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Social informatics refers to the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that takes into account their interactions with institutional and cultural contexts. Social informatics research may be done at group, departmental, organizational, national and/or societal levels of analysis, focused on the relationships among information, information systems, the people who use them and the context of use. In this paper we outline some of the central principles of a social informatics perspective. In doing this we provide an overview of the intellectual geography of social informatics relative to work in the information sciences and discuss the contributions that this perspective and literature provide.