AAIS Event App (2024, 2025)
For several years, Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) hosts have utilized professional event apps to provide an interactive experience of the conference for its participants. Often these apps have provided an experience that was both subpar and also expensive. AAIS also runs and sponsors other events besides ACIS, so we have been looking at various open source offerings to see if they might be free, fully-featured, extensible and applicable to multiple events.
We have decided to become involved in developing our own AAIS Event App. To do so, we have been working with Work Integrated Learning teams at the University of Canberra (soon to be followed by University of Technology Sydney) that have led to the creation of functional prototypes. These have been demonstrated to members and the community at the 2024 AAIS AGM in December. We anticipates that v1 of the AAIS Event App will be available for ACIS 2025.
AAIS Virtual Communities (2025)
Because of the number of countries and the range of the Human Development Indexes within the AAIS Jurisdiction, this has real consequences for the AAIS’s ability to support and provide services. IS members from non-HDI indexed countries can’t afford to join the rest of the attendees at AAIS events because of the distances and costs. The reality is that even within Australia, these constraints to physical attendance are also evident. In the absence of the ability to attend these activities physically virtual options need to be explored.
The kinds of Tracks at ACIS Conferences, represent major themes of research being conducted within the Australasian IS Community. It seems reasonable to develop Virtual Communities that can model this kind of thematic organisation of IS research activities within the AAIS Jurisdiction. The Virtual Communities Initiative will become a third strategic resources linking ACIS and AJIS. Virtual Communities will allow researchers to engage in IS research, discover who is involved in those research areas and communicate/coordinate with them about research matters. They will make research more visible within the region and outside of it.
AAIS is developing the technical knowledge to implement this kind of platform, and has been actively engaging thought leaders in different areas of IS. A minimum viable prototype is currently being developed for one of the early VCs.
AAIS Preprints (2025-2026)
The AAIS will establish a green open access preprint service, called the AAIS Preprints. There are several compelling use cases. A preprint service will:
- allow Virtual Communities to create and evolve outputs that trace the intellectual development of ideas from researcher coalitions within them,
- facilitate experimentation and exploration of alternate forms of reviewing to the standard peer-review process, especially during the early stages of idea development,
- form a pathway to publication in peer reviewed journals including the Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS),
- fill a need for AAIS to publish its policies and best practices, governance matters, and infrastructure development roadmaps. The AAIS is also obligated to create reports on its progress. For transparency reasons, these outputs should be made available to the Australasian IS Community, and as a consequence they should be citable and discoverable.
- there should be a fast track mechanism for allowing ideas to be released to the broader IS research community, while authors can retain priority over these ideas
AAIS Preprints Website (2025-2026)
Access to the outputs developed using the AAIS Preprints will also be made available through a AAIS Preprints Website. This website will facilitate the discovery of AAIS Preprints across specific interests and authors as well as showcasing author biographies and preprints.
AJIS Website v2 (2025)
Redesign and expansion of the existing Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS) website will be undertaken during 2025. AJIS is a Diamond, Open Access journal. Additions to be made to the AJIS Charter and the AJIS Website will provide details about the open access priorities of the AAIS- the publisher of AJIS.
These priorities involve alignment of AJIS to the EU funded Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication (DIAMAS) project and in particular its Extensible Quality Standard for Institutional Planning (EQSIP). The AJIS Website will include detailed information involving the following seven EQSIP assessment criteria:
- Funding
- Ownership and Governance
- Open Science Practices
- Editorial Quality, Editorial Management and Research Integrity
- Technical Service Efficiency
- Visibility, Indexation, Communication, Marketing and Impact
- Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)- multilingualism, gender identity