The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2012) is an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from Computer Science, Informatics, Social Sciences and Management Sciences to share ideas and opinions, and present original research work on studying the interplay between socially-centric platforms and social phenomena. The ultimate goal of Social Informatics is to create better understanding of socially-centric platforms not just as a technology, but also as a set of social phenomena. To that end, we are inviting interdisciplinary papers, on applying information technology in the study of social phenomena, on applying social concepts in the design of information systems, on applying methods from the social sciences in the study of social computing and information systems, on applying computational algorithms to facilitate the study of social systems and human social dynamics, and on designing information and communication technologies that consider social context.

A special focus of SocInfo 2012 is on how technology can influence social phenomena through better motivation of human agents, through the use of social norms, through better modeling, or through a better understanding of social concepts like trust, credibility, privacy, and fairness. To this end we are especially inviting contributions demonstrating how behavioral theory can be formalized in agent-based models to study social dynamics. It is the expectation that this contributes to a further development of the social sciences with respect to studying and explaining various behavioral dynamics, such as opinion dynamics, social conflict, innovation diffusion, market dynamics, and crowd behavior. On the other hand, the creation of a coherent social behavioral model that is formulated as an agent system is a prerequisite for further development of socially-centric platforms and for the testing of new algorithms that use social concepts and attempt to realize social goals.