In the rubric “Leaders of the Information Society” an exclusive interview of Andrea Di Mayo, Managing Vice President of Gartner Research, given to the “Information Society” journal is published. In the interview the differences between the electronic and digital government, assessment of the role of open data in the digital economy is discussed and the growing problem of data security is highlighted. The fact that the digital government is an integral part of the digital economy is emphasized.

Under the heading “Social and Economic Aspects of the Information Society” the article by Evgenii Zinder "Managing strategic and tactical balance in the implementation of digital enterprises and e-government", in which development of e-government, digital transformation of enterprises and economic systems are discussed.

Further Leonid Goloskokov in the article “Network structures within the framework of national consolidation doctrine: risks and economic aspects of security” describes the possibility of creating network structures being one of the important technical elements of the national consolidation doctrine. Methods of building networks are suggested, some risks are assessed, and some security issues are analyzed.

The article by Larissa Mararitsa and Sergei Titov presented in the rubric “The Man in the Information Society” and entitled “Social World of Man in the Age of Virtual Social Networks”. It sets the objective of reviewing and stydying virtual communication phenomena with the purpose of analyzing its impact on the structure and quality of personal contacts, opportunities that social networks open up to the person.

Further Boris Slavin and Vladislav Protasov discussed the possibility of applying advanced collective intelligence technologies for the improvement of e-democracy in their article. Collective intelligence technologies are an alternative to crowd sourcing technologies and involve the use of self-developing communities of people to organize group intellectual activity.

Under the heading “Science and Innovations in the Information Society” the article by Dmitrii Namiot “On Smart City Standards”, in which standards related to information and communication technologies, is published. The article is an expanded and supplemented report presented at the International Congress “SMART RUSSIA 2016”. Further, Igor Mikhailov introduces us to the hyper-network theory in his article “Hyper-network theory and interdisciplinary integration of cognitive and social sciences”.

And finally, the article by Alexander Raikov entitled "Visual Analyzes of E-Government for Strategic and Spatial Planning" is presented in the rubric "Information Society Technologies". It describes intellectual technologies and visualization tools, which are given great importance and allow one to present the problem situation in a single-minded and holistic manner.