In 2015, the then International Society for Information Studies (now International Society for the Study of Information, IS4SI) held its Summit in Vienna, chaired by its then President, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, also head of the UTI Research Group. A track was conjointly organised by the Leibniz-Sozietät für die Wissenschaften zu Berlin e.V. (LS) and the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science BCSSS). This track ran under the title Emergent Systems, Information and Society.

Invited speakers included physicist Werner Ebeling who carried out studies on self-organisation in the then German Democratic Republic while Hermann Haken did so in the West, and a co-worker of Ebeling, Rainer Feistel. Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski, the spiritus rector of the group, drew a big picture spanning from a systems concept of information to dangerous technological developments such as drones in the military field. See here.

A result of the discussion of this track was the establishment of the group with the same title combining evolutionary systems thinkers in the tradition of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory and computer scientists as well as sociologists of information technology. The group was established as a Working Group at the LS, as a Research Group at the BCSSS (until 2018), and as a Special Interest Group at the IS4SI.