Society and Information Research Group

The Society and Information Research Group (SIRG) is part of the department of Communication and Systems in the faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology at the UK’s Open University.

SIRG was founded in 2008 by a group of academics with shared interests in how information and communication technologies influence, and are influenced by, society in the broadest sense.

Major current projects led by SIRG members, involving colleagues from inside and outside the university, are:

• two edited books in preparation, one on “information in context” which takes a multi-disciplinary look at ideas about, and our understanding of the nature of “information”; and the other on the way technological modelling, particularly in information engineering, generates new ways of seeing and thinking
• a book on major contributors to “systems thinking”
• three historical projects studying: computing in the banking sector; the development of automatic control; and radio science broadcasting by the BBC
• a project on ICT and gender, including a study of women ‘returners’ to the ICT profession
• an AHRC project on the design and use of ICT in civil society