Journals and conferences in discourse

It is a true pleasure to introduce this issue. It is simply interesting and insightful. In a previous editorial, we discussed ways of promoting circles of discourse within the community in general and within the journal in particular (Te'eni, 2012). The articles in this issue demonstrate the kind of interesting and surprising discourse we look for in our circles. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to converse freely about these provocative articles with the authors and reviewers and among ourselves? The seven articles in this issue talk about communication and knowledge sharing, communication and trust, trust and business interactions, risk management, and communication and modeling. Apparently members of our community are experts in studying discourse, trust, modeling and management. Hence, a nagging feeling of the cobbler's children left with no live and available circles of discourse to discuss these articles further. Perhaps we were a little too optimistic that we could quickly build online circles of discourse around EJIS articles before, and immediately after publication. We should have learnt from previous endeavors that such social innovations take time, and literally take time our members don't have. It might be that we can jump start more interactive discourse in journals by strengthening the interaction between journals and conferences , starting with EJIS and ECIS. The coming ECIS2014 builds on the previous experiences of Utrecht and Barcelona in introducing new forms of discourse and new collaborations with journals. It will offer article development workshops organized by EJIS and other journals, and it provides the opportunity for journals to sponsor tracks, with the purpose of bringing conference presentations closer to the attention of the journals. ECIS2014 will also offer two forms of discourse that present new opportunities, and possibly challenges to journal publication. One is a round table – a structure for more intimate and perhaps richer discourse than the customary conference presentation format. The other is an interactive display of a prototype system allowing for demonstrations that are quite common in engineering conferences. However, these mechanisms are not enough, and we cannot even be sure how they will affect the transfer of knowledge from one circle to another. In the first article of this issue, Nilesh Saraf, Chris Schlueter Langdon and Omar El Sawy show us that some mechanisms designed to encourage knowledge sharing produce the reverse effect. As we well know, the people involved in both the conference and the …