Social technologies may be defined as “digital technologies used by people to interact socially and together to create, enhance, and exchange content". Social technology in our context is an umbrella term used to capture a wide variety of terminologies depicting internet-enabled communications, platforms and tools, e.g. web 2.0, mobile 2.0, social media, social software, etc., which has the potential to establish collaborative connectivity among billions of individuals over the globe. Socially enabled applications supported by social technologies are fundamentally changing the way we communicate, collaborate, consume, and create. They represent one of the most transformative impacts of information technology on any organization, both within and outside organizational boundaries. People are now living in a “digitally-connected global society” where each individual in a crowd of people is a potential contributor in many ways to build a better community – they can collaborate for a social mission, participate in local governance and share their knowledge and expertise to help other underprivileged communities.
Social Informatics Research Group (SIRG), initiated at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta) in 2015 under the leadership of Prof Dr Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, is a multi-disciplinary research group involving researchers and practitioners in the domain of Management, Social Policy, Sociology, Education, Social Work and Computer & Information Science. After retirement of Prof Bandyopadhyay from IIM Calcutta in November 2022, SIRG is running as an autonomous research group under his leadership since December 2022. The objective of Social Informatics Research Group is to evaluate the possible impact of Internet-enabled Social Technologies on individual, groups, organizations and society at large and to develop and investigate Socially-enabled Applications in empowering underprivileged communities.
To this end, we are interested in investigating how people interact with social technologies and socially enabled applications to further their goals and interests and how they change and affect people and organizations. Our objectives are to study the formation and linkages of virtual communities that have the most positive effect on social capital when they can increase network density and facilitate the spread of information. Our mission is to create a more inclusive society through holistic development of rural community at large, with a focus towards empowering them with knowledge, information and opportunities so that they can live a dignified life and become contributing members of society.