The Working Group 9.4 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) gathers scholars and practitioners that deal with the issue on how ICT affects social development. The theme of the IFIP WG 9.4 2017 conference is: ICTs for promoting social harmony: Towards a sustainable information society. 

A harmonious society is viewed to be a peaceful and balanced ‘connected whole’ in a transformed social dynamics where there is a sustainable exchange of resources and development taking place through mutual agreements. As ‘all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony’, the goal of development is apparently not only to ensure social harmony, but also to minimize the elements that undermine or disrupt the ‘connected whole’. Ideally, the information society is seen as a ‘classless and conflictless’ inclusive community, which strives to use technologies to diminish structural barriers, democratize information, balance between power and dependency, and transform human values. However, in reality, it faces several challenges of, for example, political and religious extremism, infringement of privacy and security, disparity of wealth and social disconnection. As we are unavoidably intermingling towards the complex environment of information society, we need to critically investigate the ‘social construction’ role of information technology especially in the contexts of peace and conflict, cooperation, and development of human capital for creating a ‘sustainable world’.

To address and emphasise this issue, we however welcome contributions from a wide range of perspectives, for example, public administration, entrepreneurship, business administration, information technology for development, information management/systems, philosophy, or management amongst other disciplines.