Introduction to Collaboration Systems and Technology Track

Summary form only given, as follows. Teams and organizations collaborate to create value that cannot be created through individual effort. Collaboration, however, engenders complex economic, interpersonal, social, political, cognitive, emotional, physical, and technological challenges. Groups can improve key outcomes using collaboration technologies, but any technology that can be used well can also be used badly; good tools do not assure successful collaboration. The value of a collaboration technology can only be realized in the larger context of a collaboration system, a combination of actors, hardware, software, knowledge, and work practices to advance groups toward their goals. Designers of collaboration systems must therefore address many issues when creating a new collaboration system. This track seeks new work from researchers in many disciplines to foster a growing a body of exploratory, theoretical, experimental, and applied science/engineering research that could inform design and deployment of collaboration systems. We seek papers that address individual, group, organizational, and social factors that affect outcomes of interest among people making joint efforts toward a group goal. Collaboration is too complex to be fully understood from a single perspectives. The track therefore seeks to foster broader understandings with a diversity of approaches. We solicit papers from the full range of epistemological, methodological, and ethical approaches.