Minitrack Introduction

Collaboration has become a fundamental part of organizational life, and its importance increases still. Recent trends in the use of socialware, collaborative learning, and virtual teams show that there vastly increasing number of research challenges ahead to support groups and teams in effective collaboration. It is therefore critical that collaboration processes are of high quality in various aspects such as productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. A group of people trying to collaborate face many challenges such as resolving disagreements, misunderstandings, information overload, and distractions. Groups are not likely to overcome these challenges on their own. To help groups to address these collaboration challenges, process and technology support can be offered to support groups to structure and focus their effort on efficient and effective goal achievement.