One of our colleagues, Rob Kling, has been working tirelessly on the topics which where at the core of the HCC Conferences. He was a founding father of IFIP-TC9. Unfortunately, he passed away on 15 May 2003, at the age of 58 years. In remembrance of his friendship and of his devotion to the field, HCC7 will be centred on “social informatics”, not firstly in the sense of clarifying the field as Rob defined it, but in collecting what he has done for foreseeing what we have to do in the future to share his views, and to promote a proactive research which will permit a “people first” in a human information society “for all”.

Rob is surely a pioneer of the Computers and Society field. Everybody remembers his contribution to HCC2 “Social Issues and Impacts of Computing: From Arena to Discipline” [Kling, 1980a] or his analysis of more than 200 papers in “Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives” [Kling, 1980b]. The development of his work through his Computerization and Controversy, Value Conflict and Social Choice book has been considered as a Textbook, and the more recent lengthy papers such as ‘What is Social Informatics and Why Does it Matter?’ [D-Lib Magazine, January 1999] or ‘Social Informatics, [Encyclopedia of LIS, July 5, 2001] must be considered as foundational. One should refer also to the Rob Kling remembered website where many of his friends wanted to pay him their intellectual and friendship's debt: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/klingremembered/

The Beckman Center of the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, where Rob taught until he joined the University of Bloomington, organized on March 11-12, 2005 an invitation-only workshop to honour his contributions as founder of Social Informatics. The workshop focused on paper presentations related to Social Informatics and, in particular, to extending Rob Kling’s research on computerization movements (CM). The workshop ended with a discussion of the future of social informatics: A Rob Kling slideshow may be found on the website of that workshop: http://www.crito.uci.edu/2/si/resources.asp