Celebrating the Global AIS Community and Looking Forward to 2022

At the start of every year, we take the opportunity to reflect on significant accomplishments across the Association during the prior year and to highlight upcoming events. The importance of your intellectual contributions, engagement and support toward making the entire AIS community a continued success has been remarkable. Despite society’s continued global challenges, the Association achieved numerous milestones during 2021.

• The Association reached an all-time high membership level in October 2021.
• The AIS eLibrary surpassed 10 million article downloads in November 2021. On average, articles in the AIS eLibary have been downloaded 184 times each and have garnered more than 400 abstract views each.
• AIS hosted nine virtual Research Exchanges during 2021 covering topics ranging from the “Anatomy of a Good Paper” series, to “Bringing Science to Practice”, to “Advancements at JAIS, MISQ, CAIS” and more. All recordings of these events can be found here https://aisel.aisnet.org/research_exchange/.
• In February 2021, the Association’s first Associate Vice President (AVP) of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) was appointed by the AIS President. All of the Association’s AVPs are available at https://aisnet.org/page/avps.
• A Virtual Conference Series (VCS) 2021 was formed and provided access to three regional conferences - ECIS 2021, PACIS 2021 and AMCIS 2021 for a single registration. More than 1,500 people attended VCS 2021, which provided access to 900 research articles, author-presentations, panels, keynote speakers, professional development workshops and much more. All recordings from the virtual conferences can be viewed in the AIS eLibrary https://aisel.aisnet.org.
• Author-videos in the AIS eLibrary have grown to be incredibly popular driven by their ability to positively affect the study’s impact, inclusiveness of reaching those who are unable to attend live presentation, and the ability to help frame the message of the paper. With more than 100,000 video streaming sessions to date, on average every author video in the AIS eLibrary has been played 37 times.

As always, the year reached a high point with hosting the most prestigious gathering of information systems scholars and research-oriented practitioners in the world with ICIS 2021 in Austin, Texas. Led by Conference Chairs Ryan Wright and Anitesh Barua, and Program Chairs Atreyi Kankanhalli, Xitong Li, and Shaila Miranda, this remarkable hybrid event had 623 in-person attendees and 818 virtual attendees, representing more than 40 countries. We extend our sincere thanks to the entire ICIS 2021 Conference Committee as more than 480 paper presentations were featured across conference paper sessions, workshops, TREO sessions, PDWs, panels and more.

More than 200 hours of live-streaming presentations were provided for hybrid attendees, while on-site attendees enjoyed a return of ‘normal’ conference experiences such as a Welcome Reception, a Social Event, networking lunches, exhibitors and several coffee breaks. Two keynote presentations were given, along with the annual presentation of AIS Awards and the Best Conference Paper awards. All of the conference papers, author-videos, keynote speeches, awards presentations, can be found at https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2021/.

As a global community, the past two years have been personally and professionally challenging on all of us. Although we do not know where the virus will take the world during 2022, AIS remains committed to supporting the global IS community through the pandemic and well beyond. We encourage and remind all members to continue leveraging the numerous resources for research, teaching, collaboration, communication, and more that are offered through the Association.

Membership levels and eLibrary traffic levels are at all-time highs and we are so grateful of your continued intellectual contributions, engagement and support toward making the entire AIS community a success. Together, the global AIS community can not only survive, but we can thrive as a global community during these most challenging times. As we look forward to ECIS, PACIS, AMCIS and ICIS in 2022, AIS will continue working and collaborating with each of the respective Conference Committees to help support those conferences in the delivery mode that’s determined to be best.

Thank you for being a member of AIS and we wish you a happy, healthy and a wonderful 2022.

Sincerely,
AIS Presidents, AIS Council, AIS Staff