Historically, Western European concepts of social informatics research has been strong in the Scandinavian countries and the UK. The beginnings can be traced to the 1980s in Norway and Slovenia. The fundamentals of social informatics in the USA were laid by Kling in 1996 with his colleagues and students from Indiana University. Within North America, the field is represented largely through independent research efforts at a number of diverse institutions. There are several approaches, which were historically named or classified as social informatics: American, Russian, British, Norwegian, Slovenian, German and Japanese. The oldest concept of social informatics was founded in the USSR by A.V. Sokolov and his colleagues in the 1970s.