biennially at the Australian National University. A 
number of people have come and gone in that time. However, it's heartening to note that the 
workshops have maintained their collaborative, collegiate and thoughtful approach to new 
work, new ideas and new scholars.  

In this, the 9th workshop, the focus was on the theoretical foundations of information systems 
at the social intersection. In particular, papers had to clearly address some theoretical body or 
bodies of knowledge in the information systems or a related domain, and the implications for 
practice of the theory or theories under consideration. We sought papers that are carefully 
argued, stimulating, speculative and controversial.  

We received papers on a variety of topics, from which a number were selected for presentation 
at the workshop. From these papers, three feature in this special section. In "Explanations as 
Discourse: Towards Ethical Big Data Analytics Services", Sadaf Afrashteh, Ida Someh and 
Michael Davern use the lens of discourse ethics to examine the use of explanations arising 
from big data analytics. In "The Challenges Involved in Establishing a Research Technique", 
Roger Clarke identifies conceptual and methodological challenges and processes involved in 
the development of new research techniques. In "Making IS Relevant in a Connected World: 
Revisiting the Intellectual Structures Framework", Henry Linger and Helen Hasan revisit the 
Intellectual Structures Framework against the backdrop of an ad-hoc, diverse IS field. Each of 
these works witnessed lively discussion at the workshop. 

The papers presented in this special section were accepted following a double-blind peer-
review process. The workshop relies each year on the time and effort of a number of 
anonymous reviewers - it is these anonymous reviewers who truly embody the vital spirit of 
the workshop. I am also grateful to the other program chairs, Prof. John Campbell and Prof. 
Kai Riemer for their support, and to Prof. Shirley Gregor for delivering the keynote address. 

Finally, as many know, we lost our dear friend and colleague, Prof. John Campbell, not long 
after the ISF workshop. John was a guiding light and a longstanding contributor to the ISF 
workshop series over many years. We miss John terribly. 

 

Copyright: © 2020 Goode. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the 
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia License, which permits non-
commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author 
and AJIS are credited. 

doi: https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v24i0.2731 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/au/


Australasian Journal of Information Systems Goode 
2020, Vol 24, Selected Papers from the IS Foundations Conference ISF Preface 

 2