For this special section of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, which we'll wrap up with a final article in the next issue, we have gathered a collection of articles that describe 'social informatics' in principle and practice. When you read these articles, you may still wonder, 'Do I really know what is meant when they say social informatics'? We have grappled with this question in the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo since our first efforts at creating a mission for the school in 2001. We knew that our concerns are different from computer science, library science, information science or even communication, and yet all of these areas were a part of the picture. We knew that our focus was on the intersections of people, information and technology and that our mission involved the social aspects of information. And, we were not alone, nor were we first to articulate this focus.