Abstract

The University of Maribor provides a meeting-point for researchers, professionals and executives, from throughout the world, who are interested in all aspects of electronic technologies applied to economic, administrative and social purposes. This Special Section exploits the substantial corpus of papers published in Bled eConference Proceedings since 1988 – over 1,000 in all, 773 of them fully-refereed. An Invitation was distributed to Bled community members in September 2011 (copy attached). It sought papers that reflect on, and build on, the content of the first 24 Bled conferences, that focus on a theme that has persisted across multiple conferences, and that are future-oriented. The Call for Paper attracted 27 expressions of interest. A total of 9 contributions survived the review process, 5 by sole authors and 4 by teams ranging in size from 2 to 8 people. The 21 authors' affiliations are in 8 countries, in alphabetical order – Australia, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and Vietnam. Each paper was reviewed by at least two referees, all of them senior in the IS discipline. Most of the papers had the advantage of two rounds of review, and substantial improvements were made as a result of the comments provided to authors. A double-open procedure was used. Reviewer blindness to paper authorship is often only nominal, and there are even cases where authors can guess the reviewers’ identities as well. Worse, process and product quality using double-blind procedures are often actually lower than they would be if participants were aware of one another's identities. The Bled community comprises hundreds of researchers, but the authors of many of the papers would have been reasonably apparent in any case, from the topic, the approach adopted and the content. It would therefore have been particularly inappropriate to use pseudo-blind procedures for this Special Section. The papers published in this Special Section fit naturally into four categories.

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