The open exchange of ideas and the freedom of thought and expression are central to the aims and goals of the UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS) community. These require an environment that recognises the inherent worth of every person and a group that fosters dignity, understanding, mutual respect, and that embraces diversity. Our community is committed to enabling and promoting all member’s rights to full participation in the activities, groups, and decision-making of without distinction or discrimination on the basis of individual or group differences.

UKAIS is committed to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). Diversity means all the individual or group differences that characterize current and future UKAIS membership. These include, but are not limited to, differences in career or employment status, academic rank, geographic location, age, biological sex, citizenship, disability, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, language, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, skin colour, and socioeconomic status. 

Inclusion means that all members can be involved and participate in any and all our activities and groups, depending on their interests and wishes. All members will have their voices heard and valued and have fair and reasonable opportunities to influence our policies and decision-making.

This means that as a forum of scholars, researchers and practitioners, we want UKAIS to be a space where:

  • equitable opportunities to access membership services and benefits, irrespective of their protected characteristics,
  • everyone is welcomed and accepted and our members’ diversity is celebrated and considered a strength towards achieving greater value in our practice,
  • everyone feels they belong and are able to participate in full in our initiatives, conferences, events and the Academy itself.

Membership

UKAIS is committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive community of IS researchers. In addition to adhering to our diversity and inclusion principles when it comes to memberships, we have made free membership available to colleagues from UN Human Low Development Index Countries and retired colleagues.

Conferences and Events

Conferences play an important role in disseminating knowledge and promoting communication and interactions among members. UKAIS is committed to promote these values by creating and running inclusive and accessible events for all attendees and members. Our objective is to organise events (workshops, conferences, webinars etc.) that are useful learning opportunities for the Information Systems co, that showcase the diversity of our discipline and are open to all career stages and backgrounds. This means that we will actively work towards enabling participation, promoting diversity among our members and participants of our events, and creating safe spaces for participants and to raise issues.