The Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems

Welcome to the homepage for the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST). This consortium emerged out of diverse threads of scholarship and converged for the first time in its present form at the Unversity of Michigan in the summer of 2008. Tom Finholt and Steve Sawyer organized the 2008 summer workshop. A team of participants from that workshop organized a follow up workshop at the 2009 iSchools conference. For one half day, 25 scholars from diverse backgrounds worked toward these three goals:

1. Increased awareness of, and connections between scholars employing and developing socio-technical principles and outcomes.
2. Continued development of a research agenda regarding socio-technical principles, issues and questions inclusive of a broad set of disciplinary perspectives.
3. Identification of a core set of materials to represent the intellectual and empirical aspects of socio-technical scholarship.

A draft of core materials repreenting the intellecutal and empirical aspects of five specific areas of socio-technical scholarship were assembled by five teams and discussed by the whole group.

1. Library and Information Science
2. CSCW
3. Social Informatics
4. Management and Organizational Behavior
5. Sociology / Science and Technology Studies

Freemind is an open source mind mapping tool used to document four of the five discussions above. Mindmeister is an online version of this tool available at http://et.afsnet.org/ The Freemind Format mindmapping files are available for download here: LIS, CSCW, MOB & SOC-STS. (If you do not have freemind installed, you may need to "right click" and "select download file"). Do read these files in visual form, you will need to download freemind or import them into mindmeister.

If you are interested in continuing to develop and define research in the science of socio-technical systems, please volunteer!